Where the Negroes Are Masters Book Report

James Key III

Sub-Sahara Africa

Dr. Ohan

February 16, 2017

Where the Negroes are Masters Book Report

        In Randy J. Sparks book Where the Negroes are Masters focuses on a port city along the African gold coast. His book centers around a little town that most people have most likely never heard of Annamaboe. During the middle of the eighteenth century, Annamaboe would stand at the height of the slave trade comparable to any of the Atlantic sister ports of the day. The main point that Sparks tries to convene in his book is that shed light on the life in the slave trading port of Annamaboe as reflected in the everyday lives of the townspeople. Also, to show or to place this rather small town in the larger Atlantic picture by depicting the movements of the townspeople between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

        Sparks to properly portray the African Atlantic world, Historians have investigated West Africa ports that were vastly important centers of maritime trade, in general, the slave trade. Studies have come out in recent years that show the interplay that happens between cultural and economic factors that lay the groundwork for the slave trade in the port of Annamaboe. As Sparks shows in his book, there is still a vast amount of information and study that can be done to further our understanding of just how important port cities like Annamaboe. Throughout Sparks book the concentrates on of course Annamaboe which is now present day Ghana on what at the time was called the Gold Coast during the eighteen centuries or the prime years of the Atlantic slave trade. Annamaboe was a fort maintained by the English Royal African Company that flourished as a supply center for the transatlantic slave trade and then later the by its successor the Company of Merchants trading to Africa. At the time the English dominated the slave trade at Annamaboe but other nations traded there as well such as the French, American, and Dutch. As chapter five goes on to explain that Rhode Island merchants or better know from the book as Rum men gained a significant position in the slave trading business at Annamaboe decades before the American Revolution and throughout the profitable trade of New England rum hence where their name comes from.

        Sparks draws from extensive archives of the Royal African Company to evaluate the wide range of personnel that was involved in the slave trade at Annamaboe and to explain the activities of white traders, mainly associated with the Royal African Company. Sparks demystifies the dynamics of the slave trade to show colossal, interconnected, and unseen dimensions of the Atlantic world system. He observes how the Fantes’ initial exchange of African gold for European cloth and other commodities at Annamaboe shifted to a trade in slaves as plantation slavery in the Americas grew rapidly. Sparks points out how different power players on the coast — such as Fante rulers, chiefs, and caboceers — jealously guarded the profitable trade, while their Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French trading partners competed amongst themselves to monopolize it. Pawning, an indigenous African trade practice in which family members became collateral, lent itself to African-European socio-economic relationships, which proved critical to the expanding slave trade. These transactions, hanging on familial consent, personal connections, African-European cultural exchange, and a delicate balance of trust worked together to facilitate the development of the slave trade at Annamaboe. It was this dynamic that ultimately distinguished the business of slave trading from piracy and kidnapping. 

In Atlantic history, slavery has assumed a central and immovable presence, critical to the shaping of identity in the African migration, its ethics, and politics. Following its demise, efforts to hold Western powers responsible for slavery’s enduring legacies led to a historiographic line of argument that Europeans had acquired slaves through kidnapping, rather than from genuine trade with African merchants. Operating from this view, diasporic scholars "excised language of African power" from the slave trade literature. Putting Africans in positions of power during the slave trade meant incurring a collective guilt in remembering memory and remembering collectivizing Africa and the movement. Yet the failure to acknowledge African power during the slave trade era had epistemological, ontological, and psychological outcomes and the victimology discourse that it ultimately serviced permeated many aspects of black life. Admittedly, this school of thought has been in decline for some time. Nonetheless, Sparks' injection of new life into this historiography makes his work necessary and welcomed. 

At the outset of Where the Negroes are Masters, Sparks brings together the interconnected worlds of the Atlantic to tell the story of an African Prince who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, but who was nonetheless able to return home because, his powerful family. Though the author gracefully moves from Annamaboe to South Carolina labor demands, and to expanding European capitalism, one never quite grasps a deeper sense of how power changed hands and mutated across these spaces and over time. In this notoriously slippery Atlantic world, Sparks' focus remains on Africans exercising power from within a circumscribed spatial and temporal position. But the kind of African power exercised at Annamaboe rarely crossed the ocean into the diaspora, or into the African present. Rather, it was the heartbeat of anti-African racism that persisted in Africa, the Americas, and Europe well after slavery ended – facilitating various kinds of legal, political, and economic exclusion quite contrary to the power Africans held in the port at Annamaboe. In this regard, a greater exploration of the tenuous nature of power in the Atlantic world might have enhanced Sparks' work.