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Okomfo Anokye formed a tree to hide from the Akwamu: priestly power, freedom, and enslavement in the Afro-Atlantic

This study focuses on West African oracular, archival, and field evidence in recreations of identities and spiritualties of freedom by maroons, free-blacks, and slaves in the Anglo-Caribbean. Oral accounts of the priest Okomfo Anokye (c.1635–1720) conveyed themes of Akan, Guan, and Ga culture and history related to freedom and resistance to enslavement in the eastern Gold Coast (modern day Ghana). Captives from the region expressed elements of spiritualized antislavery thought and practice throughout the Americas. Jamaican kumfu-men and obeah-men idealized cosmologies and traditions from the Gold Coast to promote resistance and rebellion by maroons, slaves, and free-blacks. This study considers priestly power as an association of political culture and cosmology and argues it became integral in reactions to trans-Atlantic human trading. Okomfo and obayifo diviners and spiritualists were both real historic actors and mythic incarnations of precolonial political culture. Their perceptions of freedom and enslavement in West Africa echoed into the Americas. This study considers West African cultural transfer in Cudjoe's Treaty of 1739 and Tacky's Rebellion in 1760 in Jamaica. Conversely, St. Mary's Rebellion of 1780, led by the infamous “Bristol” alias Three Finger'd Jack reflected antislavery influences from other sources, namely Christian conversion, Enlightenment notions of liberty, and the increased arrival of captives from other African regions. These influences gradually supplanted Akan, Guan, and Ga ideas of priestly power, oath-making, naming patterns, and other social practices as influential to expressions of freedom in the lives of maroons, slaves, and free-blacks in Jamaica.