Fetish Contracts and Fante States: The Rise of a Ritual Confederacy in 18th-Century Fanteland

If the Fante are renowned for their historic engagement with Atlantic Slavery in eighteenth century West Africa, the form and development of their government remains elusive and enigmatic. Although the Fante were never organized within a singular state, much debate surrounds both the structure of their polities and how these became linked during the eighteenth century. Why are their political, military and ritual titles so difficult to rank, converging into what Gorgio Agamben has called “zones of indistinction”? Through what forms and exchanges was sovereignty invested, and over what spaces did it effectively extend? And how best to characterize their mode of association as Atlantic slavery kicked into high gear? Did the Fante states develop into a consociation, a confederacy, or a “coastal coalition,” as different historians have suggested and debated?

Much of this confusion and ambiguity can be resolved, I argue, by recasting the alliances that developed between Fante states as a ritual confederacy, one that vested ultimate authority in the high priests of the deity Nananom Mpow in the kingdom of Mankessim. Building on the insights of Thomas McCaskie and Rebecca Shumway but pushing them further, I argue that ritual office became paramount in the ritual confederacy due to the complex development of fetish contracts through which Fante merchants negotiated the trade of enslaved Africans and controlled its sphere of circulation from coast to hinterland.