Mental Healing

This talk opens a research agenda on madness and enslavement in West Africa prior to 1900 through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in the Gold Coast, today coastal Ghana, in the Atlantic era. When shrine priests healed mental distresses, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, thought to owe ritual debts and deemed unfit for sale on the Atlantic market due to mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. West African shrines were thus spaces of value conversion: reflecting a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture and enslavement in the Atlantic-era Gold Coast—where potential “refuse slaves” were made, once again, commodifiable.