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In this article I focus on the “historicity” of Nana Tabir, a West African coastal deity who is associated with Cape Coast Castle and Atlantic slavery in Ghana. My goal is to take Tabir’s history seriously, less as a record of objective documentation than as a generative locus of insights into the past—in this case, of Afro-European encounters associated with the rise of the Atlantic economy and the development of Cape Coast government and society. In this respect Tabir epitomizes a range of African coastal “fetishes” extending from Senegambia to Luanda that register European contact and trading relations in their ritual iconographies and forms of spirit possession. What distinguishes Tabir within the growing literature on the historicity of such ritual archives, however, is the depth of European documentation going back to 1601. If Tabir looks like an invented tradition “customized” for tourists, he has been around for centuries, changing forms and places, sacralizing spaces, and shaping pathways of ritual reciprocity to empower chiefs and devotees. His history is less a story to be told than a past which he both mystifies and manifests; of migration and settlement, Cape Coast Castle, the Royal African Company, gold and slaves, coastal asafo military companies, market driven warfare, and the making of a creole culture through the mimetic appropriation of European signs.
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