Merchants, Missionaries & Migrants

Book excerpt: In November 1701, David van Nyendael, an envoy of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) was the first European to visit the royal court in Kumasi, capital of the emerging Ashanti empire in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. Three hundred years of Dutch-Ghanaian relations have passed since then. "Merchants, Missionaries and Migrants" focuses on various aspects of this long-standing and intricate economic, political and cultural relationship between the Ghanaians and the Dutch. Experts from Ghana, the Netherlands, Suriname and Indonesia present their research findings in fascinating histories. They describe a wide range of topics from Dutch-Ghanaian history: from the trade in gold, ivory and slaves to the cocoa trade; from liaisons between European men and African women in previous centuries to present-day Ghanaian migration to the Netherlands; from the involuntary migration of tens of thousands of slaves to the plantations in Suriname to the largely forgotten history of the African soldiers who sailed from Elmina to serve in the Dutch army in the East Indies; and from the role of Dutch geneva in Ghanaian ritual to the tragic story of Jacobus Capitein, the first black Christian minister to be ordained in the Netherlands.