3 - “Worlding” Nativity: Early Gold Coast Culturalist Imperatives and Nationalist Initiatives

Summary

Here on the Gold Coast, you have to deal with an aboriginal race with distinctive institutions, customs and laws, which … European writers may attempt to portray, but which they can never fully interpret to the outside world.

—Casely Hayford, Gold Coast Native Institutions (1903)

The life of a people grows … it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. But there may come a check, an arrest; memories may shrink into withered relics—the soul of a people—whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to be dying for want of common action. But who shall say “The fountain of their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation”? Who shall say it? Not he who feels the life of his people striving within his own. Shall he say, “That way events are wending, I will not resist”? His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events.

—Attoh Ahuma quoting George Eliot, in Memoirs of West African Celebrities (1905)

To Be or Not to Be Native: Navigating the Problem of “Thrown-Togetherness”

When did we become a people? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do these big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other as well as with others?

—Edward Said, After the Last Sky

The residual anomaly of tribal exclusiveness has the regrettable tendency of evolving unhappy antagonisms against those called of and qualified by God to harmonise the disorganised interests of our Country…. We are in sore need as Africans of an expansive horizon … broad as the heavens.

—Attoh Ahuma, The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness (1911)

Unhappy are the people who cut themselves off from the past.

—Sarbah, quoting Gladstone, in Fanti National Constitution (1906)