The history of the coastal population of Ghana in the era of the slave trade cannot be explained solely by developments in trade and politics, although changes in these aspects of Gold Coast life certainly had a profound impact on people in the coastal area. The majority of people in Fanteland, the common folk, were not directly involved in the creation of the Coastal Coalition or the traffic in human captives, although they were affected by both. The experiences of not only the elites but also the common people from generation to generation created a sense of common culture and history among southern Ghana’s communities during the era of the slave trade. To better understand those experiences, it is necessary to look beyond coalition building and trade to the social and cultural institutions in which coastal people participated and within which they expressed their notions of shared identity.

This chapter considers the development of Fante culture during the eighteenth century and highlights cultural institutions that reinforced the unifying influences of political and economic conditions in eighteenth-century Fanteland. The people of southern Ghana wove a new cultural fabric in the era of the Coastal Coalition, combining their distinct traditions and creating new ones. These cultural changes occurred in religious practice, kinship systems, and artistic traditions, among others. Taken as a whole, they reveal the development of a common cultural foundation among the coastal peoples that did not exist prior to the eighteenth century.

The communities living on the coast of modern-day Ghana between the Pra River and Accra during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries were divided into distinct polities, each with its own linguistic features and under the political authority of a sovereign ruler (“king” in European parlance). The Borbor Fante was one of these groups, occupying the lands around the modern-day towns of Mankessim, Anomabo, and Kromantse. The Borbor Fante polity was situated between the polities of Asebu to the west and Agona to the east.