Colonial Ghana Research Articles

WRITING MEDICAL AUTHORITY: THE RISE OF LITERATE HEALERS IN GHANA, 1930–70

AbstractFor generations, healers sustained medical knowledge in African communities through oral communication. During the twentieth century, healers who learned to read and write used literacy as a vehicle for establishing medical authority. In particular, literate healers lobbied colonial and national governments for recognition, wrote medical guidebooks, advertised in African newspapers, and sent letters to other healers to organise their profession. This article examines the case of literate healers in colonial and postcolonial Ghana living near the twin port cities of Sekondi and Takoradi. There, an early organisation of ‘Scientific African Herbalists’ and later, the ‘Ghana Psychic and Traditional Healing Association,’ used literacy to reclaim the public's trust in their medical expertise. An examination of literacy shows historical avenues for professional formation and the continued quest for medical legitimacy and respectability.

Mining in Colonial Ghana: Extractive Capitalism and Its Social Benefits in Akyem Abuakwa under Nana Ofori Atta I

Historians and economists studying the third world regard mining as one of the major sectors in which the exploitation of resources by European enterprise took place, both with regard to labor use and the alienation of large areas of valuable land for what are now regarded as extremely small sums of money. Not only were these resources misused, but also—so the argument goes—gold rushes in Africa have become conduits through which surpluses generated in the continent are accumulated and transferred to Europe and other areas. In this regard, a gold rush in developing countries should hardly yield any sustainable development dividend, so long as foreign capital remains the dominant player. This article, however, tells a different story. It argues that gold mining in Akyem Abuakwa opened up and brought prosperity in the area. It challenges scholars who doubt the transformative, developmental, and poverty-alleviation roles of the mining industry in Ghana. By providing the basis for an understanding of the impact of mining on the traditional state, it contributes to the economic history of West Africa.

Mining and conflict in the Akyem Abuakwa Kingdom in the Eastern Region of Ghana, 1919–1938

This paper provides an overview of the conflict involving the Okyenhene Ofori Atta I and two of his subordinate chiefs, Kwaku Amoah of Asamankese and Odikro Kwame Kuma of Akwatia, in colonial Ghana. Popularly referred to in Ghanaian historiography as the “Asamankese Crisis”, this conflict was triggered by the discovery and subsequent exploitation of diamonds in the township of Akwatia. It is argued that the quest for resource control in the Akyem Abuakwa traditional area proved to be a major driver of social conflicts in Ghana during the period under study.

Status and Mimicry

Status and Mimicry: African Colonial Period Architecture in Coastal Ghana looks at Anomabo, a historically significant port, as a case study to examine hybrid African colonial period architecture in coastal Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast Colony. Between the 1870s and 1920s, numerous residences with façades inspired by British styles were built for and by Africans in Anomabo. Courtnay Micots examines these houses as reflections of a deliberately constructed hybrid style of architecture with exteriors appropriated from the Italianate and Queen Anne styles of nineteenth-century England and interior plans utilizing borrowed and local elements. This hybrid architecture in colonial Ghana reflects status, modernity, and resistance to British hegemony. Through close analysis of five residences and the potential motivations of their patrons, Micots shows these houses to be markers of selfhood and cultural belonging, local forms that were refashioned to counter the growing authority of the British administration.

African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History by Carmela Garritano (review)

Reviewed by: African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History by Carmela Garritano Joseph Oduro-Frimpong (bio) African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History by Carmela Garritano. Ohio University Press. 2013. $26.06 paper; $12.99 e-book. 246 pages. One of the key defining features of most Ghanaian video movies is that they are embedded—either explicitly or implicitly—in Pentecostal Christian aesthetics. Fittingly, a major research perspective, situated at the juncture of religion and film (and pioneered by Birgit Meyer), elucidates how the movies draw on shared Pentecostal beliefs and practices to mediate themes on occult practices.1 In African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, Garritano, motivated by her apt identification of the video movies’ “unrestrained and unruly heterogeneity” and their concomitant multiple narrative forms, examines a subject with which scholars have so far not explicitly engaged.2 This characteristic of the video movies as a “shifting and historically contingent discursive field marked by myriad ideologies, anxieties, discourses, and desires” enables the author to explore a historical narration of the Ghanaian movie industry through analyses of selected video movies.3 This [End Page 151] approach allows the author to show the connection between the economic circumstances that gave rise to the industry and the manifestation of these same conditions within the movies’ themes—centered on poverty, work, and gender—that the first generation of producers explored. Here, the author teases out the ways in which the movies normalize and refashion “dominant discourses of globalization, gender and sexuality, neoliberalism, and consumerism.”4 In the same breath, she also emphasizes the manner in which the innumerable number of movies made since the inception of the industry in the 1980s generates a certain ambivalence toward these same themes. The approach also enables the author to explore and elaborate on multiple visual texts and their “variations in aesthetics, narrative form, modes of spectator engagement [as well as] [their] anxieties, desires, subjectivities, and styles.”5 This discussion is in the introduction to the book. In this same section, Garritano presents the book’s thematic focus, offers a short historical overview of the initial negative critiques of video movies by African film and literature scholars, and addresses the global aspirations of the industry’s players when she adopts the term Ghallywood. Additionally, the introduction includes a succinct summary of the five chapters that make up the book. The introduction together with the conclusion provide the theoretical lens of contextual criticism that underpins this work and the historical approach that the author adopts to investigate the huge changes that have occurred in the Ghanaian video-movie industry. In “Mapping the Modern: The Gold Coast Film Unit and the Ghana Film Industry Corporation” (chapter 1), Garritano examines the gamut of the history of filmic practices in late colonial Ghana (Gold Coast) as well as early postcolonial independent Ghana, when the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) was established, until its collapse in the 1980s. Consistent with recent approaches in the social sciences that reject simple binaries, Garritano conceptualizes these two histories as “complex, overlapping disjunctive order[s]” that are characteristic of global media cultural practices.6 This fruitful way of framing the GFIC as not a mere supplanting of the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU) enables her to investigate how these units cinematically produced “modernity as articulated in the late modern colonial and the national films.”7 Through a close reading of Boy Kumasenu (Sean Graham, 1952; GCFU) and A Debut for Dede (Tom Reibero, 1992; GFIC), Garritano teases out how these two films, in their treatment of modernity, tradition, and nation, use stereotypical gender differences in articulating their respective perspectives around these themes. In “Work, Women, and Worldly Wealth” (chapter 2), Garritano explores the early history of the Ghanaian video-movie industry from 1987 to 1992. This period witnessed the country’s implementation of a World Bank loan package that required the privatization and liberalization of the nation’s economy and media, respectively. Thus, Garritano shows how Ghana, much as in the cultural-political terrain of Togo during the same [End Page 152] period, experienced “a time in which the money [had] dried up, the state [had] pulled back from...

The Politics of Chieftaincy Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana, 1920–1950

Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, The Politics of Chieftaincy Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana, 1920–1950. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014. 241 + xiv pages. Gã history is a veritable conundrum, shaped by centuries-old socio-economic and cultural processes, and laden with

The Politics of Chieftaincy Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana, 1920–1950 by Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch

The Politics of Chieftaincy Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana, 1920–1950 by Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch

Thinking through the sociality of art objects

A central theme weaving through this paper is the sociality of art objects in an essentially evolving, increasingly dynamic global art world. It examines a number of theoretical trends in anthropology concerning art production, perception, and circulation. Art objects are considered live social beings whose aesthetic value, significance, and emotional efficacy are subject to change in the course of their mobility through time and space. This paper looks at how artworks are incorporated into discourses of empowerment and advocacy, set against the emergence, growth, and intensification of networks of social relations between institutions and individuals, in a particular society and cross-culturally. It is argued that people's engagement with artworks is reinforced by the social parameters of transactional artistic fields of visual representation. Previous knowledge about the meaning and status of an artwork induces particular interpretations and influences the aesthetic experience. Case studies from the colonial Gold Coast and contemporary Ghana discussed here demonstrate that artistic subjectivity is entangled with aesthetic and other culture-specific ideologies within a sensorial sphere of knowledge and experience. This discussion highlights the theoretical implications of a processual relativist view of the performative life of the art object for the anthropological study of art.

Law as Redemption: A Historical Comparison of the Ways Marginalized People Use Courts

This essay reflects on how Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013), a study of second‐century Roman Egypt, contributes to the study of law and on how legal culture in ancient Egypt relates to law and legal cultures in other times and places. From the perspective of social history, this essay focuses on the connections between the victims of violence who seek redress in local courts in Egypt and more contemporary work on the legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana and the United States. This comparison reveals how law becomes a vehicle for the marginalized to repair and reconstruct their personhood.

Using child labor to save souls: the Basel Mission in colonial Ghana, 1855–1900

The notion that Europeans had a duty to civilize “slaves, sinners and savages” was used as a justification for nineteenth-century colonialism and evangelization. Wherever European missionaries traveled, they carried the message that slavery and slave trading were morally abhorrent. Despite deep antislavery sentiments in Britain, the abolition of slavery in colonial Ghana did not end the forced labor of children in the colony. The process and consequences of abolition in the Caribbean and in India shaped the steps that were taken when slavery was outlawed in colonial Ghana. Following the Emancipation Ordinance, the use of children as slaves was particularly common. The Basel Mission, in particular, often relied on the labor of unpaid children. These children were largely students at the mission schools who split their time between general education, Bible study, and unpaid labor. The conflict between the missionaries' philosophical opposition to slavery and their need to support the continued growth of the Mission through trade, led to a complicated relationship between the missionaries and African children. Despite its opposition to slavery, the Basel Mission was often directly involved in mediating the exploitation of child labor through established African institutions such as slavery, pawnship, and debt bondage.

Motor Transportation, Trade Unionism, and the Culture of Work in Colonial Ghana

AbstractThe emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s highlights the wide range of strategies for social and economic organization available to workers in the Gold Coast. Particularly among workers who operated outside the conventional categories of the colonial economy, unions provided only one of many models for labor organization. This article argues that self-employed drivers appropriated unions and an international discourse of labor organization in the early twentieth century in order to best represent their interests to the colonial government. However, their understanding of the function and organization of unions reflected a much broader repertoire of social and economic organizing practices. Rather than representing any exceptional form of labor organization, drivers highlight the circulation of multiple ideas surrounding labor organization in the early decades of the twentieth century, which informed the ways in which Africans engaged in the wage labor economy and implicitly challenged British colonial assumptions about labor, authority, and control.

Measuring African development: past and present. Introduction to the Special Issue

The chief economist for the World Bank's Africa region, Shanta Devarajan, delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article “Africa's Statistical Tragedy”. Is there a “statistical tragedy” unfolding in Africa now? If so then examining the roots of the problem of provision of statistics in poor economies is certainly of great importance. This Special Issue on measuring African development in the past and in the present draws on the historical experience of colonial French West Africa, Ghana, Sudan, Mauritania and Tanzania and the more contemporary experiences of Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The authors each reflect on the changing ways statistics represent African economies and how they are used to govern them.

An uneven statistical topography: the political economy of household budget surveys in late colonial Ghana, 1951–1957

This paper reconstructs the history of household budget surveys in late colonial Ghana. It is argued that the household budgets institutionalised an “uneven statistical topography”. This unevenness comprises a spatial and a conceptual dimension. The former refers to the choice of the sampling locations, closely mirroring the uneven will of the state to exercise control over different parts of the country. The latter refers to the fact that household budget surveys incorporated different cognitive tools and served different aims depending on what the government envisaged as its political and economic agenda in the surveyed areas.

“Christianity, Commerce and Civilization”: Child Labor and the Basel Mission in Colonial Ghana, 1855–1914

AbstractFocusing specifically on colonial Ghana between 1855 and 1914, this article aims to situate the history of child labor in colonial Africa within the larger historiography of African labor history. Relying primarily on the records of the Basel Mission, this article complicates the narrative of labor history by studying how the mission acquired and sustained the labor of children and youth at various mission stations as part of the greater “missionary project.” This article argues that childhood in colonial Ghana can be viewed as a site of contestation between the competing interests of patriarchy, race, and colonial and missionary authority, in which the labor of children was used to achieve a larger degree of control and influence in the region.

Strangers and authorities in the gold coast: Immigration control in colonial Ghana, 1900—1957

Until the imposition of colonial rule on Africa, movements of people from one place to another were not restricted by national or regional borders, visa systems, or national security fears. The modern idea of immigration is related to the development of nation-states and nationality laws, which often distinguish between citizens and immigrants. Citizenship of a nation-stale confers on nationals an inalienable right of residence, employment and free movement in that state, but the residence, employment and movement of immigrants are subject to conditions set by immigration regulations. Since it was the colonial authorities that introduced immigration regulations into Ghana, any attempt to gain a good understanding of the history of immigration control in the country must start from the colonial times. Therefore, using both primary and secondary documents, this study examines the measures which the colonial authorities devised to control the entry of immigrants into Ghana as well as their stay in and exit from the country, and assesses the relative effectiveness of their implementation. It argues that the colonial authorities had been generally liberal towards immigrants in Ghana. The study concludes that the manner in which immigration control had been handled in the colonial era was partly accountable for the frequent influx of many 'illegal' migrants into Ghana after independence.

Teaching the Research in Akan Gender History

��� In my advanced undergraduate course on colonial Ghana, I set students the following essay question: “Did cash-cropping and colonialism conspire to reduce the autonomy and status of Akan women?” In order to answer this question, students must develop a working understanding of: 1. the spread of cash-cropping in the Gold Coast and Asante, and the particular inputs of land and labor that are required for the production of cocoa; 2. Akan social and political organisation, including the concepts of matrilinearity and rights-in-persons, and the role of stools and lineages in determining access to usufruct on different types of land; and 3. the nature of indirect rule and the potential for male chiefs and elders to increase the control of senior men over women and junior men. Those students who can see the connections between this essay and other segments of the course (particularly those which address missionary Christianity and formal schooling), tend to produce more sophisticated answers. Across the range of marks, however, students almost invariably conclude that the answer to the question is “yes,” and this is consistent with the position of most of the authors who feature on my reading list (e.g. Jean Allman, Victoria Tashjian,

Changing the World: Sean Graham

Sean Graham was born Hans Friedrich Eisler in 1920 in Germany. His parents were from well-established Jewish families. His mother died soon after he was born and he was brought up by his maternal aunt and uncle in Hamburg. The family left Germany with the rise of anti-Semitism, bringing Sean and his sister to England. He was educated at Aldenham and Bryanston public schools and studied law at Cambridge, although he aspired to be a poet and preferred attending English literature lectures. During the Second World War, Graham was promoted to the rank of colonel beyond his years in order to interrogate high-ranking German prisoners of war. Graham forged a brief but significant career in postwar documentary which was defined by a decisive encounter with John Grierson. Graham had worked for Paul Rotha and Gaumont-British Instructional before meeting Grierson, who was then Head of the Films Division of the Central Office of Information. Upon meeting Grierson, he was sent to colonial Ghana in 1948 to lead the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU) in Accra, based at the Information Services Department and headed by Victor Lillie-Costello with his deputy James Moxon. When Graham first returned from Ghana to live in the UK in 1957, he continued to work in film, and spent some time in post-independence Tunisia. Finding it difficult to get sufficient film work, Graham became a writer. He has published a number of novels, his most recent being The French Odalisque (2009). We interviewed Sean Graham in 2010 for the ‘Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire’ project, an online academic and archival resource and catalogue where some of the films Graham directed for the GCFU can be viewed. The website also contains brief

Encounters in quest of Christian womanhood. The Basel mission in pre- and early colonial Ghana. By Ulrike Sill. (Studies in Christian Mission, 39.) Pp. xvii+420. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2010. €130. 978 90 04 18888 4; 0924 9389

Encounters in quest of Christian womanhood. The Basel mission in pre- and early colonial Ghana. By Ulrike Sill. (Studies in Christian Mission, 39.) Pp. xvii+420. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2010. €130. 978 90 04 18888 4; 0924 9389 - Volume 64 Issue 3

Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood: The Basel Mission in Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana. By Ulrike Sill. Studies in Christian Mission 39. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010. xvii + 420 pp. $185.00 cloth.

Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood: The Basel Mission in Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana. By Ulrike Sill. Studies in Christian Mission 39. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010. xvii + 420 pp. $185.00 cloth.

Controlling deviant wives: Marriage and justice in the early Ghanaian novel

This article looks at two early Ghanaian novels, A. Native’s Marita: or the Folly of Love (serialized in 1886–88) and R.E. Obeng’s Eighteenpence (1943), which portray conjugal life in colonial Ghana during a time of legislative and judicial transition. They deal with ways in which both the colonial administration and traditional authorities attempted to regulate the contested arena of marriage. The novels create the impression that such external controls freed married women from traditional restraints and turned them into deviant wives who asserted their own interests, overturned gender norms and undermined their husbands’ authority in private and in public. We argue that far from liberating women, the external control of marital affairs left women bereft of traditional support systems and therefore dependent on, and submissive to, men. We conclude that an underlying male angst is responsible for the representation of wives in both novels, as well as for the texts’ silencing of resistant women.