Boy-servants at Elmina Castle

Living at Elmina Castle

The Castle of St. George d'Elmina was home to Dutch officials, soldiers, labourers, and servants from 1637 to 1872. In the eighteenth century, the castle also housed the enslaved men and women - a home to them it was certainly not - in the so-called dungeons.

The senior officials had relatively comfortable and spacious rooms, and the director-general had a multi-room appartment. This was were they organised their lives and spent much of their private time.

Elmina Castle, with view of living quarters of the officials in the high building on the left.

Ditto, looking at living quarters.

          

Officials and servants

The social-economic status of the senior officials was such, that they could maintain some sort of household, including servants. As far as we can establish these servants were always boys of various ages.

The social position of these boy-servants can best be compared to that of high-valued domestic slaves in the households of the African elite in the town of Elmina, next to the castle. Domestic slaves were often considered to be part of the family, could have lots of freedom of movement, and in some cases were able to work independently.

Prof. Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana is a specialist in the history of indigenous slavery and wrote a book about it: A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century.

As Natasha Gray states in her review of the book,

 'Perbi argues that slavery in Ghana was rooted in an African understanding of property rights based on kinship and reciprocity rather than individual ownership. Therefore, although slaves could be bought and sold, "the position of a slave in Ghana was 'that of a person in a state of servitude guarded by rights'" (p. 4). Interestingly, she notes that in precolonial Ghana there were five separate terms for different conditions of servitude: servant, pawn, slave, war captive, and slave under capital punishment (p. 3).'

On the legacy of indigenous slavery after abolition in 1874 Perbi gave a lecture that can be found on YouTube.

The historical evidence supports the hypothesis that the boy-servants can best be described as servants in the context of domestic slavery. This set them apart - literally and as a figure of speech - from the enslaved people that were kept imprisoned in the dungeons and slave camps, awaiting their shipment to the Americas and a life on the plantations.

Director-general Jan Pranger and his boy-servant in his quarters in Elmina Castle by Frans van der Mijn, 1742. Coll. Rijksmuseum.

The Dutch seventeenth-century poet and West India company official Focquenbroch wrote in 1678 about his boy-servant of about twelve years old:

' [Being] so kind, polite, and loyal, that I love the boy with all my Heart, and would (if he were a slave) not hesitate to pay a Pound of Gold for him.'

This confirms the idea that the boy-servant was a dependent and placed in a servile position, but not seen as a slave in the narrower sense of the word.

That they had freedom of movement and were staying with their 'masters', sleeping in a section of his accommodation is confirmed by a reference from the Dutch sources, where a West India Company official described how he, reporting to the rooms of fiscal Jan van Rijk, only found his two boy-servants there.

The personal relationship between European officials and their boy-servants, a relationship of mutual responsibility and care, also makes it plausible that many of these boys accompanied their 'masters' to the Netherlands when they returned. Or, alternatively, as evidence suggests, were sent to the Netherlands by themselves, to serve with family members or others.

In the quest for Presto it can be noted that in 1746-1747 fiscal Huibert van Rijk had his servants in the Castle, among whom the boy Accra Doura. He accompanied Van Rijk to the Netherlands and the town of Weesp in 1750, the town in which Presto would settle fifiteen years later. Also in 1746-1747, Presto was staying at Elmina Castle, purportedly in the service of director-general Jacob de Petersen, whom, we have already hypothesised, may well have been Presto's 'benefactor' and the reason he came to the Netherlands.

Procuring slave children on the Gold Coast (I): The European position

Children without names

When we study Africans in the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these individuals are denied their original African identity. This is of course also the case with Presto, whose African name, given to him by his parents, is unknown to us, and was possibly even unknown to Presto himself, as was his African family history. It makes looking for his origins in Ghana quite complicated.

However, it also poses questions about the social status of African children like Presto in general. Were they chattel slaves, like the enslaved people that were sent to the plantations in the Americas? Or were they a special category of captives, and if so, how did this play out in the way in which they were procured in Africa and treated in Europe? Let's first look at their European position, and then move back to Ghana in a second instalment of this blog, and see what we can find there with regard to these young children. Also as another point of interest for the field trip.

African children in Europe: made-up identities

The research into Presto's / Christiaan van der Vegt's origins, his stinge at the Court of the Prince-Stadtholder, and as servant to the mayor of Weesp, Abraham d'Arrest, has yielded a large amount of information about other African boys in the Netherlands and Europe too. One rich source for our knowledge about these boys - and some girls - are the formal portrait paintings in which African children figure, usually in the background, as servants to 'important people.' Annemieke is collecting them on a special Pinterest Board, titled Young Africans with Europeans in the 17th and 18th century. And indeed, at the time of writing this blog, the board counts 412 pins already.

Portrait of Cocquamar Crenequie
(Coll. Museum Weesp)

In art history there has long been a tendency, so it seems, to regard these young African servants as ornaments, rather than real people. In current museum collections this is still very much visible in the descriptions of these paintings, which never name the African servants, if mentioning them at all.

We take the position that most, if not all of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century portraits, should be seen as  real-life depictions in which all elements have meaning, and are part of the main figure's life. This includes servants, African or otherwise, pets, and inanimate ornaments and objects. Only by taking this position, it becomes possible to seriously study the prevalence of African child servants in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no longer as something exceptional, but as a regular occurance. As Annemieke already stated: 'Christiaan was not the only one.'

 And more importantly, by naming the African children in these pictures, we make a start in giving them their identity back.

To prove the point that efforts to identify these pictured anonymous African boy-servants can be fruitful, there is the case of Cocquamar Crenequie, or Willem Philip Frederik, as he was called after his christening. He was born on 'the Coast of Guinea', i.e. in West Africa, around 1739. Since the middle of 1750 he was a member of the household of the Count Gronsfeld, special envoy of the Dutch States General to the Court at Berlin. Cocquamar Crenequie was christened in Berlin on Sunday  27 January 1754. The reason we know all this is that his christening was reported in a Dutch newspaper, which report coincides with our knowledge about the provenance of a painting of the same year in which he was pictured with the Countess zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Virneburg, Gronsfeld's wife.

Report on the christening of Cocquamar Crenequie in Berlin, in
Opregte Haerlemsche Courant 5 February 1754

In her blog postings, Annemieke has also shown that there were more boys like Presto who were brought to the Netherlands by (former) officials of the Dutch West India Company, sometimes identifiable by an African or African-sounding name, like Accra Doura, a contemporary of Presto and also living in Weesp for a while. In most cases African names are not known, and when they are, they are invariably too mangled to make sense of for purposes of regional identification or meaning (which includes Cocquamar Crenequie). Others were given fantasy names or exotic names, like Presto, Fortuin, Coridon, Cupido or Cedron, to name the boys touched upon in Annemieke's blog alone. When baptised the Christian name Christaan is prevalent, sometimes connected with a fantasy name of sorts, as was the case with Christiaan van Souburg, Christiaan Narcis and Christiaan Congo Loango. Proper African names usually do not occur.

From the Netherlands to West Africa

So far, we have a fair idea of the scope of these African boys living in Europe in higher-placed servile positions, through their appearance in paintings, and because of selected case studies from archival sources. That does not mean that the picture is complete yet, however, or that we fully understand the social positions of these boys and the social mechanisms governing their position and status, including Presto. This is a research topic in itself, which should be undertaken with some urgency.

During our trip, Annemieke and I will look into the context of the Atlantic slave trade and the position of enslaved people for that trade on the one hand, and into the physical and social context in which children were procured for service in the Netherlands on the other.

An important issue to consider is how the procurement of these children in Africa worked. The premise here is that the children brought directly to Europe cannot, in social terms, be compared to the huge numbers of chattel slaves shipped 'in bulk' - excuse the expression - and anonimity to the Americas. In the case of these children, one can ask whether their was some sort of 'parallel trade', considering the numbers found in Europe, or whether it was a more incidental occurance with its own rules and regulations?

In the next blog I will go into that more in detail, on the basis of several recorded cases from the era in which Presto and Fortuin were also brought from the Coast of Guinea to the Netherlands.