scholarly journals Exhuming and highlighting the nearly forgotten Gold Coast intelligentsia: The life and times of Prince Kwamin Atta Amonoo V

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
James Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Architectural Design ◽  
First World War ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The First World War ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Class And Status ◽  
First World

The name K. A. Amonoo sits in the Roll of Honour in the entrance hall of Queen’s College, Taunton, Somerset, England together with the names of other former pupils who served in the First World War. In recent times, focus on K. A. Amonoo has been on his palatial residence, which he built in Anomabo, a coastal town in Ghana, in colonial Gold Coast, as Micots (2015 and 2017) have sought to emphasize in terms of the architectural design of his residence. Therefore, what this paper seeks to do is to bring to light a historically significant narrative of who Amonoo was, as a case study to examine and foreground the contributions of some of the nearly forgotten African intelligentsia of coastal Ghana. Through close analysis, the paper also places a central gaze on his activism within colonial Gold Coast and Calabar in colonial Nigeria as subtle moves to counter the growing authority of the British administration. Utilizing a set of key biographical prompts, the paper reflects on thematic issues such as class and status, modernity, and resistance to British colonial hegemony.

The International Institute of African Languages and Cultures: A memory of its Beginnings

Africa ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. E. F. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
First World War ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
International Institute ◽  
World War ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Inaugural Meeting ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
The Church

I went out to the Gold Coast as a teacher on the staff of the newly established Achimota College in October 1924, and a few weeks before I came back for my first leave, in April 1926, there came to the college a distinguished visitor, Major Hanns Vischer (later Sir Harms), the educational adviser to the Colonial Office in London. It was Major Vischer who told me about the project to establish an International African Institute.Vischer was a remarkable and delightful character. I was told that he was of Swedish descent, which was why he spelt his name Harms instead of in the German form Hans. He had served in the British army through the First World War, but before the war he had served in Nigeria as a missionary for the Church Missionary Society. He spoke fluent Hausa, and (I was told) some other languages. He was certainly a skilled linguist, for he seemed equally at home in English, French and German. He spoke English with a slight foreign accent, which made it easy to believe in his Scandinavian origin; it was not a German accent. He stayed at Achimota for a week or so, and went on from the Gold Coast to visit Sierra Leone. He joined my homeward-bound steamer at Freetown; he remembered having met me at Accra, and told me about the projected institute. Whoever may have been responsible for starting the scheme, it was Vischer who was the driving force in organising its inaugural meeting.

‘The day of Compromise is past’: The Oxford Free Churches and ‘Passive Resistance’ to the 1902 Education Act

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 455-470
Author(s):  
Martin Wellings
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Passive Resistance ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Education Act ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

Balfour's Education Act of 1902, abolishing directly elected school boards and making rate aid available to denominational schools, provoked a storm of opposition from the Free Churches in England and Wales. One response was to refuse to pay the portion of the rate designated for the support of denominational schools; this led to Free Church representatives appearing in court and facing distraint and even imprisonment for non-payment. This article offers a case study of ‘passive resistance’ in Oxford, where opposition to the act was co-ordinated by a Citizen's Education League and the Free Church Council. It sets out the case made by the Free Churches, explores the personnel and denominational identities of the resisters, and assesses the impact of the campaign between 1903 and the First World War.

Amputated Men, Colonial Bureaucracy, and Masculinity in Post–World War I Colonial Nigeria

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 620-643
Author(s):  
George N Njung
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
First World War ◽  
African History ◽  
African Continent ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
First World

Abstract Since the 1980s, several aspects of masculinity in relation to the First World War, including the image of the citizen-soldier, have been well studied. Other aspects, however, such as the experience of combat and its impact on peacetime masculinities lag well behind. Though wartime and postwar experiences in Africa provide a repertoire for gender and masculinity research, the continent has been neglected in this realm of studies. British colonial Nigeria contributed tens of thousands of combat men to the war with thousands becoming disabled and facing challenges to their masculine identities, yet there is no serious research on this topic for Nigeria. This paper contributes to this long-neglected aspect of African history. Known in colonial archival documents only as “amputated men,” war-disabled Nigerian men struggled to navigate colonial bureaucracy in order to obtain artificial limbs and redeem what they considered their lost manhood. Employing data collected from the Nigerian and British archives, the article’s objectives are twofold: it analyzes the diminishment of the masculine identities of war-disabled men in Nigeria following the First World War, and it explains how such diminishment was accentuated by an inefficiently structured British colonial bureaucracy, paired with British colonial racism. The article contributes to scholarship on WWI, disability studies, gender studies, and colonial studies, through examination of the protracted legacies of the global conflict on the African continent.

The Posthumous Lives of Thomas Muir

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pentland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the ways in which Thomas Muir was used by political activists, historians and writers in both Great Britain and Australia in the centuries following his death. It analyses Muir's posthumous lives as a case study of how, when and why revolutionary figures of the 1790s have become politically usable. It discusses three important contexts that help explain both revived interest in Muir and changed interpretations of his political significance: one was provided by two global conflicts, the First World War and the ‘age of revolutions’ between 1790 and 1848; the other was provided by the success of the Labour movement in the West of Scotland. The chapter shows how the transnational dimension of Muir's life has been at least partially recovered and his legacy shaped and deployed by an emerging Australian nationalism from the end of the nineteenth century.

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