Desecrating Ancestral Spaces of Rest

Abstract For decades, Africanist historians have emphasized not only African participation in the slave trade but also the ensuing violence, insecurity, and indebtedness that a European-dominated Atlantic commerce in captives and merchandise unleashed on African societies. This Gold Coast case highlights how predatory capitalism and its legal institutions disrupted ancestral spaces of rest. As Gã and Fante merchants increasingly collateralized family houses rather than captives to secure European credit on imported merchandise at the end of the legal slave trade in 1807, they undermined the permanence of the homestead, a cohabited space for living, dead, and unborn relatives. Unlike Gold Coast Africans, European firms and Christian missionaries deemed houses as disembodied from ancestors and therefore dispensable. But collateralizing one’s ancestors—the people and heritage tied to the house—remained a grievous moral difficulty for many Gold Coast merchants. Ultimately, the practice of home burials and the value of sleep as a symbol of contractual obligations between the living and the dead did not entirely succumb to capitalist logics or subsequent British colonial urban planning schemes bent on outlawing intramural sepulture.