Abstract
SummaryThis article argues that during the formative years of the colonial state in Ghana, European employers established new collaborative mechanisms with African intermediaries for the purpose of expanding the modern mining sector. They were forced to do so on account of severe labour-market limitations, resulting primarily from the slow death of slavery and debt bondage. These intermediaries, or “headmen”, were engaged because of their apparent affluence and authority in their home villages, from which they recruited mineworkers. However, allegiances between them and managers in the Tarkwa gold mines considerably slowed the pace towards free labour. Indeed, a system in which managers reinforced economic coercion and repressive relationships of social dependency between Africans, allocating African labour contractors fixed positions of power, resulted from the institutionalization of purportedly traditional processes of labour recruitment into the modern market.
Highlights
During the ‘‘industrialization’’ of gold mining in colonial Ghana at the turn of the nineteenth century, after two decades of a vexing labour shortage and one disastrous attempt at the large-scale import of indentured labourers from elsewhere in the British Empire, mine managers around Tarkwa felt compelled to pull in migrant labourers from various enclaves of West Africa
In the setting of the formative colonial state, Europeans relied on African employees for a wide range of essential duties
As African colonial employees in the ‘‘industrialized’’ mining sector, headmen initially emerged as labour recruiters and contractors in the Tarkwa region when European mine managers and officials, pressurized by labour shortages during a boom period, were unable to bring large numbers of young men into the labour market with wage incentives
Summary
Migration was not a novel feature of the Ghanaian economy. Rather, the story of the twentieth-century mining industry was one of concentrated mass migration. Before a gang could depart, it was expected that the labour recruiter would provide each man with an advance payment These funds were ‘‘primarily for the purpose of paying his debts (not for supporting his family) as otherwise his creditors, and natives have creditors, would not allow leave’’, remarked one European official.[40] Settling debts with local creditors granted large groups of indebted young men the mobility to pursue work for cash beyond the confinement of their home villages in order to improve their social status, among a broad spectrum of ambitions. In Ghana, some headmen were just as conniving, managing to lengthen their men’s service by continuously and strategically raising fines.[63] In one especially bad case, a particular headman refused payment to his entire gang after several months of hard labour.[64] These strategies of tying workers for (relatively) short terms were pervasive throughout the recruitment process during the first years of the twentieth century. Why did mine managers accept the infusion of ‘‘traditional’’ authority into the labour process?
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