The African Country Fetu

Originally written in Germany in the 1660s, this book is an assessment of an African society by a Danish missionary stationed in Fort Fredericksborg. Basing his ethnography on the ancient Kingdom of Fetu (roughly today’s Cape Coast and Elmina area), this White visitor who found himself in the land of the ‘heathen’ won their friendship and made interesting interpretation of the people, their culture and livelihood systems. Wilhem Johan Müller lived and interacted closely with the local people yet his cultural distance rendered some of his accounts absurd while others were …not too wrong.

Fetu is a vintage document translated into English by a master linguist, Kari Dako.