Kwasi Konadu

Transatlantic Africa

Slaving Forts

African History 360Kwasi KonaduComment

The Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa was incorporated by a royal charter in January 1663. It was reconstituted by a new charter almost a decade later as the Royal African Company of England, which held a monopoly on trade to Atlantic Africa. The company’s headquarters in Africa was at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana).

Gender and Power Relations during the Transatlantic Era

African History 360Kwasi KonaduComment

The invasion of “Angola” brought Njinga Mbande (ca. 1583 – December 17, 1663), ruler of the kingdom of Ndongo and Matamba, into the political picture. Born around 1582 in the Kingdom of Ndongo, Njinga was the eldest child of the kingdom’s ruler, Mbandi Ngola—“Ngola” became the source of the territory called “Angola.”

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The Research Process

EssaysKwasi Konadu2 Comments

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Mohammed Ali Ben Said settled in Alabama, where his narrative and the paper trail for his life ends, but where the research for my Transatlantic Africa book began. Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 retold the story of transatlantic slaving through the lived experiences and intellectual history of Africans who lived through it. In that way, uncovering Mohammed’s story was fortuitous because Mohammed was an African, a Muslim, and an enslaved or indentured person for most of his remarkable life. For all these insights Mohammed’s extraordinary story provided, it left an equal amount of questions. These questions became the legs of my research, conveying it along an exploratory journey.

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