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‘I WANT TO FOLLOW KWAKU’: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND HOME BY UNFREE CHILDREN IN THE GOLD COAST, c. 1941*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2015
Abstract
Scholars of children and migration have recently turned their attention to how children mediate home and belonging, especially through contradictory or challenging circumstances. For unfree children in Africa, challenging circumstances of sale or debt-bondage pose particular difficulties. Despite what historians of slavery have noted of their adaptability for survival, questions remain about how the unfree child constructs self, home, and belonging when transferred over long distances, and when age and size precludes running away as a strategy for survival or return. This article focuses on the transcript involving the testimonies of three young, unfree girls transacted in 1930 and redeemed through a district court of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast in 1941. Though their testimonies are provided within the arena of a male, colonial district court, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo reveal how their treatment, duration of bondage, and geographical and cultural distance shaped their constructions of self, home, and belonging.
- Type
- Children, Slavery, and the Colonial State
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015
Footnotes
*
Research in Ghana for this article was made possible by a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, and a Queen's University Graduate Dean's Doctoral Field Travel Grant, Huntley MacDonald Sinclair Travelling Scholarship, and Timothy C. Franks Travel Grant. The staff at the Tamale archives provided valuable research assistance, as did Ato Quayson and Samuel Ntewusu. I also would like to thank Robert Shenton, Jeff Grischow, Marie Rodet, Elodie Razy, Joey Power, Janice Boddy, and Marieme Lo for their critiques of this article at various stages. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and suggestions. Author's email: [email protected]
References
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5 The village would be located in present-day southeastern Burkina Faso and Bawku, in the upper northeast region of Ghana.
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17 The focus on particular ‘markers’ of treatment based on physical abuse and/or cruelty as evidence of slavery dates at least to the 1870s. See T. R. Getz and L. Clarke, ‘Abina Mansah's 1876 court testimony’, in T. R Getz and L. Clarke, Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford, 2012), 83–93.
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20 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 158.
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30 Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 422.
31 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, C. C. R. Amory Asst. District Commissioner, Bawku to Chief Commissioner, Northern Territories, Tamale.
32 G. Austin, ‘Human pawning in Asante, 1820–1950: markets and coercion, gender and cocoa’, 188.
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34 C. Coe, ‘Domestic violence and child circulation in southeastern Gold Coast, 1905–1928’, in E. Burrill, R. Roberts, and E. Thornberry (eds.), Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Athens, OH, 2010), 60.
35 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 87.
36 Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 411.
37 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 91.
38 NAGT 8/2/204, Domestic Slavery, ‘Memo on the Vestiges of Slavery in the Gold Coast’, J. C. de Graft Johnson, Asst. Secretary for Native Affairs, Accra, 18 Oct. 1927.
39 Ibid.
40 The defendant, Kwaku Anin, was an example of such a wealthy person. He was a kola trader and the kola trade was tied to commercial circuits of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades, and with the expansion of Islam in the nineteenth century, demand for kola nuts grew. This was especially the case in the Sokoto Caliphate where kola was an alternative to substances prohibited by Islam, such as alcohol. Along the interior trade routes, kola traders like Kwaku Anin could engage in small-scale trade. For Anin, the town of Bawku provided an especially convenient base and it was through his commercial connections in Bawku that Anin explained his acquisition of Atawa.
41 B. L. Shadle, ‘Girl Cases’: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 (Portsmouth, NH, 2006), xxii.
42 Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 419.
43 Coe, ‘Domestic violence’, 65.
44 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 91. See also Igbafe, P. A., ‘Slavery and emancipation in Benin, 1897–1945’, The Journal of African History, 16:3 (1975), 416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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46 Getz notes that in post-proclamation times, those caught owning or trading slaves – particularly young female slaves from the northern interior – commonly claimed the girls had been purchased in the ‘traditional way’ to be a wife. At the time, the ploy was an effective defense. Getz, ‘Slaves and masters in the postproclamation Gold Coast’, 115.
47 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 91.
48 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 160.
49 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, C. C. R. Amory Asst. District Commissioner, Bawku to Chief Commissioner, Northern Territories, Tamale.
50 NAGA 57/5/1, Kusasi Informal Diary, 5 Apr. 1929.
51 Adding to this image of lawlessness was District Commissioner Cardinall's report in 1927 that the Upper East, Upper West, and Northern regions of Ghana continued to act as reservoirs for slave raiding and dealing, with states such as Mossi resembling ‘islands of anarchy’. Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana, 55.
52 Morton, ‘Small change: children in the nineteenth-century east African slave trade’, 55.
53 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave dealing 1937–48, ‘Pawning of Persons as Security for Debt’, Colonial Secretary's Office, Accra, 24 Aug. 1948.
54 Ibid.
55 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Pawning of Persons as Security for Debt’, Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Office Administering the Government of Gold Coast, 16 July 1948.
56 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 M. Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (London, 1993), 36.
60 See Burrill, , ‘“Wives of circumstance”: gender and slave emancipation in late nineteenth-century Senegal’, Slavery & Abolition, 29:1 (2008), 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women, 4. Moreover, as Getz points out, for slaves of northern origin, and particularly those captured as children, little advantage was perceived in returning to kin groups that may have voluntarily sold them into slavery; their assimilated status could be deemed preferable to the risks of return. Getz, ‘Slaves and masters in the post-proclamation Gold Coast’, 124.
62 J. Allman and V. Tashjian, ‘I Will Not Eat Stone’: A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Portsmouth, NH, 2000), 46–50. Further, P. Haenger argues that such marriages ‘covered over the divergences of unequal social backgrounds’. See P. Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa, J. J. Shaffer and P. Lovejoy (eds.), trans. C. Handford (Basle, 2000), 3.
63 Allman and Tashijian, ‘I Will Not Eat Stone’, 73.
64 NAGA 57/5/ Informal Diary, Bawku, Apr.–July, 1928. Wright references incidences of women being captured after raids in East-Central Africa and being ‘tied in pairs to logs’. Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa, 36. This strongly indicates the presence of slavery or slave-like conditions for women in early twentieth-century Bawku. The term ‘logging’ refers to being imprisoned in a log for a period of time, or chained to one. Getz and Clarke, Abina and the Important Men, 43.
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68 Interestingly, when asked whether he agreed to the use of translators in the court, Kwaku Anin attempted to block the court's use of a Busanga translator.
69 Campbell, Miers, and Miller (eds.), ‘Editors' Introduction’, Children in Slavery through the Ages, 1.
70 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
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72 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
73 Her widowhood reminds us of what Kenda Mutongi has said of widows in Maragoli, Kenya, who in the 1940s used ideas of masculinity to their advantage to gain sympathy. K. Mutongi, ‘Worries of the heart: widowed mothers, daughters, and masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940–60’, in A. Cornwall (ed.), Readings in Gender in Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 71.
74 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
75 Ibid. The fact that the Magistrate invoked ‘human sacrifice’ in his concluding remarks shows the extent to which his pre-existing perceptions about the slave trade influenced his decision.
76 Ibid.
77 See S. Hawkins, ‘“The woman in question”: marriage and identity in the colonial courts of Northern Ghana, 1907–1954’, in J. Allman, S. Geiger, and N. Musisi (eds.), Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 118; and R. Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH, 2005).
78 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 169.
79 De Boeck and Honwana, ‘Introduction: children and youth in Africa: agency, identity & place’, 4.
80 B. Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH, 2005), 7.
81 Ibid.
82 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
83 Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women, 15.
84 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 169.
85 See A. Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Oxford, 2005); Burton, A., ‘Raw youth, school- leavers, and the emergence of structural unemployment in late-colonial Tanganyika’, The Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 363–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. L. Hodgson and S. A. McCurdy (eds.), ‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2001); L. White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); Thomas, L., ‘The modern girl and racial respectability in 1930s South Africa’, The Journal of African History, 47:3 (2006), 461–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allman, J., ‘Rounding up spinsters: gender chaos and unmarried women in colonial Asante’, The Journal of African History, 37:2 (1996), 195–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Waller, R., ‘Rebellious youth in colonial Africa’, The Journal of African History, 47:1 (2006), 77–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
86 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
87 Kibadu, especially, would have been cause for concern as her desire to remain with Kwaku as his wife reflects a certain level of maturity and independence. Bradford notes how the Prophetess Nongqawuse's independence contributed to her being rendered a ‘young girl’ or ‘orphan girl’ in need of protection. Bradford, ‘Women, gender and colonialism’, 366.
88 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
89 J. Cammaert, ‘Undesirable Practices’: Women, Children, and the Politics of the Body in Northern Ghana, 1930–1972 (Lincoln, forthcoming 2016).
90 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 169.
91 See Getz and Clarke, Abina and the Important Men, 120; Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 168–9.
92 K. Olwig, ‘Children's places of belonging in immigrant families of Caribbean background’, in K. Olwig and E. Gullov (eds.), Children's Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York, 2003), 231.
93 Grier, Invisible Hands, 3.
94 De Boeck and Honwana, ‘Introduction: children and youth in Africa: agency, identity & place’, 3.