When enslaved people became “mad,” they lost exchange value as labor capital on the Atlantic market, as neither African nor European merchants considered the mentally distressed to be valuable bondsmen. Historians of slavery in the Americas have drawn on accounts of “mad slaves” to understand how labor value was generated, and disrupted, through the transport and sale of captive Africans. But historians have yet to examine the relationship between psychological distress and enslavement in West Africa, where many of the captives in question originated. This article opens a research agenda on madness in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gold Coast, today’s coastal Ghana. Ga families confided their mentally distressed kin to shrine priests, who treated severe illnesses caused by ritual afflictions. When shrine priests healed these ailments, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, deemed unfit for sale due to mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. West African shrines were thus spaces of value conversion that reflected a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and raiding that proliferated on the Gold Coast.

当被奴役的人变得“疯狂”时，他们就失去了在大西洋市场上作为劳动力资本的交换价值，因为非洲和欧洲商人都不认为精神上有问题的人是有价值的奴隶。研究美洲奴隶制的历史学家利用“疯狂奴隶”的叙述来了解劳动力价值是如何通过运输和出售被俘虏的非洲人而产生和破坏的。但历史学家尚未研究心理困扰与西非奴役之间的关系，许多相关俘虏都来自西非。本文通过对 18 世纪和 19 世纪黄金海岸（今天的加纳沿海地区）Ga 神社作为精神治疗空间的作用的案例研究，开启了关于大西洋时代西非疯狂的研究议程。嘎族家庭向神社的神父倾诉了他们患有精神疾病的亲人，他们治疗由仪式痛苦引起的严重疾病。当神社的祭司治愈这些疾病时，他们就进行了精神典当：将因精神上无行为能力而被认为不适合出售的疯子转变为潜在的奴役对象。因此，西非圣地是价值转换的空间，反映了在黄金海岸激增的更广泛的捕获、奴役和袭击的货币和仪式经济。