The literature on the African diaspora in the Americas has been gaining depth and specificity in recent years. After a long series of general works concerned with identifying and explaining processes of change and methods of analysis, new texts are emerging that trace the migrations and fortunes of particular populations, practices, and individuals. Kwasi Konadu's book focuses on the Akan of the Gold Coast, who, he says, formed a ‘composite culture’ by the late fifteenth century; this culture then proceeded to move through a diasporic history via ‘persons who may or may not have been Akan’ (p. 6).

There is much to appreciate in this impressively researched text. Konadu has written the first book-length treatment of the Gold Coast diaspora, rich with material on the precolonial origins of Akan societies, the migration of Akan-speakers to the Americas, and their participation in social and political struggles. It also introduces readers to key figures in the development of Akan spiritual communities in North America and their relationship to those of present-day Ghanaians. Gathering strands from half a millennium, Konadu weaves together the temporal, ideational, and spiritual elements of a culture that, he claims, defines the Akan over this broad sweep of time.

This is a work that should be read by all serious scholars of diaspora, and yet many historians who recognize the virtues of Konadu's work will also find that it has limitations. Thus, while Konadu weighs in usefully on the debate over the Mande influence on the Akan before European contact – he maintains that it was slight – it is less helpful that he treats Akan culture as if it were a bounded and integrated whole, somehow retaining its fundamental coherence over many tumultuous centuries. Where Konadu might have used his deep knowledge of Akan language and religion to measure the sensitivity of cultural practices to changing social context, he only highlights their perseverance. For Konadu, ‘people, ultimately, are nothing but their culture, and their historical movements – in terms of the pragmatics of day-to-day living, collective ideas, or spiritual strivings – are cultural histories’ (p. 16). Indeed, Konadu treats culture and history as if they were equivalent. But this view may obscure our understanding of the ways that day-to-day living and striving transform patterns of belief and behaviour over time. His cultural history assumes a transhistorical culture. Indicative is his tendency to use the phrase ‘enslaved Africans in America’ to refer to both African born and American born peoples, which refuses distinctions that were critical among enslaved and free people of color in slave societies. Thus much of the specificity that might have been gained by examining a delimited population such as Akan speakers from the Gold Coast, has been lost by too general a treatment of historical experience. We learn of the basic elements that Konadu believes are required for Akan being, but much less about how particular odysseys have shaped what became of enslaved Akan speakers their descendants in the Americas.

With a reified conception of ‘Africans’ core understandings and identities', Konadu aims to map the trajectory of a ‘specific Akan culture’ and ‘its input toward a composite diasporic cultural identity and ideology, and its engagement with contemporary realities on both sides of the Atlantic’ (p. 5). Rather than showing how Africans responded to dislocation, enslavement, and the needs of community building over time, as in the work of Walter C. Rucker, Konadu seeks to locate an ‘Akan variable in the African diasporic equation’ (ibid.). He pursues this approach through a ‘synoptic profile’ of the Akan in the Danish, Dutch, and British Americas and into a history of the North American present, in which African Americans, some undoubtedly descended from Akan speakers, preserve Akan spirituality in their religious communities even as they chide converts to evangelical Christianity in Ghana. And it is in religion that Kondau finds the sustaining force of Akan existence. Defining culture as the ‘spiritual, ideational, and temporal dimensions of life as experienced by people across historical time and place’ he resorts to the well-worn metaphor of the tree: ‘the temporal would be the trunk and its branches, the ideational would be the roots, and the spiritual would be both what nourishes the roots and the unseen activities of sustainability well beneath the soil and beyond the eye of the microscope’ (p. 16). He might as well say that Akan culture and history spring from supernatural first principles.

The principal value of this book, then, is less in its explanation of processes and experiences of diaspora than in the learned case it makes for the essential nature and worth of Akan being across time and space. As such it will be an important source for scholars hoping to understanding continuing struggles over the social meaning of Africanness and the politics of identity in the African diaspora. It exemplifies the kind of material that scholars such as Bayo Holsey and Saidiya Hartman examined in their recent studies of slavery, memory, and historical belonging. They address an important question posed two decades ago by the anthropologist David Scott: ‘What are the varying ways in which Africa and slavery are employed by New World peoples of African descent in the narrative construction of relations among the past, presents, and futures?’ This is still an open question, but as the anthropologist Stephan Palmié has recently argued, it requires a perspective, ‘that addresses “Africa” and “Africanity”’ – and ‘Akan’, I would hasten to add – ‘as theoretical problems instead of ontological givens’ so that we may ‘ask how and to what extent these terms have variously come to take on ethically, morally and politically salient meanings not only in the African Diaspora, but among individuals and groups located on the African continent itself.’ To the extent that scholars read Konadu's book with the seriousness it merits, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas will greatly enhance our sense of what Africa means to its residents and descendants.Footnote ¹