Christian Encounters

2021 ◽  
pp. 172-190
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Religious Transformation ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Funerary Customs ◽  
Ways Of Life ◽  
Christian Message

This chapter discusses how death loomed over the nineteenth-century encounter between Christianity and the peoples of the Gold Coast. It highlights the evangelists who sought to overturn established values and ways of life in order to challenge the very idea of mortality itself: by abandoning idolatry and embracing the salvation offered by Christ. If African religious practice was resolutely this-worldly, aimed at maintaining the beneficence of deities and ancestors in order to defer death, Christianity was distinctly otherworldly, seeking to wash away sin so that the repentant might enjoy a blissful life beyond the grave. The chapter explores how the Akan and their neighbours regarded death, and explains the centrality of the doctrine of eschatology to the Christian message. Finally, the chapter assesses the further expansion of the Christian faith into Asante and the acceleration of conversion in the era of colonial rule. New perceptions of life after death, new funerary customs, and new ways of dying were crucial components of this religious transformation.

Colonial rule and the ‘legal factor’ in Ghana and Lesotho

Africa ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Gocking
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Judicial System ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Legal Factor ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
British Colonies

This article compares and contrasts the development of the legal systems of two British colonies that occuped almost opposite ends of the colonial judicial continuum: what in colonial times were known as the Gold Coast and Basutoland. Both became British colonies in the late nineteenth century, but followed considerably different paths to that status. In the case of the Gold Coast it followed centuries of contact between Europeans and the coastal peoples in this area of West Africa. In the case of Basutoland incorporation into the European world was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and far more rapid. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, as indirect rule became the officially accepted wisdom as to how colonial peoples should be ruled, administrators in both colonies sought to make the chiefly order an integral part of the colony's administration and award its chiefs judicial responsibilities. In the Gold Coast, however, chiefly courts remained in competition with a highly developed British-style Supreme Court. In Basutoland there were basically only chiefly courts until late in the colonial period, which applied Sesotho customary law that was written down as the Laws of Lerotholi in 1903. The two-tier judicial system of the Gold Coast allowed far more contestation and was far more flexible and responsive to social changes than was the case in Basutoland. Incremental changes over time meant that the judicial system evolved far more smoothly than in Basutoland. When in the latter colony changes did not come ‘from above’ in the 1940s, there was a serious outbreak of ‘medicine murders’ that many observers felt was directly related to the chiefs losing their judicial role. Also, the colony's high court ruled against the validity of the Laws of Lerotholi in the controversial ‘Regency case’. Apart from being a return to comparative analyses of the impact of colonial rule on former African colonies, much in vogue in the 1960s, this study is an attempt to modify the emphasis on ‘cleavage’ and the ‘coercive’ that has characterised historians' approach to the study of colonial law.

“A Smattering of Education” and Petitions as Sources: A Study of African Slaveholders' Responses to Abolition in the Gold Coast Colony, 1874–1875

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 39-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.O. Akurang-Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Colonial Policies

By the mid-nineteenth century African societies had begun to use petitions as an instrument of agitation for reforms in nascent colonial policies. This was especially true of those societies located in the coastal enclaves where precolonial European and diasporic African influences were markedly profound. Compared with other African responses to European colonial rule, anti-colonial petitions are less spectacular. This explains, perhaps-deservingly so, why petitions or memorials, which also took the form of deputations, as a historical genre have been marginalized in the polemical studies of African responses to colonial rule. Such studies have included militant responses in the form of war, riots, social banditry, millennarianism, arson, strikes, avoidance of conscription, desertion, and mass migration. Other forms of African response, devoid of militancy or overly tumultuous actions, have been aptly described by James C. Scott as the Weapons of the Weak. These have included foot-dragging, the use of songs, and the protest politics of the indigenous African press.This study deals with how slaveholders in the Gold Coast responded to British abolition of slavery and pawnship in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. Specifically, I examine how the African intelligentsia in the Gold Coast Colony used quasi-legal means, essentially petitions, to oppose abolition and emancipation of slaves and pawns. This opposition was undertaken on behalf of slave/pawnholders, including the indigenous rulers of the coast, especially the Fante region. Additionally, the study draws attention to Africans' use of petitions as an important historical source that can benefit the study of various aspects of colonial rule and facets of African responses.

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.

PAWNSHIP, DEBT, AND ‘FREEDOM’ IN ATLANTIC AFRICA DURING THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE: A REASSESSMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Congo River

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

From Hospitality to Hostility: Ibadan and Strangers, 1830–1904

1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Open Door Policy ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.

Colonialism and the Decline of the Traditional Metal Industry of the Igbo, Nigeria

Itinerario ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
O.N. Njoku
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Metal Industry ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Agricultural Equipment ◽  
High Level

At the close of the nineteenth century, that is on the eve of colonial rule in Igboland, Igbo metal industry was flourishing. Production had attained a high level in the range and the quality of output. The output included agricultural equipment, traps and guns as well as title insignia and ornaments, mosdy made of copper and brass. The demand for die smiths' products were widespread and seemingly insatiable. To serve the need of dieir widely dispersed customers and patrons, Igbo smiths from Abiriba, Agulu Amokwe, Agulu Umana, Awka, and Nkwere undertook regular tours of parts of soudi-eastern Nigeria and even beyond – up to die Niger-Benue confluence area; past die Edo country to Ondo Yorubaland; and to the Bamenda district of die Cameroons. The superiority of Igbo metalworking led, in some of these places, to the demise of the local industry.

Debt, Trust, and Reputation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schwecke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Trust And Reputation ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 32

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Involvement

With its five thematic sections covering genres from cantorial to classical to klezmer, this pioneering multi-disciplinary volume presents rich coverage of the work of musicians of Jewish origin in the Polish lands. It opens with the musical consequences of developments in Jewish religious practice: the spread of hasidism in the eighteenth century meant that popular melodies replaced traditional cantorial music, while the greater acculturation of Jews in the nineteenth century brought with it synagogue choirs. Jewish involvement in popular culture included performances for the wider public, Yiddish songs and the Yiddish theatre, and contributions of many different sorts in the interwar years. Chapters on the classical music scene cover Jewish musical institutions, organizations, and education; individual composers and musicians; and a consideration of music and Jewish national identity. One section is devoted to the Holocaust as reflected in Jewish music, and the final section deals with the afterlife of Jewish musical creativity in Poland, particularly the resurgence of interest in klezmer music. The chapters do not attempt to define what may well be undefinable—what “Jewish music” is. Rather, they provide an original and much-needed exploration of the activities and creativity of “musicians of the Jewish faith.“

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