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Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of “Mina” (Again)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Robin Law
Robin Law*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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The term “Mina,” when encountered as an ethnic designation of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, has commonly been interpreted as referring to persons brought from the area of the “Gold Coast” (“Costa da Mina” in Portuguese usage), corresponding roughly to modern Ghana, who are further commonly presumed to have been mainly speakers of the Akan languages (Fante, Twi, etc.) dominant on that section of the coast and its immediate hinterland. In a recently published paper, however, Gwendolyn Hall has questioned this conventional interpretation, and suggested instead that most of those called “Mina” in the Americas were actually from the “Slave Coast” to the east (modern southeastern Ghana, Togo, and Bénin), and hence speakers of the languages nowadays generally termed “Gbe” (though formerly more commonly “Ewe”), including Ewe, Adja, and Fon. Given the numerical strength of the “Mina” presence in the Americas, as Hall rightly notes, this revision would substantially alter our understanding of ethnic formation in the Americas.

In further discussion of these issues, this paper considers in greater detail than was possible in Hall's treatment: first, the application of the name “Mina” in European usage on the West African coast itself, and second, the range of meanings attached to it in the Americas. This separation of African and American data, it should be stressed, is adopted only for convenience of exposition, since it is very likely that ethnic terminology on the two sides of the Atlantic in fact evolved in a process of mutual interaction. In particular, the settlement of large numbers of returned exslaves from Brazil on the Slave Coast from the 1830s onwards very probably fed Brazilian usage back into west Africa, as I have argued earlier with respect to the use of the name “Nago” as a generic term for the Yoruba-speaking peoples.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 32 , 2005 , pp. 247 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2005

References

1 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, “African ethnicities and the meanings of ‘Mina’” in Lovejoy, Paul E. and Trotman, David R., eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London, 2003), 65–81Google Scholar. The argument is elaborated in a forthcoming book, African Ethnicities in the Americas, chapter 7; my thanks to Gwen Hall for allowing me to see a draft text of the relevant section of this work.

2 Law, Robin, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” HA 24(1997), 205–19Google Scholar; for the argument that the generic use of “Nago” in West Africa represents feedback from Brazil, see ibid., 212-15.

3 An interesting question, which however cannot be pursued here, is whether/how far European usage in the Americas distinguished between the Akan and Ga-Adangme language groups. The English in the late seventeenth century did distinguish between “Cormantine” or “Gold Coast” slaves and the “Allampo,” i.e., Adangme, the former being much preferred: Phillips, Thomas, “A Journal of a Voyage made in the Hannibal of London” in Churchill, Awnsham and Churchill, John, comps., Collection of Voyages and Travels (6 vols.: London, 1732), 6:214Google Scholar; Law, Robin, ed., The English in West Africa 1685-1688: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of Englan,d 1681-1699, Part 2 (London, 2001), 415Google Scholar (doc. 973: Edwyn Steede and Stephen Gascoigne, Barbados, 12 May 1686). But the distinction seems to have been lost in later English usage, and to be altogether absent in that of other European nations, which referred generically to “Mina” slaves.

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5 Bràsio, António, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana (1st series, 14 vols, Lisbon, 1952–1985), 5: 374Google Scholar (doc. 137: Relação da Costa da Guiné, 1607).

6 This term occurs in a document of 1699, quoted in Verger, Pierre, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1968), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 Law, , Slave Coast, 148–50Google Scholar. The earliest report of this trade (in 1659) implies that it was a recent innovation (operative only for “some years”).

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22 Strickrodt, , “Afro-European Trade Relations,” 77n41, 245Google Scholar. In a report of 1852 the town's indigenous name is given as “Adiner Cooma,” i.e., Fante akuma, “junior.”

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46 Indeed, Edwards, ibid., even states explicitly that they “speak the Whidah language.”

47 Oldendorp says that the Allada were “descendants” of the Hueda, but this is probably a confusion: versions of local tradition recorded recently state rather that Allada and Hueda shared a common origin, from the Adja kingdom of Tado to the west.

48 Associated with the town of Notse (Nuatja), in modern Togo—this being apparently the earliest reference to this group in any contemporary source.

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51 And providing the first documentation of this ethnonym, which is not attested in West Africa itself before the nineteenth century. The vocabulary also gives “Gamthòmè” for “as minas [the Minas].” This is interpreted by the editor Yeda Pessoa de Castro as Gentome, “Gen country,” i.e., Little Popo, but it seems more likely to refer to Minas Gerais in Brazil than to the “Minas” in Africa, perhaps from gan, “metal.”

52 Later the Agonlin and Savalou also chose their own kings: Soares, Mariza de Carvalho, Devotos da cor: identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro, 2000), esp. 200–02Google Scholar.

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