British Business and the Gold Coast Colonial State on the Eve of Decolonization

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.

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

History in Africa ◽

10.1017/s0361541300003120 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 30 ◽

pp. 11-36 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

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.

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William Ofori Atta, Nnambi Azikiwe, J.B. Danquah and the “Grilling” of W.E.F. Ward of Achimota in 1935

History in Africa ◽

10.2307/3171885 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 21 ◽

pp. 171-189 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ray Jenkins†

Keyword(s):

Turning Point ◽

Past History ◽

Progress Report ◽

Gold Coast ◽

Colonial State ◽

Kwame Nkrumah ◽

Study And Teaching ◽

History Of ◽

British Colonial ◽

The Relationship

In December 1932 J. B. Danquah identified five stages or “ages” in the coastal political history, or the “national history,” of the Gold Coast. This paper may be described as a temporary departure from a preoccupation with “Ages” two, three, and four (1867-1930) and a tentative entry into the study of the fifth: Danquah's post-1930 “Age of Enlightenment.” What follows therefore is more of a shift in time than of space and focus—the area and arena of coastal politics in the colonial Gold Coast. If a new age did dawn in the 1930s, then for an influential core of today's Ghanaianist historians, it would seem that the turning point occurred in 1935. In that year the radical response of I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and Nnambi Azikiwe (“Zik”) to the Ethiopian crisis galvanized those forces that presaged the later emergence of Kwame Nkrumah, one of history's winners. In sharp contrast, J.B. Danquah, one of history's losers, represented the continuity of past conservatism during—and after—the 1930s.A bold attempt to confirm or contradict the 1935 “discontinuity thesis” is beyond the scope of this progress report on an act of trespass into the 1930s. The modest outcome of the latter is a snapshot of Accra-based politics. It tries to bring into focus several elements: the texture, style, and ‘reach’ of urban-based politics and politicians; the place of the study and teaching of history in anticolonial nationalist thought; and the extent to which rhetoric served as a mask for the pursuit of group or personal grievance and ambition. In short, this paper re-examines an old theme—the relationship between past history and present politics, albeit within the confines of a British colonial state.

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DECOLONIZATION, THE COLONIAL STATE, AND CHIEFTAINCY IN THE GOLD COAST

African Affairs ◽

10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097772 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 85 (338) ◽

pp. 75-106 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

RICHARD C. CROOK

Keyword(s):

Gold Coast ◽

Colonial State

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The Failure of European Mining Companies in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853700019897 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 22 (4) ◽

pp. 511-529 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Jim Silver

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Labour Force ◽

Gold Coast ◽

Primitive Accumulation ◽

Colonial State ◽

Mining Companies ◽

Turn Over ◽

Labour Power

European mining companies in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast failed because they were unable to solve the problem of ‘primitive accumulation’. Their failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation was attributable to a variety of factors, including financial manipulations by ‘share-pushers’ and ‘concession-mongers’, managerial and technological inadequacies, and the refusal of the colonial state to employ that degree of force which would have been necessary to overcome the resistance by Africans to the sale of their labour-power to the mines. The resistance mounted by African gold diggers was such that they not only refused to sell their labour-power to the mines, but also out-produced the European mining companies for most of the period under review, while those few Africans who did sell their labour-power to the mines formed a small and highly transient labour force which engaged in a largely individualistic form of resistance characterized by their consistent refusal to work at the pace demanded by management, and to turn over to management the entirety of their day's output. Thus not only did the resistance of Africans contribute to the failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation, and to the consequent weakness of the European mining companies, but conversely the weakness of the European mining companies contributed to the structuring of the mines'labour force, and to the forms of resistance waged by mineworkers.

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Producing a Received View of Gold Coast Elite Society? C.F. Hutchison's Pen Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities

History in Africa ◽

10.1353/hia.2006.0010 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 33 ◽

pp. 473-493

Author(s):

Michel R. Doortmont

Keyword(s):

Expert Knowledge ◽

Gold Coast ◽

Government Control ◽

Colonial State ◽

Political Interests ◽

Urban Elite ◽

Administrative Units ◽

Written Word ◽

Administrative Structures ◽

Colonial Government

In the early 1920s British West Africa saw a flurry of colonial activity, in which the formation of the colonial state—originally started in this region in the 1870s—was brought to a higher plane. The introduction of Indirect Rule in the newly-amalgamated Nigeria by governor Frederick Lugard called for a rethinking of colonial political and administrative structures. Where before, the relatively small administrative units were dominated by Europeans and western-educated Africans, now the position and role of “traditional” leaders was enhanced on all levels of colonial government. Control over the economy came more and more into the hands of European businesses and business conglomerates, at the expense of African firms. As a result, relations between African elites, who had vested economic and political interests in the colonial states, and the growing European colonial establishment hardened.In the case of the Gold Coast, the African urban coastal elite of merchants, educators, missionaries, and others faced an overwhelming onslaught of change and modernization in all parts of society. In many cases these changes undermined the elites' social status, as well as their political and economic position. One of the weapons in the battle between British colonial authorities and African urban elite society was the written word. Within this context, expert knowledge about African achievements, molded in the form of biographies, was the two-edged sword of African cultural nationalists of diverse plumage.

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