This chapter examines key writings of James Africanus Beale Horton and Edward Wilmot Blyden to highlight the inconsistencies inherent in the labelling of these activist writer-intellectuals as “proto nationalists.” Horton was a British army medical officer who was a participant in British conquests. Yet, he is indispensable to nationalist history because of extant evidence in letters, pamphlets and books that establish his commitment to self-government for West Africa as well as its progress. Blyden occupies the position of foremost articulator of the “African personality.” Yet, Blyden campaigned for Britain to colonise Liberia. Treating them as hostile to the ideals of later anti-colonial nationalists falls down because they shared with this later group a faith in and hope for African independent fluorescence. These conundrums are resolved by understanding them as, first, dealing with problems of the day in the terms of the day and second, being pro-African and not necessarily anti-colonial.

This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

In 1873, Ashanti forces invaded the British Gold Coast Protectorate over a territorial dispute, inflicted serious harm on the Protectorate Fante population, and took hostage several European missionaries. A British force under General Sir Garnet Wolseley was dispatched, and in less than six months, defeated the Ashanti army and burned their capital of Kumasi. The hostages were freed and the Asantahene, Karikari, was forced to sign a harsh treaty. Wolseley employed a highly-mixed force and cadre of handpicked officers achieving great results. His force utilized advanced, and often untested, technology such as Martini-Henry rifles, light Armstrong cannons, Hale rockets, and telegraph lines which played significant roles in Wolseley’s military success, as well as Gatling guns and Steam Sappers (traction engines) which did not. Wolseley had to overcome engineering and biological obstacles: building 274 bridges while keeping disease under relative control. The Battle of Amoaful, fought on 31 January 1874, in which the British employed a square formation and marched straight into thick enemy-occupied bush, proved to be the decisive battle of the war. The success of the expedition opened up political, military, and public opinion to the notion that European armies could reliably operate in the West African interior.