“We Shall Rejoice to see the Day When Slavery shall Cease to Exist”: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 19-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Littoral Region ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
Intellectual Activities ◽  
And Diffusion

The articulation of antislavery among Africans remains to be studied. Overall, the staple of animated questions, debates, and conclusions of the vast literature on abolition of slavery in the last two decades or so has neglected African contributions of ideologies of antislavery to the global abolition epoch in the Atlantic world. Charting a new trajectory for the study of abolition in Africa, as well as the global abolition epoch, this study examines the ideologies of antislavery among Africans as expressed in the Gold Coast Times (Cape Coast) during the heyday of the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. The study, echoing African agency, reveals the manifest presence of the African intelligentsia abolitionists in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The origin and timing of the African intelligentsia's antislavery attitudes in the Gold Coast are not made known in the sources. However, the sources do reveal that antislavery flowered in the littoral region between Elmina and Accra, the hub of precolonial intellectual activities, political activism, and diffusion of cultures, linked to the larger Atlantic world.Overall, I argue that antislavery existed among the African intelligentsia and that they articulated their ideologies of antislavery in several ways, both on the eve of the British colonial abolition of slavery and in its immediate aftermath. The study is divided into four main parts. The first section problematizes the sources and addresses some methodological considerations. For its part, the second portion interrogates the comparative historiography on abolition, while the third section conceptualizes the African intelligentsia abolitionists and their association with the Gold Coast Times, the main platform for the African intelligentsia's espousal of ideologies of antislavery. Divided into two parts, the final section examines the African intelligentsia's articulation of antislavery both before and after the inauguration of abolition by the colonial state.

To Wassa Fiase for Gold: Rethinking Colonial Rule, El Dorado, Antislavery, and Chieftaincy in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1874–1895

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 11-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gold Mining ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
El Dorado

In a recent book, El Dorado in West Africa, Raymond E. Dumett examines the history of gold-mining in Wassa Fiase in the Western Province of the Gold Coast during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Among other thematic preoccupations, Dumett argues that until the late 1890s the British colonial authorities did very little to encourage capitalist gold-mining in Wassa Fiase. Resurrecting the ghost of local crisis, he argues that the colonial intervention in Wassa Fiase was due to king Enimil Kwao's ineptitude, structural conflict inherent in chieftaincy, and problems of African rulers' territorial jurisdictions.Dumett also asserts that it was a forceful London-based antislavcry lobby and Governor George Strahan's tactlessness that drove the colonial state to intervene in Wassa Fiase. Although Britain was at the center stage of the unprecedented global commodification of gold in the late nineteenth century, Dumett evokes serendipity as the cause of the British colonial intervention in the gold-rich Wassa Fiase. Overall, his explication of the aims and processes of colonial rule in Wassa Fiase is couched in theses of an “unpredictable course” and “a government policy (more rather a nonpolicy) [sic] riddled with vacillation and half measures…”The first part of the present study reviews the literature, while the second section, based on new official sources and newspaper accounts, gives additional insights into Enimil Kwao's slave-dealing trial and his consequent exile to Lagos, hence reevaluates the objectives of the colonial state and the Colonial Office. The study complements the work of Francis Agbodeka and Paul Rosenblum, who have respectively argued that colonial rule in Wassa Fiase paved the way for capitalist gold-mining.

Locating the politics of a Sierra Leonean chiefdom

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fanthorpe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
Primary Means

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.

The Royal African Company of England's West African Correspondence, 1681-1699

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
General Terms ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

Colonial Modernity and Diffusion of Power: Identity and Community Formation among Mappilas of Malabar

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-119
Author(s):  
Shameer T.A
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
The Press ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
And Diffusion

Abstract This paper explores colonial modernity and the knowledge system’s role in constituting community formation among the Mappilas of Malabar. Colonial modernity, such as the introduction of printing, made this transformation more advanced and communitarian in structure. It also discusses colonialism as a force to reshape and bring socio-cultural changes in Malabar during the time. It argues that the existence of a clearly defined community is not a predetermined social fact; it looks at how the Mappilas were represented in an analytical category. In Malabar, the press and literature have played an essential role in framing community consciousness among Mappila society. Print media has brought a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. This paper will encompass the coming of the printing press and the moulding of community consciousness among the Mappilas of Malabar. It discusses the discursive and non-discursive practices of the colonial state for constructing various identities in Malabar.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disease Models ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Morbid Anatomy ◽  
Models Of Disease

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.

Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Rajbir Singh Judge
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

IV.—A Note on the Geology of the Littoral of the Gold Coast Colony between Elmina and Sekondi, West Coast of Africa

1911 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 265-267
Author(s):  
John Parkinson
Keyword(s):  
West Coast ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
Shore Line

The following note on the rocks of the shore-line of part of the Gold Coast Colony are a result of a short journey I undertook there in 1910. On that occasion I landed at Cape Coast Castle and travelled westward, staying successively at Elmina, Chama, and Sekondi.

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