More Than an Intermediary: James Bannerman and Colonial Space-Making on the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast

Abstract

Scholars have emphasized the importance and autonomy of African intermediaries in European imperial projects. However, intermediaries have not been studied as founders of (proto) colonial administrations. Between 1840 and 1874, the inchoate British establishment on the Gold Coast was largely a project of Anglo-African merchants, rooted in their political visions of “progress.” Merchants like James Bannerman provided infrastructure, institutions, and material form to the administration and intended it as a force for development. Ultimately, the British administration exercised its hegemony through Euro-African infrastructures, spaces, and ideas. Consequently, merchants like Bannerman undermined their local networks, rulers, and dependents who opposed British domination.

Introduction

On November 28, 1857, Benjamin Pine, a British official at James Fort, Accra on the Gold Coast, penned a letter to the Rt. Hon. Labouchere, a Member of Parliament in London. In the letter, Pine pleaded for a pension of “not less than £300 per Annum” for a prominent but ailing and bankrupt Anglo-Gã merchant, James Samuel Bannerman of Accra. ¹ In making his case, Pine listed several of Bannerman’s “long unrequited services” of about thirty years in “assisting the Government.” ² These services included massive infrastructural and logistical projects. On the eve of the Gold Coast–Asante war (Nsamankow) of 1824, Pine recalled that then thirty-three-year-old Bannerman (see Figure 1), “garrisoned the Forts with 130 men paid, clothed, and equipped at his own expense” at a cost of £5,000. According to Pine, Bannerman was only given a paltry compensation of £500 “many years later” as a “cost of compromise” instead of the actual amount he had stated. A sympathetic Pine had to reiterate that he had no doubt Bannerman’s financial claims were accurate. ³

In other projects, Bannerman and his brother-in-law and fellow Anglo-Gã, John Hansen, erected a £200 “public wharf” and “handed [it] over to the Government.” ⁴ The wharf was a major infrastructural support for shipping services on which European, Euro-African, Gã, and Fante merchants in Accra depended. Besides the wharf, Bannerman “put a new roof upon, and generally repaired James Fort, at the cost to himself of £150.” In responding to the poor nature of roads, Bannerman built “a carriage Road at his own expense from this town [James Town] to Christiansborg [Osu].” This facility, according to Pine “was still in existence,” in the 1850s and 1860s “and [was] of great service” to the British establishment. ⁵ Besides providing infrastructure, Bannerman was also a deep political and legal thinker and was one of two merchants who originated the idea of the Gold Coast Legislative Council in 1850, the colonial prototype of Ghana’s Parliament. Bannerman had also served as interim Governor of the British Forts and Settlements on the Gold Coast from October 1850 to December 1851 and intermittently as Lieutenant Governor until the late 1850s when he retired (Wolfson 1950:412). This makes Bannerman the only British colonial governor of known African ancestry. ⁶ Bannerman and the Gold Coast’s Anglo-African merchants self-identified as “mulatto” in ways that overlapped with their Gã or Fante identities (von Hesse 2023:271). ⁷

In navigating his in-between role as a Gold Coast-born power broker and London loyalist, Bannerman provided blueprints for extending and legally ratifying the extension of British rule beyond the Forts and Settlements. By examining the life and times of Bannerman, this article tells the story of a nineteenth-century Gold Coast which de-centers European hegemony while emphasizing how local interests sustained and shaped the British administration for decades. Such an approach sheds light on different political possibilities, emphasizing Gold Coast African agency while presenting a non-teleological perspective in the transition to formal British rule in 1874. Put simply, this article analyzes the British presence on the Gold Coast not from the hegemon that they became in parts of the Gold Coast after 1874. Rather, I discuss how the mostly Euro-African merchants not only empowered the British administration but sought to bend the establishment to serve their visions of a modern society. Ultimately, local Anglo-African merchants like Bannerman imagined that the establishment would deliver the fruits of modern British infrastructural development to the Gold Coast. However, these expectations were largely premised on the mercantile elites’ precarious roles as intermediaries between the British and indigenous Gold Coast rulers and peoples.

Despite Pine’s mention of the term “Government,” British jurisdiction existed only within the walls of the forts and castles. Government, in this sense, referred to a string of British forts and properties interspersed with Danish and Dutch trading establishments that stretched across the littoral. However, in the decades after Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, British administrators were increasingly dragged into local politics. Consequently, Fante conflicts with Asante pushed the former into greater alliance with the British administration by the mid-nineteenth century. These alliances led to the British administration’s exercise of some de facto political influence in parts of the Gold Coast. British officials settled disputes, provided legal services, and encouraged trade, and all these were largely done with the support of local rulers and merchants, the most powerful of whom were members of the Cape Coast Castle administration (see Kimble 1963; van Hulle 2020:1–2).

Even though Britain had no official colonial policy beyond their forts and claimed no legal sovereignty over the “Native Sovereigns” and polities of the Gold Coast, British and Anglo-African merchants effectively established a government which by mid-century enjoyed the tacit support of the Oguaahen (the king of Cape Coast), Nana Egyir, alias George Fynn Aggrey. ⁸ Though Egyir may not have shared Bannerman’s specific vision of British rule, both well-travelled men were impressed by Britain’s massive infrastructure and desired to replicate that form of “progress” on the Gold Coast through a Cape Coast Castle-backed system of taxation. Nonetheless, from about 1850 to 1874, the extent of British political influence remained a subject of confusion, contestation, negotiation, and conflict (see Kimble 1963:168–261). In fact, the existence of communities of biracial or Anglo-African merchants like Bannerman who considered themselves British subjects and were recognized as such by the Colonial Office in London would further complicate the Gold Coast polities’ relations with the inchoate administration.

Although Bannerman lacked parliamentary approval in London, he advised Secretary of State for the Colonies Earl Grey on the best strategy to legally extend British sovereignty to the “immense districts of country [beyond the Forts and Settlements], where territorial jurisdiction is not claimed.” ⁹ This legal hurdle, Bannerman explained, “could be overcome by an act of Parliament similar to that which conferred his [i.e., the “English Governor” on the Gold Coast] powers upon the Judicial Assessor.” ¹⁰ By 1843, the British establishment at Cape Coast Castle with the support of local Fante rulers and with subsequent parliamentary approval had established two different courts—a magistracy for British subjects and a Judicial Assessor’s court only answerable to the “Native Sovereigns.” ¹¹ With this strategy, Bannerman hoped to spread the fruits of British trade, “civilization,” protection and to “bind them [i.e. the local rulers] to the Government” through salaries. The fact that Bannerman and other Anglo-African merchants’ fortunes and livelihoods were largely connected to the vicissitudes of global British imperialism, trade, and industry may explain their calls for direct British rule. ¹²

In fact, British-based commercial firms, and commission houses such as Forster & Smith, had the most influence among merchants on the Gold Coast. These British firms supplied independent Gold Coast merchants with manufactures, received primary products in return and charged their local correspondents a percentage commission on the shipping of goods and on the sale of produce. In 1826, Bannerman and Hansen exported corn and oxen to Madeira, chartering a ship with the collaboration of two British merchants at Cape Coast (Kaplow 1977:318–19). But for the most part merchants like Bannerman and Hansen exported palm oil, ivory, and gold dust to Britain and this business depended on their links to firms such as Forster & Smith and W.B. Hutton & Sons for advance credits on imported (manufactured) merchandise, which they sold to local traders on the Gold Coast and in Asante. With these connections to imperial commercial networks, it is not surprising that Bannerman and his oldest son Samuel (d. 1856) as well as Hansen, Henry Barnes, and Joseph Smith, who formed a core of the British administration, all favored direct British rule and the provision of infrastructure through resident merchants. ¹³ These ideas were in line with Anglo-African merchants’ commercial and political interests.

By leasing houses such as the Bannerman residence in Winneba as a courthouse, Fortgate House (owned by Catherine Swanzy of Cape Coast) as the residence of the governor, and several other homes rented out as hospitals and schools, Anglo-African merchants provided some of the earliest forms of colonial infrastructure on the Gold Coast and in West Africa. ¹⁴ In fact, the British administration depended on Anglo-African merchants rather than their own limited resources for their accommodation and infrastructure needs. If social space as Henri Lefebvre explained, entails the mathematical and philosophical notion of mental and physical spaces as defined by such features as built forms, infrastructure as well as some semblance of predictable legal institutions and socio-political action, then Anglo-Africans were co-architects of British colonial space making. ¹⁵ While British authority was limited to the forts, the founding of legal and political institutions such as the Legislative Council, the Judicial Assessor’s court as well as the magistracy were undoubtedly colonial in the sense that these structures provided the institutional basis for the future Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate in 1874. In this sense, it is not far-fetched to state that these mostly Anglo-African merchants were effective colonial space-makers. In line with their vested political and economic interests, these merchants called for direct British imperial intervention to ensure civilization or greater public infrastructure for the peoples of the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, London had no official plans of annexing the Gold Coast, and British policy, as sociologist Kofi Asante (2018:67) elegantly explained, was “punctuated with many moments of official hesitation.” But despite this official hesitation, British and Gold Coast mercantile interests necessitated the creation of a legal and commercial framework for the purposes of trade and increasingly the enforcement of British authority. By 1852, these processes culminated in Bannerman sanctioning the passing of an unpopular poll tax ordinance that was intended to generate revenue to provide public infrastructure.

Most crucially, the infrastructure of colonial space-making—legal institutions, schools, hospitals, and public housing—on the Gold Coast prior to the late nineteenth century was largely an African elite project. Local merchants not only provided material form to the early British administration but largely shaped its trajectories. By re-interpreting well-known colonial archival sources kept at the British National Archives and the Public Records and Archives Administration Department in Accra, it is possible to center Bannerman and Anglo-Africans in the making of the British administration. In addition, unutilized Gã language sources on Gã political discussions and rebellion prior to and in the immediate aftermath of the British bombardment of Osu brings fresh perspectives to the conflict. These Gã sources are verbatim speeches and “palavers” recorded by the German-born Basel Missionary, the Reverend Johannes Zimmerman (1825–75) as well as a separate contemporaneous visual record of the destruction of Osu. ¹⁶ These sources directly implicate Bannerman in the British bombardment of Osu. Such new perspectives move away from the standard but often less detailed discussions of the bombardment which recount the incident as though it was simply an alien British offensive (see Kimble 1963:179; Parker 2000:35, 59, 29). ¹⁷ Emphasizing how Bannerman sanctioned the bombardment reinforces this essay’s central argument that he was, more than a mere intermediary, an ambitious Anglo-African who nurtured his own political ambitions, even if these goals ultimately ended in failure.

Gold Coast Merchants as Intermediaries

In the last quarter century, Africanist scholars have not only emphasized the incoherence of European colonial regimes and overseas trading posts but also problematized the colonized/colonizer binary (Cooper 2005; Ochonu 2014; Lawrance et al. 2006; Janzen 2022; Greiner 2022). This line of thinking is further reinforced by a growing body of literature on the role of African intermediaries and how they used their knowledge, autonomy, and experiences to help run colonial administrations. Increasingly, these studies illuminate our understanding of how (proto) colonial systems cannot be simply reduced to European imperialism without any discussion of autonomous local political processes. In this reasoning, African intermediaries are often discussed as not simply servants of empire whose autonomous actions are circumscribed by the ultimate objectives of European imperialism.

By using the case of the nineteenth-century Gold Coast, this essay further complicates, diversifies, and periodizes the role of intermediaries as not just autonomous actors or lower-level officials, as was largely the case in twentieth-century colonial Africa. In the nineteenth century, Gold Coast intermediaries were co-architects in the founding of the British administration. The Gold Coast case suggests that the influences, autonomy, and courses of action of intermediaries differed markedly based on time, geography, and political context. Although many Gold Coast merchants of the mid-nineteenth century could be described as intermediaries, powerful merchants like Bannerman do not necessarily fit this category because they were not lower-level officials. While Bannerman, like other local elites such as Hansen who was commandant of James Fort, interacted with and negotiated their roles as political and economic brokers with the British on one hand and the various Gold Coast polities, rulers, and peoples on the other, less powerful merchants treaded precariously. Politically, less powerful merchants—unlike Bannerman who was virtually a potentate—depended on the local Gold Coast rulers and their subjects. Should Bannerman be transposed to a twentieth-century African colonial state of the kind that dominates the historical literature (e.g., Lawrance et al. 2006), he would be the equivalent of a governor and not a “native clerk” or “district commissioner.” Nonetheless, as governors, administrators, and commandants and as people who leased their stone houses and provided infrastructure for the nascent British administration, the Gold Coast merchant elite were not simply colonial intermediaries who carried out the administration’s tasks. These merchants were in effect among the founders of the British administration on the Gold Coast.

On the surface, Bannerman’s infrastructural and financial contributions to the British establishment on the Gold Coast may seem wasteful, but it must be understood within his desire to transform a passive British administration into an instrument of local development. While Bannerman’s massive decades-long expenditures eventually contributed to his bankruptcy in the twilight of his life, his spending also speaks to his ambitions as a power broker within the British establishment. Secondly, and most importantly, reports of Bannerman’s contributions to public infrastructure and housing for British officials defy conventional accounts of the hegemonic designs of fledgling or inchoate colonial establishments in African history. Although Africanist scholarship on architectural history and imperial building or infrastructural projects tend to focus on how colonial regimes used the built environment to reinforce its power and hegemony (e.g., Myers 2003; Murray 2011; Bissell 2011; Bickford-Smith 2016; Greiner 2022), the Gold Coast case shows how the British establishment depended more on African-owned properties and political strategies for their infrastructural needs and institutional survival.

In examining nineteenth-century Africa and the Gold Coast prior to the Berlin Conference, historians have famously labelled this era as a period of “informal empire” and “free trade imperialism” and metropolitan aloofness towards the acquisition of colonial territories. In reaction, Gallagher and Robinson (1953:4, 11) have argued that mid-Victorian metropolitan aloofness did not translate into British anti-imperialism and aversion to territorial acquisition. While there is some evidential basis for this claim in the archives, it is important to go beyond “face value” readings of the archival record. As historian Larry Yarak (1997:73) has rightly argued, such face value readings tend to obscure the real limitations of European and particularly British political and judicial authority, even at the beginning of “formal empire” on the Gold Coast in 1874 and elsewhere in Africa. In that sense, the period between ca. 1840 to 1874, birthed important colonial institutions, and spaces, some of which would eventually be incorporated into the founding of the future Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate. It is the contention of this article that these institutions and spaces were largely the product of Gold Coast merchants working in tandem with their resident British colleagues.

In effect, Anglo-African merchants at this point did not necessarily inhabit a separate sphere from other British officers as eventually became typical of colonial Africa. Rather, the British exercised their limited authority through Gold Coast merchants’ infrastructures, spaces, and ideas. Among the Anglo-African merchants of the Gold Coast no one epitomized local political and economic ambitions more than Bannerman. He not only was a foremost provider of infrastructure but was also invested in ensuring stable political alliances with the “Native Sovereigns.” Anglo-African merchants like Bannerman saw these political alliances with the British as beneficial processes that would result in what he termed progress or more specifically public infrastructure, modern legal institutions, and trade.

While conventional histories of the early British administration on the Gold Coast credit George Maclean and Governor Hill for introducing British legal principles and modern institutions, Bannerman, and other older and more experienced Anglo-Africans such as Hansen and Henry Barnes are often written out of or not acknowledged in these processes (see Metcalfe 1962; Shumway 2015; van Hulle 2020). Historian Tom McCaskie (1999:688) rightly explained that British imperialism on the Gold Coast evolved “from one that asked to one that demanded and at last commanded.” But the asking, demanding, and commanding of the British was also a product of Anglo-African ambitions and initiatives. A careful (re)reading of archival sources reveals that Anglo-Africans not only served as expert advisors to British expatriate administrators but also largely determined the course and viability of the establishment.

Even though Bannerman permanently lived in Accra, eighty miles to the east of Cape Coast, he was indispensable to the Council of Merchants which governed Cape Coast Castle. To facilitate his “occasional voyages to and from Cape Coast Castle,” in the 1820s and 1830s, Bannerman, according to British travel writer James Holman, owned a “very fine canoe” which was “fifty feet in length” with “seventeen paddles.” Bannerman, Holman wrote, “had raised” the canoe “two feet in the fore part (where the passengers were seated on chairs), expressly to protect him from the sea” (Holman 1834:260). Properties like these not only communicated the power and prestige of Bannerman, “the Englishman,” but also provided him with political leverage as an influential Anglo-African official in the British administration. Though a British subject, Bannerman was neither ethnically English nor a white man. He was an Accra-born son of a Scots officer, Col. Henry Sartorius Bannerman, and Naa Abia Lãŋkai, a Gã woman with paternal connections to the Lãŋte Dzãŋ We¹⁸ (clan) in the Asɛrɛ akutso (quarter) of Kinkã (Dutch Accra) and with maternal affiliations to the Alata akutso in Osu. ¹⁹ The fact that his white British contemporaries could refer to him as an Englishman or a “whiteman” is testament to how the blurry nature of the color line prior to the last four decades of the nineteenth century could provide space for prominent Anglo-African merchants to wield enormous power (see Huntley 1850:128–29; Kaplow 1977:322; McCarthy 1983:59).

In the case of the Gold Coast, British imperialism was largely deployed and courted by sections of the Gold Coast mercantile elite as a tool for economic and political transformation in line with Anglo-African ambitions and visions. To execute their political and economic visions, Bannerman and other Gold Coast merchants became important brokers and intermediaries between the “Native sovereign” rulers of the Gold Coast and the British. While local merchants’ intermediary roles in the emerging British administration resonated with their visions of progress, it also jeopardized their positions as patrons for their extended African families and allies. In as much as merchants desired greater British protection and the provision of public infrastructure to support merchants’ trade, they ultimately had to balance such interests with the imperatives and political visions of their local Gã and Fante allies and dependents. Consequently, as James Bannerman and the Anglo-African mercantile community pressed on in their partnership with the British administration, they would often remind the “Cape Coast Castle Government” that the Gold Coast rulers were “sovereign.” ²⁰

In fact, more than two decades prior to the formal British proclamation of the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate in 1874, merchants like Bannerman had envisioned that the provision of European-style infrastructure backed by taxation as well as legal institutions was the key to African “progress” and economic and political security. ²¹ For Bannerman, the resistance of sections of the Gã to the British administration was a threat to his own political ambitions. In all his labors, Bannerman had hoped to harness the fruits of modern British infrastructural development for the benefits of the peoples of the Gold Coast. During his tenure as lieutenant governor at Christiansborg Castle in 1851, Bannerman in a letter to Secretary of State Earl Grey summed up his vision of “progress,” for the “sovereign” African states adjacent to the British Forts and Settlements:

As one deeply interested in the welfare of the Country, I grieve that I can point out no way of Africa helping herself—She must still look to the fostering hand of England, until greater progress has been made. This progress is rapidly going on and the time I believe is not far distant when she may be prepared for very great modifications of the present system. This can best be hastened by affording instruction to the young and justice to all. ²²

Bannerman and by extension, the Gold Coast’s Anglo-African elite participated in a discourse of “progress” and “civilization” that was popular in Britain and in the broader English-speaking world among apologists of British rule and Christian missionization. In fact, African American and Caribbean settlers and intellectuals of Liberia and Sierra Leone, such as US-born Episcopalian clergyman, Alexander Crummell not only saw themselves as harbingers of “Anglo-Saxondom” but also civilization and progress, and therefore were duty bound to lift Africa out of her “degradation.” ²³ Similarly, Earl Grey—with whom Bannerman corresponded extensively—believed that the imposition of a poll tax for the development of infrastructure would further the course of civilization. ²⁴ All these views not only sound very similar to but also resonated with Bannerman’s own ideas. Given the fact that Bannerman was biracial, well-travelled, and liberally educated in England, it is almost certainly the case that he and other Anglo-African merchants such as Hansen and Henry Barnes drew on and contributed to Victorian discourses about the redeeming and “civilizing” potential of British rule. These notions of progress and civilization may also explain these merchants’ vested interests in literally building the British administration on the Gold Coast. And yet Bannerman knew full well that the British administration had neither the legal sovereignty nor financial muscle to provide colonial infrastructure on the Gold Coast. ²⁵ It was through these political beliefs and ideas about progress that Bannerman and Oguaahen Egyir supported the Poll Tax Ordinance of 1852, which cost “one shilling per head for each man, Woman and child” supposedly under British protection. ²⁶

The poll tax not only became unpopular, but eventually overstretched the intermediary role of the Gold Coast merchants, resulting in local revolts. Ultimately, the merchant elites’ willingness to support British authority put them in a serious bind when it came to underwriting policies that engendered popular resistance to the administration. Eventually, a frustrated Bannerman, after several rounds of negotiation, would sanction the infamous destruction of Osu—what became known to posterity as the “British bombardment of Christiansborg.” ²⁷ Ironically, Bannerman, who had been advocating for progress, did not hesitate to bombard Osu and other Gã-speaking towns on the southeastern Gold Coast for residents’ refusal to pay the poll tax and resisting the Cape Coast Castle Government.

“I shall fire Cannons at them.”

In 1850, the Danes sold their “possessions” on the southeastern Gold Coast to the British for £10,000 without the express consent of their Gã, Dãŋme, and Aŋlɔ-Ewe allies. On March 6, 1850, Edward Carstensen, the last Danish governor at Christiansborg Castle, in an emotional public farewell ceremony exited the castle after formally handing over the premises and all Danish properties to Bannerman. Bannerman occupied the former Danish citadel as Civil Commandant and Lieutenant Governor of the British Forts and Settlements on the Gold Coast, while Carstensen temporarily moved into the nearby redoubt known as Prøvesteen and awaited a ship to Copenhagen. ²⁸ This development brought the entire southeastern Gold Coast under the Cape Coast Castle government’s sphere of influence. But the strong anticolonial lobby that emerged in the British Parliament in London in the 1850s and the limited finances of the Cape Coast Castle government, worked together to limit the administration’s effectiveness. London was simply not willing to bear the high cost of running the British administration headquartered at Cape Coast. Metropolitan aloofness coupled with the desire of the mostly Anglo-African merchants for modern infrastructure led to an agreement for the Poll Tax Ordinance of 1852 to be promulgated. ²⁹

For Bannerman and the British establishment, the Danes’ departure provided an opportunity to extend Britain’s influence and the promises of progress and infrastructure over the former Danish spheres. In the thinking of Bannerman and other Anglo-African merchants, the larger populace, including enslaved persons, poor commoners, and households stood to benefit from this arrangement. But these assumptions were wrong. Bannerman’s presence in Osu did not translate into British authority on the southeastern Gold Coast. Various constituents within the Gã polity challenged assumed British authority almost immediately after the Danes vacated their forts. In 1851, the newly appointed Governor Winniett reasoned that relocating the “Head Quarters of the Cape Coast Castle government” to Accra would “greatly increase our physical power, and the presence of the Executive would induce to better order and discipline, and possibly correct such abuses as have lately occurred at [A]ccra].” Winniett was concerned that “seventeen months” since occupying the “Former Danish Forts,” the British administration had “undertaken” not “less than three Expeditions” to enforce their authority on the southeastern Gold Coast. ³⁰ However, Winniett quickly revised his plans of relocating the headquarters of the British administration to Accra and Osu due to the high financial costs involved and the lack of “infrastructure” and “public schools” in that area compared to Cape Coast, “which [was] far advanced.” ³¹

Apart from the pragmatic Danish-descended merchant elites of Osu, who like the Anglo-Africans, had depended on British trade for decades, most rulers and their subjects on the southeastern Gold Coast challenged British authority. To achieve progress, Bannerman strongly believed that the British administration must be run by long-resident merchants like himself rather than officials appointed by the Colonial Office in London who may not understand the customs and laws of the Gold Coast (Asante 2018:63–92). This move could have solidified Bannerman’s own political position and likely that of his sons on the Gold Coast. ³² Bannerman was a man of strong convictions. His determination for the development of modern infrastructure and progress crucially informed his support for the British administration and the poll tax.

While the Gã protested the British presence, the tempo of this resistance would increase with the passage of the Poll Tax Ordinance in 1852. Within a year of the passage of the poll tax, the people of Osu, Labadi, Tɛshi, Tɛmã, and Kpoŋ had foreseen the debilitating effects of the tax. By January 16, 1853, these towns further to the east of Accra had begun an open rebellion against the administration. In Osu, the rebellion erupted at a time when there was a political power vacuum in the town. The Osu Mãŋtsɛ (mãŋtsɛ = “town father”/ruler) and Osu Alata Mãŋtsɛ had died. ³³ In hindsight, the Gã-Danish historian Carl Christian Reindorf, believed that the late Osu Mãŋtsɛ could have discouraged the rebellion and averted the “rush folly” of the oblempɔŋmɛi (sing. oblempɔŋ; “grandees”). The principal Osu grandees and officeholders including the Otsiami or spokesperson of the late Osu Mãŋtsɛ, Badu Asɔŋkɔ, and the Klɔte priest (wulɔmɔ) Nɔi Osekãŋ closely collaborated with the Labadi Mãŋtsɛ Akɔnɔ and his Mãŋkralo (second highest office holder in a town), Tɔgbɔ Tɛko Asɛrɛ, and the Tɛshi Mãŋtsɛ (see Reindorf 1895:336).

By 1853, the poll tax scheme had failed, and the promises of infrastructure were never realized as the revenue was largely used to pay British and Euro-African administrators and bureaucrats rather than enhancing infrastructure and the security of trade in the interior. Besides these problems, the insurrectionists had rightly cited financial impropriety and mismanagement on the part of both British and Euro-African tax collectors. Moreover, paying one shilling per head ensured that larger and/or poorer households could not afford to pay and many reportedly sold or pawned their children and dependents to service the poll tax (Reindorf 1895:331). The tax weakened and destabilized the “house,” which was a physical representation of lineages and kin groups. In reaction to these difficulties, Badu Asɔŋkɔ resolved in January 1854 that “we’re not serving” (Gã: “Wɔ sɔmɔɔ”) the “Cape Coast Castle government” (Gã: “Gua amralo”) or paying the poll tax (Zimmermann 1972:187–93). The Gã statement, “wɔ sɔmɔɔ” initially used in the various anti-British and anti-poll tax durbars that the Gã held prior to the incident, underscored a repudiation of any form of dependence and political and economic reciprocity on the British administration. ³⁴ After all, from a Gold Coast African perspective, social dependency and relations of reciprocity were meant to empower and not to disempower. This fact is better captured in the popular Gã and Akan adage, “if you don’t have a master, a beast will devour you.” ³⁵ But one need not serve a dangerous or a less powerful master, particularly one whose actions or inactions threatened the security of livelihoods and households. Given the controversies and difficulties, many Gã even questioned the wisdom in paying taxes that would be used in providing amenities for Fante towns.

Apart from a handful of Danish-descended merchants in Osu, Bannerman’s vision of progress and the merchants’ support for the British administration did not resonate with the peoples of the southeastern Gold Coast. The most prominent among these Gã-Danish merchants included Julius Briandt (alias Nii Yul), Wilhelm August Lutterodt, Niels Holm, Johan Emanuel Richter, Joseph Fleischer, Hans Svanekiær, and Lebrecht Hesse who occupied an even more precarious position. Despite local agitations and the threats of capital punishment, these eminent Osu merchants served as Justices of the Peace and poll tax collectors in the new British regime. Clearly, these Osu merchants understood that they had a lot to lose, and they tried to mediate between the agitated Gã on one hand and Bannerman and the British administration on the other.

Despite his lofty ideals of progress, Bannerman felt betrayed by these Gã leaders whose loyalty he counted on. After all, for decades, Bannerman had contributed immensely to the military protection of eastern district communities—supposedly in the Danish spheres of influence—during and in the aftermath of the Gold Coast–Asante wars of the 1820s. ³⁶ On January 14, 1854, Julius Briandt, the leader of the Osu merchants, whose property and commercial interests spanned the entire eastern districts of the Gold Coast, had failed in convincing the leadership of Osu, Labadi, Tɛshi, Tɛmã, and Kpoŋ to negotiate with the British administration. Briandt had recounted to the leaders of these Gã towns not only Bannerman’s frustration but the fact that he felt the rulers of these towns “conspired against” him (Gã: “Amɛ pãm eyinɔ”) by mobilizing military forces at Kpeshinãa, a sacred lagoon located at Labadi about five miles to the east of Christiansborg Castle. For this reason, Bannerman had threatened through Briandt in Gã, that “if they come here [Christiansborg] and try to do anything like this, I shall fire cannons at them” (Zimmermann 1972:190–91). After these series of meetings, Briandt and other Gã-Danish merchants in Osu had conveyed several petitions for clemency to James Bannerman and Governor Major J. Stephen Hill (Zimmermann 1972:190–91). However, repeated harassments of British and local Euro-African officials by the Osu “rebels” and their Tɛshi and Labadi allies exacerbated the conflict. On August 27, 1854, about 4,000 Gã men scaled the walls of Christiansborg Castle. Elsewhere, angry Gã mobs from Osu attacked a group of unarmed British soldiers. ³⁷ As the conflict intensified, the Osu people imposed a blockade on Christiansborg Castle, “preventing any provisions being sent in the Fortress,” except on the pain of “an ancient” form of execution by drowning in the sea. ³⁸ In the heat of the agitation, an armed militia from Osu threatened to attack a more sympathetic James Town and James Fort, which was about three miles to the east. ³⁹

These Gã measures must have provoked and humiliated not only the British administration but Bannerman as well. True to Bannerman’s earlier specific threats, Osu, Tɛshi, and Labadi were bombarded between September 12 and 13, 1854, with reinforcements from the man-o’-war, HMS Scourge, which had arrived from Freetown via Cape Coast (Reindorf 1895:340). In Osu, the combined fire from the guns of Christiansborg Castle and the Scourge destroyed the town and “dislodged the rebels.” In the aftermath of the bombardment, the towns were “reduced to a heap of Ruins,” with an estimated “four hundred dead and wounded.” In the Christiansborg Castle garrison, four British soldiers were reportedly killed and fifteen wounded. ⁴⁰ In assessing the destruction in Osu, Reindorf recounted that “[t]heir whole property, consisting of several beautiful [stone] buildings, twenty-two of which were supposed to be worth from £400 to £3000, money, jewels, goods, furniture, besides their influence and glory, and their influential men and people were lost in the bargain, and themselves dispersed in the country!” ⁴¹ Defeated and dejected, the rebel towns “submitted to the authority of the Government,” and provided “two hostages” each to the Christiansborg Castle garrison as securities for “their further obedience and good” behavior. ⁴²

The so-called rebels must have struck fear into the British administration. Five months after the incident, the Illustrated London News issue of February 10, 1855, published an article on the incident together with a sketch depicting the naval and artillery bombardment of Osu’s heavily built urban landscape (see Figure 2). The slightly inaccurate drawing depicts Christiansborg Castle (seen on the right) on an almost flat land, rather than on a cliff and the redoubt known as Prøvesteen virtually on the beach.

Figure 1. James Samuel Bannerman (May 6, 1790–April 23,1858). Source: Public Records and Archives Administration Department, Accra.

Figure 2. HMS Scourge bombards Osu (“Danish Accra”). Source: Illustrated London News, February 10, 1855, p. 124.

As lieutenant governor and commandant of Accra and Christiansborg, Bannerman was directly responsible for the bombardment. The bombardment of Gã towns to the east of Accra was not only apocalyptic but also destroyed economies and livelihoods. Ironically, Bannerman who almost certainly ordered the attack, had family ties in Osu. His mother, Naa Abia Laŋkai’s maternal family hailed from the Alata akutso of Osu. Incidentally, Badu Asɔŋkɔ, who had led the revolt in Osu due to that town’s power vacuum, also hailed from the Alata akutso. Asɔŋkɔ and Bannerman knew each other well. Bannerman’s sister-in-law, Asante princess Maanua had married Asɔŋkɔ’s maternal relative, an eminent Osu merchant, Henrich Richter (1785–1849) (see Justesen 2003:129). During the bombardment, one of the Richter family’s stone houses was destroyed. The late Richter’s son, Johan Emanuel Richter had petitioned Governor Hill for compensation. ⁴³ However, in a report, a Christiansborg Castle garrison officer, Captain H. Bird, stated that the Richter family’s fortified “double House,” which “overlooked Christiansborg Castle,” served as a bulwark for “armed men” who fired rockets at “the Batteries of the Fort and from which” a number of the British troops “were killed and wounded.” ⁴⁴ The “relatives of Mr. [Johan] Richter,” according to Bird, had “more than once refused to obey Summonses issued against them from the court in the Fort [Christiansborg].” In Bird’s judgment, the “occupants of that House” were “by no means faithful to our flag.” ⁴⁵ Based on these reports, the British government refused to compensate the brothers Johan and Robert Wilhelm Richter for the destruction of their properties. Given Badu Asɔŋkɔ’s anti-British resistance, he would have put immense pressure on Johan Richter to take a stand against the British. ⁴⁶ However, despite the threats from his extended kinsmen, Richter like many other Gã-Danish merchants managed to pay their poll tax and yet the British administration whom they worked for could not guarantee the safety of their properties.

Unfortunately, archival evidence does not permit us to know what Bannerman thought of the destruction of the properties of people he knew intimately and others whom he was even related to by blood and/or marriage. While Bannerman did not specifically comment on the destruction of property in Osu and elsewhere, he bitterly complained in a letter in 1855 to the Acting Colonial Secretary in London, about how the “Chiefs and Elders” of Akuapem, Akyem, Krɔbɔ, and Accra had “made a solemn compact not to pay the tax again.” ⁴⁷ It appears to me that the letter was a justification for the bombardment in the wake of victims’ calls for compensation. Given Bannerman’s strong political and economic influence in Osu and the then Danish spheres of influence, Asɔŋkɔ would have perhaps regarded him as a usurper or must have been jealous of his influence. It is also very likely they were bitter political or commercial rivals prior to the exit of the Danes and the eventual poll tax controversies. Whatever it was, we can never be sure of some of Bannerman’s ulterior motives for sanctioning the destruction of Osu. But through Julius Briandt’s testimonies, we know that Bannerman felt betrayed by people whose support he felt entitled to. One could argue that this sense of entitlement must have stemmed from Bannerman’s military protection of the communities of the eastern districts during and in the aftermath of the Gold Coast–Asante wars of 1824 and 1826. ⁴⁸

While Bannerman was somewhat tight-lipped about the bombardment, two of his sons, Charles and James, their maternal cousin, Robert Wilhelm Richter, and several others, “representing the mercantile interests of [James Town] Accra” called for an end to the violence. At the same time, these James Town-based merchants shifted all the blame for the bloodshed on the people of Osu, Tɛshi, and Labadi. ⁴⁹ It is likely the older Bannerman shared this view. Otherwise, how could he have justified the bombardment of towns that stood in the way of progress and civilization? After all, less than a year earlier, and for similar reasons, Bannerman had suggested to Governor Stephen Hill the subjugation of the Aŋlɔ-Ewe country with an “auxiliary force of natives” with the “military that can be spared” from the various British garrisons dotted along the Gold Coast. ⁵⁰ While the bombardment signaled British power, their use of brute force also points to their inability to consolidate their colonial presence on the Gold Coast.

In addition to the Richter family, the houses of other Gã-Danish merchants such as Thomas Svanekiær, Wilhelm and Philip Lutterodt were also destroyed despite their paying the tax and they therefore demanded compensation. However, it is important to understand the Lutterodts and some Gã-Danish merchants contextually. Some of these families may have played a double game or at least concealed their support for the British. Bird’s intelligence revealed that the Lutterodts, “and others not named here did urge on the Rebels, against the British Government.” ⁵¹ In the aftermath of the bombardment, not only were the Osu merchants frustrated with the British administration but the entire Gold Coast mercantile fraternity as well.

Post-Bombardment Blues

The period between 1840 and 1874 were tumultuous and uncertain years for the Gold Coast and the British administration. The series of military crises, bombardments, financial difficulties, and London’s skepticism about its string of costly forts and castles along the Gold Coast threatened the stability of the British administration (Parker 2000:35). These challenges, coupled with the lack of infrastructure—housing for colonial officials, jails, and courthouses—meant that the emerging administration was far from secure. Despite ongoing conflicts and disagreements about the extent of the British administration’s influence and jurisdiction, local ideas and spaces were crucial in shaping and defining these political arrangements. In order to survive, the British administration on the Gold Coast had to rely on African and Euro-African merchants’ properties to support their infrastructure needs. Ironically, many of these merchants and families had demanded infrastructure from the British administration through the poll tax. This era was also one of opportunity for many merchants who benefited from the real estate boom.

By the mid-nineteenth century, there was clearly a high demand for leases in Gold Coast towns. In 1851, then Lieutenant Governor James Bannerman complained about the “high rate of house rent in the Country, which even for moderate accommodation, is not less than £60 per annum, for which it would be impossible to serve in this Climate.” ⁵² Despite his complaints about rent, Bannerman and his family, like many other Gold Coast merchant families, benefited from this property boom. In 1856, Connor discovered that a recently deceased magistrate of Winneba, Samuel Bannerman had rented out commercial “stores” within his much “commodious house” as a “Court House and Gaol.” Connor thought the stores were “very small for the Rent” of £40 per year since 1851. Nonetheless Connor was impressed by the “good and imposing appearance” of the much bigger house, which was the “only one in the Town habitable by a European Gentleman.”

The Bannerman residence in Winneba was at the time of Connor’s visit going by the name “Government house,” (not to be confused with Government House in Cape Coast)—an appropriate designation, the Acting Governor thought, for a town with “no remains of the Former English fort, ⁵³ except perhaps an odd Gun or so.” However, Bannerman who had originally built the house for his late son, was not willing to extend the government’s lease over “any lengthened period as it [now] belonged to his Grandson.” ⁵⁴ Despite his old age, waning health, and financial problems, “Old Bannerman” as his grandchildren, in-laws, and friends affectionately called him, could still provide some infrastructure for the Cape Coast Castle Government.

Conclusion

This article has emphasized the role of leading Gold Coast merchants, particularly Bannerman as a founder of the British administration prior to the formal proclamation of the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate in 1874. Historians of Africa have for decades recognized the important role of African intermediaries in shaping European diplomatic or colonial projects in Africa. In such discussions, African intermediaries are often cast as autonomous and powerful and yet subordinates of empire. However, in the case of the Gold Coast, which had an active European presence even before the nineteenth century, powerful Anglo-African merchants were more than mere intermediaries.

In contributing their money, munitions, infrastructure, and knowledge to co-found the British administration, merchants like Bannerman, Hansen, and Barnes sought to implement their own political visions of a modern and cosmopolitan society. In their thinking, a viable British administration on the Gold Coast would not only provide public infrastructure but also enhance trade and in Bannerman’s view ensure the realization of British infrastructure development on the Gold Coast. But Bannerman’s vision of an empire of progress was never achieved. Sixteen years after his death, Britain formally colonized the Gold Coast and established a regime based on racial hierarchies and economic exploitation, far from what Bannerman had envisioned. Despite the failure of Bannerman’s empire, his co-founding of the British administration requires scholars to rethink conventional understandings of colonial space-making in Africa as simply hegemonic designs of European origin run by local intermediaries.