“All of the Coromantee Country”

This chapter focuses on those Akan who lived agitatedly in captivity, remained complicit with the order of things, or sought to temporally and spiritually transcend captivity in Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and parts of the northern United States. Akan naming was one of the most significant and enduring cultural practices in the Caribbean, and this was no different in North America, where the Akan naming pattern and name transmission were carried on in the southern United States. In English phonetic rendering, Akan names and persons appeared prominently in runaway slave advertisements, which provide a demographic record and a taxonomy of African bodies. However objectifying those ads may be, they nonetheless allow for a retrieval of some of the Akan (descended) lives inked in their pages and key insights into the themes of flight and slavery, language acquisition in struggles against slavery, and the numerical importance of the Akan in places like South Carolina in terms of cultural transmission in captivity or in communities isolated from whites. In the northern United States, the Akan impact in revolts and cultural matters was no less pronounced in spite of the small numbers of Akan.