Embedded in the historiography of the Atlantic world is a strong and understandable keenness to place Africans and their descendants at the centre of the historical narrative. Africans constituted the largest group of migrants in the Americas until the early nineteenth century. They were central in sustaining the connections that turned Africa, Europe, and the Americas into a world, an entangled space, where people shared and contested ideas and practices from a somewhat common ground.Footnote 1 To further explore the significance of Africans in the Atlantic world, it has been and remains critical to find ways to conceptualize and describe Africans, free and enslaved, as multi-layered and complex, as people rather than types, so that they are not reduced to abstract figures in the processes of enslavement that shaped the Atlantic trading system.Footnote 2
In an article from 1996, Ira Berlin made an important contribution to this ambition by describing free Africans (and enslaved Africans who managed to loosen the constraints of their enslavement) as Atlantic Creoles. The term Atlantic Creole was meant to indicate that certain Africans were part of an Atlantic cultural space that developed along the West African littoral, in European port cities and in the slave societies of the Americas. Berlin understood the Atlantic Creoles as bound by a specific temporal frame, namely the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by the relatively flexible notions of cultural difference that shaped the North American colonies in this period. The Creoles were different from the next generations of Africans who laboured on America’s plantations. They were shrewd traders, talented linguists, and they easily navigated the different cultural contexts that made up their world. Berlin argued that as true cosmopolitans, the defining characteristic of the Atlantic Creoles was their “genius for intercultural negotiation.”Footnote 3 This was a gift that the Creoles used to attain multiple, often overlapping, goals. In the African towns that expanded near coastal factories, the Creoles attained profitable positions as middlemen in the slave trade, while those who arrived in the Americas used their intercultural talents to strive for independence and freedom.Footnote 4
After Berlin’s intervention, scholars began mapping the transatlantic trajectories and connections of people from particular African regions and thereby refined Berlin’s argument about the existence of an integrated cultural space in which Atlantic Creoles could move with relative ease. Kirstin Mann and Robin Law argued that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, elites in the coastal communities along the Slave Coast were part of a larger Atlantic Creole community with strong ties to Brazil. Likewise, Linda Heywood and John Thornton maintained that an Atlantic Creole culture developed in West Central Africa due to the early encounter between ruling Kongolese elites and Portuguese explorers. Though by no means ubiquitous, the idea that the African Atlantic was home to people who can be described as Atlantic Creoles increasingly seems to appeal to scholars. Atlantic Creoles have been identified in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, in North and South America, and in West and West Central Africa. Kings, nobles, and servants, priests, scholars, and converts, soldiers and sailors, merchants and port labourers, slave traders, and even slaves have been described as Atlantic Creoles.Footnote 5
Though Berlin focused on the peculiar cultural plasticity of the Atlantic Creoles, in later works scholars mostly identify Atlantic Creoles by a set of socio-cultural characteristics; that is, Africans and Euro-Africans are described as Atlantic Creoles if they professed to Christianity, spoke, and sometimes wrote, one or more European languages, surrounded themselves with paraphernalia of European provenance, and possibly travelled between the continents of the Atlantic basin.Footnote 6 Indeed, the idea of the Atlantic Creole has worked productively as a way of classifying people (i.e. Atlantic Creoles versus Africans and Europeans) thereby establishing the contours of a shared cultural space. However, the idea has been less useful in focusing our attention on how people born into that space subjectively dealt with their particular experiences. I suspect that this is so, because the intercultural element of the Atlantic Creole figure is often understood as a talent and an opportunity, rather than, for instance, as a constraint, a problem, or a struggle for those who lived between cultures.Footnote 7
If we are to further understand the identity formation of West Africans as both constrained and self-made, what Law and Mann called their “subjective identity,” it appears useful to let the notion of the Creole rest for a moment.Footnote 8 I suggest that looking at how travelling Africans ascribed meaning to their spatial and emotional groundings highlights that creolisation in the African Atlantic was less smooth than suggested by figure of the Atlantic Creole. It is productive to conceptualise the Atlantic as a shared cultural space, and cultural blending certainly involved the mixing of formal cultural elements that resulted in an extraordinary cultural agility. Nonetheless, it is significant that sharing also involved confronting the cultural barriers established in the Atlantic slave trading system. Here I show that the ego-texts of Christian Protten and Frederik Svane, two Euro-African men, may bring us one step further in understanding what cultural blending meant to those who lived with it. Though ego-texts may not provide transparent insights into peoples’ inner life, such texts often provide a firmer basis for understanding the tensions and challenges that people faced.Footnote 9 Indeed, an analysis of these texts may help us to see more of the problems and choices that West Africans confronted as they sought to fend for themselves in the rough world of Atlantic slavery. The life stories of Christian Protten and Frederik Svane suggest that though these men may be understood as Atlantic Creoles, relocating to Africa did not come easily to them. They were required to renegotiate the religious and racial hierarchies that undergirded the Atlantic world during the eighteenth century.Footnote 10 In this sense they were not cosmopolitan. They did not, in any straightforward sense of the word, belong “to all parts of the world,” nor were they “free from national limitations or attachment.”Footnote 11
Similar trajectories
On a superficial level Protten and Svane appear to be almost identical. Christian Jacob Protten was born on September 1, 1715, Frederik Petersen Svane five years earlier in 1710 in the town of Osu, adjacent to Fort Christiansborg, the main Danish slave trading post on the Gold Coast and part of the larger urban settlement of Accra that also included Dutch Accra and English Accra, and their respective forts.Footnote 12 They were both the sons of high status Ga women and Danish soldiers of little prominence. Likewise, they were part of the first cohort attending the school for mixed-race children at Fort Christiansborg, the so-called Mulatto School headed by Chaplain Elias Svane (whom Frederik honoured by adopting his surname).Footnote 13 Together the boys boarded a ship set for Copenhagen in 1726. Here they were baptised, and the absolutist King Frederik IV became their godfather.Footnote 14
In Europe, Protten and Svane moved within the physical and social infrastructure established by the Danish-Norwegian colonial state. Chaplain Svane and his patrons envisioned that the boys receive training as blacksmiths. Somehow these plans changed. Protten and Svane managed to follow their own desire for religious training. After spending their first years in the village of Sorterup under the tutelage of Elias Svane, they were enrolled at the Faculty of Theology at Copenhagen University in 1732. In the following years, Lord Chamberlain Carl Adolph von Plessen, an important figure in Danish court circles and president of the Danish West India and Guinea Company (1735–49), connected Svane and Protten to the Pietist milieu in Copenhagen and Southeast Germany; and both men eagerly embraced new ideas of a sentimental and expressive faith.Footnote 15
In 1735, Protten met Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, leader of the movement of the Moravian Brethren. Protten joined the Brethren and travelled to their headquarters in Herrnhut, Saxony.Footnote 16 After his meeting with the Moravians, Protten’s itinerary, in short, went as follows: in 1736 Protten left Herrnhut for Elmina and Osu; in 1741 he returned to Europe; in 1742 he travelled to the Danish West Indies, returning probably in 1745; in 1746 he married Rebecca Freundlich, a free Danish West Indian of mixed European and African descent. For reasons that remain unclear, Protten was expelled from the Moravian community in 1756. By then a man in his forties, he travelled to Osu to take up the position as teacher at the Mulatto School. In 1762 he was again in Copenhagen and Herrnhut, returning to Osu in 1765 where he died in 1769. While on the coast, Protten wrote letters and a travel diary to his wife and other congregants in the Moravian movement.Footnote 17
Like Protten, Svane also became a transatlantic traveller. In the 1730s while studying theology at Copenhagen University, Svane, like Protten, experienced a Pietistic awakening that alienated him from the orthodox teachings at the university. In this situation, he accepted Lord Chamberlain Plessen’s offer of returning to his native country.Footnote 18 Before leaving, Frederik Svane married the Danish woman Catharina Maria Badsch, and together they travelled to Osu in 1735. Catharina returned to Denmark in 1738, while Frederik Svane spent the next nine years on the coast. After more than a decade in Africa, he returned to Denmark, his wife and their son in 1747, and became catechist at the estate of Ludvig Holberg, the great Danish Enlightenment author. During his stay on the coast, Svane corresponded with the directors of the Danish West India and Guinea Company, and upon his return to Denmark he composed a 130-page description of his 12 years in Guinea, on the order of and to his old patron Adolph von Plessen and the other company directors. Svane died poor in 1789.Footnote 19
During and after their travels, Protten and Svane wrote to please patrons and secure support. In addition to communicating with his wife, Protten participated in a vibrant Moravian epistolary tradition. Letters, reports, travel diaries, and memoirs were penned and extracts of these were circulated among the far-flung Moravian congregations and mission stations. Presumably, Protten sought to secure Moravian interest in his missionary endeavours by contributing to this flow of information and missionary visions.Footnote 20 Like Protten, Svane also wrote for an audience. Upon his return to Copenhagen, Svane was without income and had to defend his reputation.Footnote 21 In 1746, Governor Platfues at Fort Christiansborg had alleged that Svane led a “scandalous life” and cared more about “the four women he keeps” than “his wedded wife in the home country.”Footnote 22 Now, in 1748, Svane retorted by pointing to Platfues’ own relationship to a mixed-race woman of Osu.Footnote 23 It is clear that Protten and Svane wrote to secure the sympathies of patrons in Europe, and this may have led them to emphasise their Christian personae. Yet their texts are also full of inconsistencies and changes that, as we shall see, underline that each man was engaged in a process of coming to terms with his position in Osu.
Race across the Danish Atlantic
Svane and Protten were exceptional figures when they returned to their native town of Osu during the early and mid-eighteenth century, the point in time where we are to meet them below. Like other slave-trading ports along the Gold Coast, the port comprising Fort Christiansborg and the town of Osu was a violent and unpredictable place. Here Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and German-speaking traders and soldiers, Osu town people, and foreign African merchants met to trade in captives and goods. As the slave trading expanded during the eighteenth century, the Gold Coast became marred by intermittent warfare. Meanwhile, competition for trade and profit, new consumption habits, staggering mortality rates among Europeans, the risk of enslavement confronting Africans, and interracial relationships between African women and European men turned Osu into a hybrid, yet very unstable place.Footnote 24 In Osu, a small mixed-race elite acted as intermediaries in the trade between Danes and inland traders. For this elite group, connections with European ways of life, food, clothing, faith, and learning, were a way of minimising the risk of enslavement. Though never a full guarantee, one of the results of this strategy was that in Osu, “Mulatto” became a social status that helped to secure freedom.Footnote 25
Svane’s and Protten’s long stay abroad provided them with the knowledge that race had different meanings in other parts of the Danish Atlantic world. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Danish West Indies, consisting of the islands St. Thomas, St. John and from 1733 also of St. Croix, developed into a thriving sugar colony. In these islands racial slavery was an established social fact. Danish West Indian officials, estate owners, overseers, merchants, doctors, missionaries, and sailors among others, equated African origin with slavery, using “Negro” and “Mulatto” as synonyms for slave, whereas free people of African descent were described as “Free-Negro,” “Free-Mulatto” or “Free-Coloured.”Footnote 26 Both Svane and Protten had first-hand experience with the Middle Passage and slavery in the West Indies. When they travelled to Copenhagen in 1726, they did so on board the slaver Christiansborg that embarked 391 enslaved Africans, arriving in St. Thomas with 207 survivors, before heading towards Europe and Copenhagen. Later, in the 1730s, Protten again visited the Danish West Indies, which presumably reinforced his perception of the tight link between dark skin colour and enslavement that structured life there.Footnote 27
Race was also present in early eighteenth-century Denmark, but there racial slavery emerged most powerfully as a contested ideological field rather than as a social fact. Denmark was seldom a place of actual enslavement, though slaving and slave trading were administered by the Danish West India and Guinea Company and backed by royal, noble, and merchant capital.Footnote 28 Readers of Danish might come across the idea of Danish sugar planter Reimert Haagensen that Africans’ “black skin gives proof of their wickedness and that they are destined to slavery.”Footnote 29 Yet in the 1730s, some Danes would also encounter the opinion of the learned theologians of Copenhagen University and the officials of the Royal Chancellery, who argued that Christians and heathens guilty of adultery in the Danish West Indies were to be judged according to the same Danish laws.Footnote 30 For men like Svane and Protten, the emergent racial ideas that shaped elite thinking in Northwestern Europe meant that they could not be sure of their place in this world. For instance, the Moravians at times considered Protten to be guilty of pride and presumptuousness, and Svane was confronted with similar ideas. When Svane quarrelled about his salary with his employer Holberg, Svane’s church superior Bishop Peder Hersleb (who was tightly linked to Danish colonial institutions, such as the Royal Mission Board and the Royal Orphanage) believed that Svane had lost his good sense due to a mixture of “African stubbornness and European pride and arrogance.”Footnote 31
A virtue of necessity
Protten and Svane had many similar experiences and were living under similar conditions. However, they dealt very differently with their transcultural experiences and conditions. For Svane, belonging in Osu and Fort Christiansborg was fraught with difficulties from the very beginning. He arrived in the town in 1735, determined to set up an independent mission, yet his dreams of a glorious career as a missionary did not come true. Soon Svane discovered that he had lost the support of his patron Lord Plessen. Plessen disapproved of Svane’s decision to act independently of the West India and Guinea Company. Though it seems that Plessen had offered to cover Svane’s travel expenses while Svane was still in Copenhagen, Plessen now ordered Svane to cover the costs himself. Without means, the Svane couple therefore had to find employment at Fort Christiansborg, he as teacher at the school, she as seamstress. But things went from bad to worse as fort life also turned against them. In 1738, Svane’s wife and son returned to Denmark because she had been harassed by Governor Enevold who demanded “unseemly service and impermissible favours” from her.Footnote 32 For the next nine years Svane tried to reunite with his wife, but to no avail. His first application to return to Denmark was refused and so was the next. The directors of the West India and Guinea Company ordered him to stay on the coast.
Svane shifts between praise and condemnation when he describes his relationship to his African relatives and home community. Describing his situation after being expelled from Copenhagen University, Svane adopted metaphors of family and belonging. He found himself, he wrote, “fatherless and motherless in a foreign land.” Luckily, the “merciful God” helped him by installing in him the idea to “seek quiet in the most unquiet country in the world; I mean my native country on the Coast of Guinea, called Acra [sic].”Footnote 33 So, from the very beginning Svane’s choice to return to Osu was laden with ambivalent notions of belonging. Accra was a place of family, but also of disorder.
Once Svane arrived at the coast in 1735, he reconnected with his family. Svane described this meeting by pointing to his hopes of reunion and his unfulfilled expectations. He found his “dear mother, sisters, brothers” as well as several other relatives from his mother’s side and noted that his was “one of the most prominent families” in Osu. Yet their condition was so “poor and miserable” that they were unable to help him with “the necessities of life.”Footnote 34 Indeed, Svane pushed the point about the inadequacies of his family when he explained that he had actually been “as good as motherless” since infancy.Footnote 35 This was probably not an entirely accurate description of his upbringing. Svane left the Gold Coast as a young man of sixteen, and like other mixed-race boys in Osu, he had probably been raised in his mother’s compound and received the care of his maternal family.Footnote 36
Svane’s reluctant gratitude towards his family turned into outright condemnation of Africans when they did not show interest in his mission. The heathens, Svane argued, did not enthusiastically embrace the Gospel, as he had hoped when leaving Denmark, and Svane, in marked contrast to Protten, blamed the Ga language for this failure. Svane maintained that central Christian ideas, such as salvation, the redemption of Christ, and the Holy Spirit could only be expressed in Ga by “words that are sacrilegious and not proper to explain these sacred things.”Footnote 37 Ga could simply not convey the truths of Christianity, and as the inhabitants of Osu and the surrounding area spoke Ga, Svane actually argued that the majority of people from this Gold Coast area could not be reached by Christian missionising.
For Svane, both Osu and Fort Christiansborg were places of social displacement, indeed of enslavement. When, in 1742, his second request to return to Denmark was denied, his “mind and spirit” “broke.” Again he adopted metaphors of belonging and family to describe his position. Svane wrote: “I was obliged, like a slave, against my will, to remain in that country [i.e. Guinea] and live out my whole and quite possibly short life so miserably and wretchedly separated from my dear wife and son, of whose coming to me […] I could entertain no hope.”Footnote 38 Here Svane wrote of slavery as the opposite of will, yet it was the will to family that was being denied rather than any abstract concept of free will. Intentionally or not, Svane wrote of slavery as the destruction or absence of kinship ties and echoed indigenous ideas of slavery that tied servitude and bondage to an absence of familial belonging. This was a selective interpretation of slavery on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast where the transatlantic slave trade generated hitherto unknown levels of violence and insecurity. It underlined that Svane’s main concern was probably not literal enslavement, but his ambivalent relations to his African family. Indeed, his choice of metaphor is suggestive of his isolation, even exclusion, from his African family at this point.Footnote 39
Slavery also had another place in Svane’s account. Svane was not an early abolitionist, yet he explained that his early memories of the “illegal administration” at Christiansborg convinced him that company service would prove a “vexation to honest and righteous Christian sensibilities.”Footnote 40 It is unclear what exactly disturbed Svane about fort life. Yet his extraordinary decision to act as an independent missionary meant that he distanced himself from the West India and Guinea Company, the main slave-trading agent in Osu, and it underlines that his critique was not merely an attempt to ingratiate himself with his patrons. In contrast, his decision gained him the disapproval of his patron, von Plessen. However, given Svane own deep-felt Christianity, his critique may have been related to the concerns voiced by his mentor Elias Svane who, in 1724, opined that the custom of fort staff leaving their Ga wives behind upon return to Denmark was “shameful and ungodly” and found that “idolatry and witchcraft,” “drunkenness and gluttony” marked life at Christiansborg.Footnote 41 Svane did not oppose the slave trade, but he was probably wary of some of the specific intercultural practices that it gave rise to at Fort Christiansborg.Footnote 42
Slavery did not only have negative connotations in Svane’s description of his stay on the Gold Coast. For Svane slavery was also a way of making Osu into a place of belonging. Failing to establish a mission and realising that he had to stay on the coast as teacher, Svane decided to make a “virtue of necessity.” Step by step he began to inch away from Fort Christiansborg and towards the slave trading community of Osu. He began constructing a three-storied stone house outside the fort and during the construction, he moved from his room at Christiansborg to a “small Negro hut.” Here, he put up a flagpole with the Danish merchant ensign. This hut became the base from where he set up as independent broker and trader in goods and slaves.Footnote 43
As a slave trader and merchant, Svane started to value his Osu family and appreciate their life ways; and perhaps they also began to appreciate and trust Svane once he distanced himself from the Danish establishment. The “Negro hut” provided comfort and an ordinary meal of round beans provided “sustenance and refreshments.”Footnote 44 Likewise, Svane began to name particular family members in his writings and describe their help and support. One brother suddenly appeared by his full name, Johan Ditlev. Svane noted that he was a gunner at Fort Fredensborg east of Christiansborg and had “taken the trouble” to help Svane gain support for his independent trading activities.Footnote 45 Johan Ditlev was probably the reason why Svane could use workers and bearers from the nearby town of Labadi on his construction site. Johan Ditlev was married to the daughter of the brother of Putti, the leader and caboceer, i.e. chief merchant, of Labadi, and Ditlev’s father-in-law was first in-line to inherit Putti’s position.Footnote 46 Or to put it in more simple terms: through Ditlev, Svane held a kinship claim on Putti.
Indeed, African kinship ties began to work to Svane’s advantage once he entered the world of slave-trading that shaped life on the coast; and Svane’s estimation of Africans changed accordingly. At one point, when Governor Jørgensen had Svane arrested and accused of plotting, Svane relied on the help of his niece Helena Svendsdatter who brought him cooked food.Footnote 47 He could also rely on the protection of Putti. Upon escaping from his arrest, Svane found refuge in Putti’s territory. Putti, Svane noted, was a “man of great honour and respected for his sincerity.”Footnote 48 Likewise, Qvassi, Putti’s brother and father-in-law of Svane’s brother, was “honest and sensible,” and “made great efforts […] in all possible ways to be of service,” offering, amongst others, to support Svane’s trading venture.Footnote 49 The Labadi people showed Svane “sympathy and compassion, faithfulness and sincerity, honesty and serviceableness” and gave him “a short period of calm after many bitter years of toilsome service at the fort of Christiansborg;” these were “enterprising people,” “industrious in tilling the soil,” generous, and hospitable.Footnote 50
Nevertheless, Svane easily showed bigotry. He noted that the Osu townspeople who arrested him had no “conscience” and “no share in the true knowledge of God.” Indeed, Svane argued, these people were deeply idolatrous. They venerated painted clay, bones, drums and palm nut beads covered with devilish symbols. Showing little appreciation of the ritual and material elements of Ga spirituality, Svane claimed that the people of Osu were “worshipping the things that are manifestly against the most common sense, and to the greatest degree contrary to quite natural light.”Footnote 51 Svane alleged that these “Negroes” were easily corrupted because they were without reason and faith. According to him, a small gift of strong liquor was enough of a bribe for them to commit horrendous crimes, murdering not only their “neighbour” but also “their closest family and blood relation.”Footnote 52
It is clear that Svane did not articulate a coherent, stable view of Africans, neither of his family nor of strangers; and perhaps his family did not have a stable view of him either. Rather Svane’s Africa changed as his circumstances changed. Osu was both a place of belonging and slave trading and a place of dislocation and enslavement. In Svane’s account, he navigated between multiple truths about the people of Osu. As a Christian missionary, Svane did not value his Euro-African and African family very highly, but as a broker and slave trader in Osu, he showed them appreciation and respect. So, even though his scepticism towards Osu and Christiansborg was strong, there was occasionally room for a more positive vision. However, he did not transform his travels and multifarious experiences into a harmonious idea of Africa. Instead he opted for a narrative, in which parallel versions of Africa and Africans provided drama and drive.
Svane’s thoughts about his place in Osu speak to the famous double consciousness of later African Americans who attempted to make sense of being black in societies where belonging was predicated on whiteness.Footnote 53 Yet Svane’s challenges were more amorphous. As a Euro-African man, he navigated in a world where racial categories had yet to become as rigid as they did in the racial sciences of the nineteenth century.Footnote 54 So Svane’s identity politics moved along many crisscrossing routes of meaning. One route tied belonging to Christianity and family. As a Christian husband and father, Svane could belong where his faith gained support. Indeed, as an independent missionary he had believed he could belong on the Gold Coast. A second route tied belonging to his African family and to slaving; to belong in Osu, Svane turned himself into a slave trader. And yet a third route, mobilised the links between race, freedom and enslavement that shaped the Danish Atlantic world. Svane walked along this route when he was arrested and challenged his captors, asking if they really had the courage “to capture and tie up, indeed, even to truss slavefashion, a free man and a Mulatto” like him. Here the links between freedom and Mulatto-status established in Osu provided an argument against Svane’s arrest and figurative enslavement.
Svane, then, believed—or hoped—that his blended origin signalled his freedom, yet he must have known that this was not the common meaning of the term Mulatto in the growing Caribbean slave societies. For a moment, Christianity and the prospect of becoming an independent missionary had promised Svane a position that was not shaped by transatlantic slavery, yet as these hopes went unfulfilled, he ran out of imagination. Svane envisioned himself either as slave trader, as the victim of enslavement, or as husband and father in a Danish village as far removed from Africa as he could be. Either Svane positioned himself within Atlantic racial slavery (as imaginary slave or actual slave trader) or he dreamt to be far away from the daily practices of slaving.
It should be very useful
Unlike Svane, Protten managed to establish a vision of a hybrid African place where he could belong as a Euro-African Christian man. Protten arrived in West Africa in 1757 after being ostracized from the Moravian community in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. To get to Africa, Protten had rekindled his connections with old patrons in Copenhagen. He approached Lord Chamberlain Plessen, Privy Councillor Otto Thott, and Lord Chamberlain Count Frederik Wedel, all men of the highest rank, with central positions in the royal administration. With such noble assistance, Protten obtained free passage to Fort Christiansborg on the slaver Frau Birgitta.Footnote 55
Arriving in West Africa was dramatic and exhilarating for Protten. He nearly drowned during his first landing at Cape Mount on the Sierra Leone coast in January 1757. The heavy surf breaking on the beach overturned the canoe that took Protten ashore. Unable to swim, he was saved by African canoe-men and arrived on land drenched and “with a belly full of seawater.”Footnote 56 Thus saved, Protten cheerfully met the local ruler, a certain King Pieter. The king invited them to a rich evening meal of boiled rice, chicken broth, mashed cassava, herbs prepared with palm oil and fish, punch, and red wine. According to Protten the food tasted “really good.” As soon as he had the chance, he turned to the Lord with a “burning heart” and thanked him for his kindness. Now Protten had found “paradise.”Footnote 57
Despite these elated feelings, Protten’s position as a fervent Christian believer at Fort Christiansborg landed him in trouble. Svane had argued that most people in Osu were unable to comprehend Christian dogma, trapped as they were in their heathen language. In contrast, Protten condemned the behaviour and beliefs of the Danish fort staff and presented them as the main obstacles to Christian life on the coast. To stress his own Christian expertise, Protten engaged in serious discussions about Christian doctrine. He had a “fierce argument” with Fort Chaplain Arv Kopp about the interpretation of Titus 2–11, a verse that proclaims God’s grace to be universal, including also underlings such as servants and slaves.Footnote 58 Protten did not disclose the specifics of their argument in his diary, but it is clear that he continued to harbour concerns about Kopp’s qualifications. When Kopp requested that Protten absolve him with imposition of hands, Protten declined, arguing that such a request was a clear sign of how “chimerical” the chaplain was. Protten was not ordained by Danish church authorities and therefore he could not perform such a ritual.Footnote 59
In yet another quarrel about faith, Protten stood up against Governor Jessen, who found inspiration in the works of Balthasar Bekker (the seventeenth-century Dutch theologian who argued against superstitious beliefs in spirits, angels, and witches) to deny the resurrection of Christ. As a Christian, this was a statement Protten could not ignore. “I began,” Protten wrote, “to fire at him [the governor] personally so that everyone fixed their eyes on me.” During this verbal barrage, Protten argued that in any other place than Guinea such a statement would be reason enough for the governor to forfeit his office. Indeed, because of the governor’s impiety, he ought to lose three fingers and have his tongue cut out, argued Protten, thereby showing that he was well aware of the punishments stipulated in Danish law for crimes of blasphemy.Footnote 60 In these ways, Protten strove to establish his position as a true believer and religious authority among Danish fort staff. He maintained that Christian life ways could not be disregarded on the Gold Coast, but such claims often isolated him from the Danish officials on the coast.
Protten’s defence of Christianity extended beyond questions of doctrinal interpretation and contained a broader critique of the depraved morals of fort staff. While Protten accepted the interracial marriages between Danish men and Ga women, called cassare marriage by Danish observers, he criticised the unregulated sexual relations between fort staff and local African women. On one occasion, while visiting Fort Fredensborg, Protten learned that the factor, by the name Reindorf, allowed a “whore” access into the fort at night. Protten confronted Reindorf with this information and an argument ensued in which Reindorf defended his right to do as he wished while Protten relayed how his old benefactor Elias Svane had chased such loose women out of Fort Christiansborg in the 1720s.Footnote 61
Protten offered a similar but less explicit critique of staff morals in his detailed description of Governor Jessen’s admiration of Amele, the wife of a certain Asamanni who was Protten’s grandmother’s sister’s son and came from the inland state Akwamu.Footnote 62 During the 1750s, maintaining good trade relations with Akwamu was crucial to the Danish establishments on the Gold Coast and trade diplomacy required fort staff to socialise and exchange gift with their trading partners. Nonetheless, in his diary Protten focused less on Governor Jessen’s trading talents than on the flirtatious hospitality he extended to Amele. Protten related that Jessen claimed Amele to be “the most beautiful Negress he had seen” and courted her with gifts of pantjes (cloths worn as skirts or kilts from the waist to the knees) and compliments, even fantasising about painting her. Protten acknowledged that Amele was an attractive woman, but he also emphasised her grace and chastity. In doing so, Protten crafted a description that strongly hinted at the governor’s indecent intentions and probably evoked recognition among his Moravian readers who were familiar with critique of European licentiousness from reports from their church brothers in the Danish West Indies.Footnote 63
Protten argued that Christianity was to be taken seriously among the Europeans on the coast and portrayed Africans as possible proselytes. Yet these were controversial and risky views. The fragile networks of loyalty and interests that supported the Danish presence on the coast shaped Protten’s disagreements with Danish fort staff. Staggering mortality rates, unstable trade, competition among Danes and between Danish, Dutch and English forts, and in particular the dependence on the goodwill of local African rulers such as those of Fante, Akwamu, Akim, and Asante meant that hierarchies were unstable and up for constant review at Fort Christiansborg.Footnote 64 Unsure of their own authority, it became vital for leading Danish officers to ensure loyalty; any small deviation from protocol and custom could be interpreted as a sign of conspiracy and usurpation. Disputes about faith were interwoven with questions of loyalty and ranking. So Protten was entering troubled waters by voicing such harsh Christian critique.
From his stay on the Gold Coast in 1737–41, Protten knew that he was not indispensable to the Danes. Back then the Danes had offered him nothing, leaving him to fend for himself while war was raging on the coast. This time, in the 1750s, Protten immediately began to rebuild connections with his family in Osu and the wider Gold Coast area. Indeed, his use of kin terms underlines that, step-by-step, he was becoming part of his maternal family again. When Protten met Ocrafo Dedei, a few weeks after his arrival in Osu in 1757, he described her as a “close relative.” The next time they met, Protten noted that she was an “aunt.” Then, after almost a year in Osu, Ocrafo Dedei had become Protten’s “mother.”Footnote 65 The same happened with Protten’s relationship to Helena Svendsdattter (whom Svane described as a niece). Protten first noted that Helena was a prudent Christian woman and the widow of former Governor Platfues.Footnote 66 Six months later, she had become Protten’s sister. After a year in Osu, Protten began to write of his African family in a way that suggests that he understood himself as being part of a familial community. Writing of the death of a certain Abbe, a woman from Popo, Protten related that she had been a “friend of our family,” and similarly he related that Asamanni was “our close relative.”Footnote 67 Protten, it seems, could now think of himself as part of a familial we. It was probably a we based on Ga kinship principles, and he may have referred to real as well as fictive kin, though this distinction is not really important. What matters is that Protten had moved from establishing links to single members of his family to being able to envision himself as a member of a collective.
Protten resumed his connections with his African family and important African elite figures, such as Cudjoe, the caboceer at English Accra, and Tette Ahinnekwa, caboceer at Dutch Accra and perhaps the most important leader of the Accra towns, described by Protten as “the King of Accra.”Footnote 68 Protten also reconnected to King Ashangmo of Little Popo on the Slave Coast, who ruled the town from the 1730s until 1767.Footnote 69 Protten’s mother was allegedly the daughter of Ofori, the previous leader of Little Popo, and this made Protten and King Ashangmo cousins. Through his mother Protten was thus connected to the ruling lineage of Little Popo. In any case, during Protten’s stay on the coast in the 1730s, Little Popo—and presumably Ashangmo—had provided shelter to Protten for a couple of months after he escaped from the town of Badagry further east on the Slave Coast, where he—it seems—had been kept hostage by the Dutch Chief-Factor Hendrik Hertogh.Footnote 70 So Protten knew from experience that from Little Popo he could receive help and assistance.
These relations to powerful Accra and Popo families proved very helpful in resolving Protten’s conflicts with the administration at Christiansborg. Protten arrived to Christiansborg at a particularly tense moment. The Danish state had recently taken over the Guinean establishments from the West India and Guinea Company, Governor Jessen had just taken up his new position, but served without royal confirmation, and the ties between Christiansborg and the towns of Osu and Labadi were strained because former Governor Engman, according to town leaders, had promised gifts that had not been delivered.Footnote 71 Serving with a fragile nomination, perhaps unsure of his own authority, Jessen seems to have had a keen eye for signs of disloyalty. Twice during the two years 1757–8, he suspected Protten of conspiracy. The first time, in 1757, Protten’s friend and ally, Bookkeeper Gerhard Friedrich Wrisberg, informed Protten that Governor Jessen was convinced that Protten was plotting against him. Protten’s diligent recordkeeping, his letters, and diaries, made the governor afraid that he spied on him.Footnote 72 Protten did not confront the governor directly with his new knowledge. Instead, he told the governor of his plans to visit King Ashangmo of Little Popo. This was an elegant way of making clear that he was not dependent on the governor’s goodwill; he could leave at his own convenience. Faced with the risk of losing his schoolteacher, Governor Jessen “protested” against Protten’s plans, promised to protect him and told Protten to let him know “if someone wants to hurt me, in words or in deed.”Footnote 73 Similarly in 1758: on a trip to the inland rosars, or plantations, of Tette Ahinnekwa, Chaplain Kopp (now on Protten’s side) informed Protten that the governor was plotting against him, trying to destroy his relations with the English and Dutch governors. Again Protten decided to leave. This time, Protten’s travel plans forced the Danish fort administration to offer him a monthly salary.Footnote 74 So Protten’s family gave him an exit option. Indeed, it seems that it was these family connections that made Protten so valuable to the Danes that they decided to bury lurking conflicts again and again.
Protten’s family connections also served to position him as mediator between the fort, the community of Osu, and African rulers. In June 1758, a messenger from King Ashangmo of Little Pope came to Protten. During the next few days, Protten discussed this visit with his relative Tette of Dutch Accra and the Dutch governor.Footnote 75 Returning to Fort Christiansborg, Protten’s position as Ashangmo’s contact in Accra suddenly endeared him to the Danish governor. Protten noted in his diary that he had the most “superb opportunity” to speak with the governor. First, the two men engaged in polite and reconciliatory conversation. Then they got down to business. Jessen wanted to speak to Protten in private about King Ashangmo. The king had let it be known that he wanted the Danes to sell him their last shipment of guns, but the governor would only sell to a buyer who promised to buy the other goods in store as well. Protten was to communicate this to the king. So Protten became central to Danish trade because he facilitated communication between Danes and coastal elites.Footnote 76
Protten’s wide network of relations enabled him to further trade at Christiansborg. It also allowed him to participate in smoothing out conflicts between fort staff and inhabitants of Osu. When his sister Helena Platfues né Svendsdatter had difficulties recovering her debt from C. A. Bertram, a senior assistant at Christiansborg, Protten appears to have advised her on how to act. A court was summoned at Christiansborg with Protten’s friend Bookkeeper Wrisberg as judge, and it was decided to withdraw money from Bertram’s salary to pay off Helena. The case was not merely about Helena’s money, however. Bertram, Protten related, had attempted to fend off Helena’s claim by spreading the rumour that Helena had “committed fornication with many Whites and he [Bertram] had said so more than once in public at the [governor’s] table.”Footnote 77 The legal session therefore also served to clear her name from accusations of immorality. Through his knowledge of the Danish administration, Protten, then, could not just help family members with trade, he could also help them secure their social standing.
Protten’s embrace of his African family and their ways went beyond utilitarian strategies. When Governor Jessen entertained high-ranking officers with stories of the “disorder” of family life among the inhabitants of Accra and claimed that families were marred by incest and adultery, Protten organized his own inquiries. He asked those in Osu and Dutch Accra, whom he believed to be knowledgeable about the subject, among them the caboceer at Dutch Accra, Tette Ahinnekwa. Despite meticulous inquiries, Protten noted in his diary, he had been unable to find evidence to support the claim that it was “customary that parents and children, brother and sister commit incest.” Moreover, Protten related that “adultery is not tolerated among them, which is surely proved by the many free born, and also children from prominent families, who have made their own way to the West Indies in this way.” At the first opportunity, Protten related these findings to Governor Jessen, but the response he got was not positive. Instead of acknowledging Protten’s exceptional ability to bridge cultural differences and provide reliable interpretations of the conjugal life of his African trading partners, Jessen accused Protten of siding with the “heathens.”Footnote 78
At the end of his life, Protten turned his experiences at Christiansborg and Osu into a vision of Africa as a place where European knowledge and faith went hand in hand with African cultural expressions to shape a future for the mixed-race people of Osu. In 1764, Protten authored the first Ga-Danish/Akan-Danish dictionary: En nyttig Grammaticalsk Indledelse til Tvende hidindtil gandske ubekiendte Sprog, Fanteisk og Acraisk (in English: A Useful Grammatical Introduction to Two Hitherto Unknown Languages, Fanteian and Accraian). In this work, Protten made clear that he understood his African birth as a resource that could constructively interact with Christianity and European knowledge forms. Protten published the Introduction in Copenhagen and it has been understood as a way for Protten to underline that he was still a resource for the Danish establishments in West Africa. But it was more than that. It was also a powerful statement about the future of Africa and the possibilities of civilised life there.Footnote 79
Protten presented his African background as a resource on the very front page of the Introduction. Here Protten informed his readers that the book was written by “Christian Protten, Studios., born on said [Gold] Coast.” This point was further elaborated when Protten explained that the Accra language was “heavy and very difficult to learn for foreign nations, therefore one, so to speak, must have the correct pronunciation with one’s mother’s milk, or from childhood and up through adolescence.”Footnote 80 According to Protten, the few existing examples of transliteration were useless because: “those who have tried it have not been natives of the country but Europeans, who may achieve a sort of perfection in understanding it, indeed also in speaking it clearly and understandably; however one must have the grammatical pronunciation and expressions already from childhood.”Footnote 81 Convincingly, Protten thus argued that the circumstances of his birth gave him a particular knowledge that was otherwise difficult to obtain.
Protten did not leave it at that. He pointed out that he was a man with scholarly credentials. He had been a studiosus at the Faculty of Theology at Copenhagen University in the 1730s. In the dictionary, he demonstrated his learning by adopting established genre rules, such as introducing the eight partes orationis and using the word “to love” to demonstrate Akan verb conjugations. In this way, he made clear that his African birth was not in discordance with his academic training.
By addressing his work both to a Danish audience and to the mixed-race children of Osu, Protten’s book offered a solution to the problem of teaching these children to read and recite Christian texts in Danish.Footnote 82 The Danish introduction and the partes orationis of the work were aimed at Danish readers (or at least readers of Danish). Danish as well as Akan and Ga speakers could use the small vocabulary and exemplary sentences. However, a substantial part of the Introduction—excerpts of Luther’s Catechism (the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, and the Sacrament of the Altar)—was rendered in Akan and Ga and presumably aimed as a primer to children who were to become readers of these languages.Footnote 83
So the Introduction was meant to benefit primarily one particular group, namely the school children at Christiansborg’s Mulatto School. It was for their sake that Protten wanted to introduce Ga and Akan to the teachers at Christiansborg. Protten put it like this: “It should be very useful for the Mallatte-children under Fort Christiansborg, on Acra-Coast in Guinea, to comprehend and understand the Danish language, preferably the written language, or that which is contained in books, if it could be explained and made clear to them through the country’s and their own mother tongue.”Footnote 84
Ostensibly this was a statement about the need for the children to learn Danish. In reality, Protten was saying that the children needed to gain access to the knowledge contained in Danish books, and this access was at least initially to be facilitated by teaching in Akan and Ga. Teachers needed to learn Akan and Ga and translate Christianity and bookish knowledge into these languages for the benefit of the children.
With the Introduction Protten presented a harmonious fusion of the localities and cultures that made up his world. Indeed, he effectively transformed one of the most hybrid results of early Atlantic cultural blending, namely the racial terminology of European expansion and colonisation. Their mixed-race status and their continuing links to the wider Danish Atlantic pushed men like Protten and Svane towards the hierarchy of status and skin colour that emerged in Caribbean slave societies. Svane struggled with this hierarchy in his account to the directors of the West India and Guinea Company in Copenhagen. Protten, on the other hand, managed to maintain and develop the connotations of the term Mulatto by linking it to true learning and education in his Introduction. For Protten there was a future for a mixed-race community in Osu that went beyond slave trading and slavery.
In effect, Protten combined belonging, family, and Christianity in Africa. This combination was possible because of Protten’s appreciation of Africa and Africans. Protten did not resort to the derogatory language of Atlantic slavery when he described his family and the inhabitants of Osu. He believed in the possibility of conversion, saw a positive future for the mixed-race community of Osu, and transformed his blended heritage into a positive force in the development of Osu. Through people like him, he argued, Christianity and European knowledge could be made useful to Gold Coast people.
Like Svane, Protten was not an early abolitionist. His vision was possible—it seems to me—because he excluded references to and reflections about the links between racial ascriptions and Atlantic slavery from his prose. Whereas Svane acknowledged, alternatingly resisting and embracing, the fact that his blended origins implicated him in the racial slavery of the Atlantic world, Protten avoided the issue. His experiences with Caribbean slavery and the Middle Passage were not part of his prose. He refrained, for instance, from mentioning that Frau Birgitta, the vessel that carried him to Osu in the 1750s, was a slaver commanded by Ole Eriksen, one of the experienced captains in the Danish transatlantic slave trade.Footnote 85 Likewise, he did not pause to reflect on the fate of the many enslaved, who were incarcerated at Fort Christiansborg before being transferred to the waiting slave ships. So to claim that the mixed-race community in Osu could be one of Christianity and knowledge, Protten, it appears, had to distance himself from slave trading and slaving.
Belonging in Africa
Protten and Svane both fit into the description of Atlantic Creoles provided by recent scholarship: they were Christian, mobile, multilingual, and literate. But they did not engage in the same kind of cultural bending and blending. Their life stories highlight that Creole conditions did not translate into identical strategies of self for those who lived divided lives. Indeed, the history of Protten and Svane complicates the tendency to see the identity formation of Atlantic Creoles, in particular of free Africans, as a smooth or opportunistic process, either connected with the struggle for independence and freedom in the Americas or with their position as middlemen in the slave trade along the West African littoral.Footnote 86 For Svane and Protten cultural blending emerges as a less instrumentalist process that confronted its subjects with profound questions about their possibility of belonging in Africa.
Svane’s and Protten’s ego-texts give evidence of an element of the Atlantic world that often seems to go unnoticed. Their writings can be read against the threat of enslavement that Africans and their descendants experienced in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Yet slavery was not merely the opposite of freedom.Footnote 87 It was also the opposite of belonging, and belonging emerges as the main problematic of their writings. For both Svane and Protten the (im)possibility of belonging in Africa was the central theme in their writing. If, as Pierre Force has recently noted, being an Atlantic Creole meant being a “native, a frequent traveler, and a new settler,” it is clear that nativity could be a real challenge, when Africa was the birthplace.Footnote 88 Svane’s and Protten’s concerns about belonging in Africa emerged in reflections about the civility of their family and the inhabitants of the Gold Coast and in their reflections on their status as mixed-race men. Whereas Protten, perhaps a dreamer, managed to change the connotation of his mixed-race origins through a powerful work of linguistics, Svane, forced to be realistic, continued to struggle with the fact that his status connected him to the racialised versions of freedom and bondage that circulated in the Atlantic trade system. Neither Protten nor Svane could simply return to Africa and seamlessly integrate into the Gold Coast elite. After having encountered the racialised hierarchies of the Danish Atlantic world, they had to renegotiate the meaning of Africa and Africans in order to feel that they could belong in Osu.
Protten and Svane were part of a very small group of highly educated Protestant Africans who returned to their homelands during the eighteenth century. Among them were Anton Wilhelm Amo (ca. 1700–1759), who was born near Axim and had a long career at the universities of Halle, Wittenberg and Jena before returning to his homeland after 1743, after which little is known about him.Footnote 89 More famous perhaps, is Philip Quaque (1741–1816), who has recently been described as an Atlantic Creole. Quaque left Cape Coast for England in 1754. Upon his return in 1766, his letters indicate that he, like Svane, oscillated between condemnation and acceptance of his homeland.Footnote 90 Yet another comparable figure, also from the Gold Coast, was Jacobus Eliza Capitein (1717–1747), who wrote a thesis reconciling Christianity and slavery at Leiden University, and returned to Elmina in 1742. Like Protten, he appears to have been relatively sympathetic towards his native land. He was a quite successful teacher and, like Protten, believed in vernacular education. In 1744, he published a Fante catechism that he apparently put to use in Elmina’s castle school. Moreover, he wanted to marry an African woman, so that fellow Africans “would be able to see that though I differ from them in my way of living and religion, they are not looked down upon by me.”Footnote 91 Together the life trajectories of these men further underline that a conception of cultural blending that highlights fluidity and dialogue rather than exclusions and hierarchies may not be sufficient to understand the subjective identities of Euro-Africans in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century.
The biographies of Svane and Protten open up for a less celebratory and more complex understanding of the Atlantic Creoles. When the Atlantic Creoles are construed as a certain social group, a particular generation, or a cultural type, it is the European elements of their mixed culture that stand out. So for instance Linda Heywood and John Thornton have argued that elite Kongolese had the “bearing and outlook of educated Europeans” and they have seen creolisation in the appropriation of European naming patterns, clothing styles, and music, among other things.Footnote 92 But for Svane and Protten it was Africa and their possibilities in Africa that weighed most heavily on their minds. Belonging in Africa was their problem in a world of growing racial slavery.Footnote 93
So Protten and Svane had a common problem, but they did not find identical solutions. Their struggles to make sense of their places in the Atlantic world suggest that we need to conceptualise the Creole as both highly determined by the circumstances that bond people as well as being open to the creative appropriation and establishment of new meanings. Or to adopt Marx’ famous sentence (made pertinent in Atlantic history by Walter Johnson): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please […]. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”Footnote 94 Neither Svane nor Protten could escape the world they were born into. More than their concrete links to different geographical places, the emergent racial discourses of the Atlantic world conditioned them to be transcultural; this was the tradition that turned their displacement into a “nightmare.” Yet by examining how they tried to find places to belong, we can establish that for people like them a variety of transcultural practices were possible—practices that ranged from complete rejection of Africans and their culture to a celebration and redefinition of the significance of Africa and African origins in the Atlantic world. Indeed, the very different approaches that Svane and Protten had to what—from the outside—appears as almost identical life trajectories testify to the fact that they were making their own histories in the Atlantic world. They were similar in that they were determined by their birth as mixed-race boys in Osu, the slave trading centre of the Danish Atlantic world. They were different in the ways they were reformulating their place in Osu and moulding, each according to his aptitudes and inclinations, their possibility of belonging in Africa.
Bibliography of Works Cited
Unpublished Archival Sources
Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität, Herrnhut:
CPD A=Guinea Mission, R15, N, Christian Protten, Diarium, 1737–41
CPD B=Guinea Mission, R15, N, Christian Protten, Diarium, 1756–61
Rigsarkivet, København:
Vestindisk-guineisk Kompagni, 189, Relationer om forholdene i Guinea, 1733–1848, Fr. P. Svane: “Generaldeclaration og underrætning om ti års begivenheder.”
Danske Kancelli, 232, Sjællandske tegnelser, 1749–1750, no. 219, April 18, 1749.
