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“We Shall Rejoice to see the Day When Slavery shall Cease to Exist”: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry*
Affiliation:
Shippensburg University
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The articulation of antislavery among Africans remains to be studied. Overall, the staple of animated questions, debates, and conclusions of the vast literature on abolition of slavery in the last two decades or so has neglected African contributions of ideologies of antislavery to the global abolition epoch in the Atlantic world. Charting a new trajectory for the study of abolition in Africa, as well as the global abolition epoch, this study examines the ideologies of antislavery among Africans as expressed in the Gold Coast Times (Cape Coast) during the heyday of the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. The study, echoing African agency, reveals the manifest presence of the African intelligentsia abolitionists in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The origin and timing of the African intelligentsia's antislavery attitudes in the Gold Coast are not made known in the sources. However, the sources do reveal that antislavery flowered in the littoral region between Elmina and Accra, the hub of precolonial intellectual activities, political activism, and diffusion of cultures, linked to the larger Atlantic world.

Overall, I argue that antislavery existed among the African intelligentsia and that they articulated their ideologies of antislavery in several ways, both on the eve of the British colonial abolition of slavery and in its immediate aftermath. The study is divided into four main parts. The first section problematizes the sources and addresses some methodological considerations. For its part, the second portion interrogates the comparative historiography on abolition, while the third section conceptualizes the African intelligentsia abolitionists and their association with the Gold Coast Times, the main platform for the African intelligentsia's espousal of ideologies of antislavery. Divided into two parts, the final section examines the African intelligentsia's articulation of antislavery both before and after the inauguration of abolition by the colonial state.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 31 , 2004 , pp. 19 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2004

Footnotes

1

Quoted from The Gold Coast Times (30 October 1874). I wish to thank Rashid Ismail of Vassar College and Femi Kolapo of Guelph University for their insightful comments on this paper.

References

2 The literature is vast, spanning nearly twenty years. See, for example, Davis, David Brion, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Miers, Suzanne and Roberts, Richard, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988)Google Scholar; Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Paul and Hogendorn, Jan S., Slow Death for Slavery (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klein, Martin, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miers, Suzanne and Klein, Martin, eds., Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London, 1999)Google Scholar; and Eltis, David, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), esp. 281–84Google Scholar.

3 Following Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823 (New York, 1999), 17Google Scholar, I use ideology to mean “an integrated system of beliefs, assumptions, and values, not necessarily true or false, which reflects the needs and interests of a group or class at a particular time in history. By ‘interests’ I mean anything that benefits or is thought to benefit a specific collective identity. Because ideologies are modes of consciousness, containing the criteria for interpreting social reality, they help to define as well as to legitimate collective needs and interests. Hence, there is a continuous interaction between ideology and material forces of history.”

4 For a very recent articulation of a paradigm of African agency see Mann, Kristin, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 22(2002), 14–16Google Scholar. For similar methodological overviews see Hine, Darlene C. and McLeod, Jacqueline, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Bloomington, 1999)Google Scholar, especially chapters by Earl Lewis, Thomas C. Holt, and Elliot P. Skinner. For conceptual definitions of African intelligentsia see, for example, Kimble, David, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850-1928 (Oxford, 1963), 135–41Google Scholar; Lloyd, P.C., Africa in Social Change (New York, 1967), 125–31Google Scholar; Foster, Philip, Education and Social Change in Ghana (Chicago, 1968), 48–69Google Scholar; and McCarthy, Mary, Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast (Lanham, 1983), 107–25Google Scholar.

5 Gocking, Roger, Facing Two Ways: Ghana's Coastal Communities Under Colonial Rule (Lanham, 1999)Google Scholar; and Parker, John, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth, NH, 2000)Google Scholar. In fact most of the African intelligentsia had come from the coastal communities. See, for example, Ephson, Isaac, Gallery of Gold Coast Celebrities, 1632-1958 (Accra, 1969)Google Scholar.

6 For the processes of abolition in the Gold Coast, see, for example, McSheffrey, Gerald M., “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874-1901,” JAH 24(1983), 349–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dumett, Raymond and Johnson, Marion, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti and the Northern Territories” in Miers, /Roberts, , End of Slavery, 1–116Google Scholar; Haenger, Peter, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast (Basel, 2000)Google Scholar; Opare-Akurang, Kwabena [Akurang-Parry, ], “The Administration of the Abolition Laws, African Responses, and Post-Proclamation Slavery in Colonial Southern Ghana, 1874-1940,” Slavery and Abolition 18(1998), 149–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast: Colonial Modes of Emancipation and African Initiatives,” Ghana Studies 1(1998), 11–34Google Scholar; idem., “‘Smattering of Education’ and Petitions as Sources: A Study of African Slaveholders' Responses to Abolition in the Gold Coast Colony, 1874-1875,” HA 27(2000), 39-60; idem., “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga:’ Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast (Colonial Southern Ghana), 1874-1899,” Left History 8/1(2002), 33-60; idem., “‘What Is and What Is Not the Law:’ Imprisonment for Debt and the Institution of Pawnship in the Gold Coast, 1821-1899” in Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, eds., Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, 2003), 427-47; and idem., “To Wassa Fiase for Gold: Rethinking Colonial Rule, El Dorado, Antislavery, and Chieftaincy in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1874-95,” HA 30(2003), 11-36.

7 Shepperson, George, “Abolitionism and African Political Thought,” Transition 3/12(1964), 26Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 22-26. For the influences of diasporic African political thought on African political thought see idem., “Notes on Negro American Influences and the Emergence of African Nationalism,” JAH 1(1960), 299-212; Essien-Udom, E. U., “The Relationship of Afro-Americans to African Nationalism,” Freedomways 2(1962), 391–407Google Scholar; Martin, Tony, The Pan-African Connection; From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (Cambridge, 1983), 3–29Google Scholar; Sanneh, Lamin, Abolitionist Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modem West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar; and Blyden, Nemata A., Weif, Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The African Diaspora in Reverse (Rochester, 2000)Google Scholar.

9 Shepperson, , “Abolitionism,” 22–26Google Scholar.

10 For variations of this critique see, for example, Zeleza, Tiyambe, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Dakar, 1997)Google Scholar; Owomoyela, Oyekan, “With Friends Like These … A Critique of Pervasive Anti-Africanisms in Current African Studies Epistemology and Methodology,” African Studies Review 37/3(1994), 77–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaba, Lansine, “The Atlantic Slave Trade Was Not a ‘Black-on-Black Holocaust,’” African Studies Review 44/1(2000), 4–15Google Scholar; and Elliot Skinner, P., “Hegemonic Paradigms and the African World: Striving to Be Free” in Hine, /McLeod, , Crossing Boundaries, 45–70Google Scholar.

11 E.g., July, Robert, The Origins of Modern African Thought (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; idem., An African Voice (Durham, 1987); and Zachernuk, Philip S., Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville, 2000)Google Scholar.

12 E.g., Coleman, James S., Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, 1963)Google Scholar; Kimble, Political History, and Gocking, Facing Two Ways.

13 For an exception see Priestley, Margaret, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (London, 1969)Google Scholar; and Falola, Toyin, Yoruba Gurus: Indigenous Production of Knowledge (Trenton, 1999)Google Scholar. For studies that make use of newspapers see Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects; and Rina Okonkwo, “The Lagos Auxiliary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Rights Protection Society: A Re-Examination,” IJAHS 15(1982), 423–34Google Scholar.

14 Studies of African resistance to colonial rule have been fruitful in demarcating specific responses, e.g., rural-based ones from littoral ones and those led by the chiefs from those championed by the African intelligentsia. See Boahen, A. Adu, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore, 1994), 27–93Google Scholar. Similar approaches that seek to detach abolition from colonial rule can enrich our understanding by capturing the differing and intersecting nuances of both processes.

15 For a discussion of the problem of compensation and abolition in the Gold Coast, See Akurang-Parry, , “Slavery and Abolition,” 27–32Google Scholar.

16 Several studies have identified the close relationship that existed among the African intelligentsia in the West African region, e.g., Gocking, , Facing Two Ways, 8–9Google Scholar; and Zachernuk, , Colonial Subjects, 20Google Scholar.

17 Strahan had a low opinion of the African intelligentsia. See, for example, Further Correspondence Relating to the Abolition of Slavery on the Gold Coast, Parliamentary Papers, 1875, C. 1139 (hereafter C. 1139); and Further Correspondence Relating to the Abolition of Slavery on the Gold Coast, Parliamentary Papers, 1875, C. 1159 (hereafter C. 1159).

18 The literature is vast, but see Knight, Franklin, The African Dimension in Latin American Societies (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Hall, Gwendolyn M., Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Society in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992)Google Scholar; Harris, Joseph E., ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (2d ed.: Washington, 1993)Google Scholar; Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Davis, Darien J., Slavery and Beyond: The African Impact on Latin America and the Caribbean (Wilmington, DE, 1995)Google Scholar; and Okpewho, Isidoreet al., eds., The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Bloomington, 1998)Google Scholar.

19 Mann, , “Shifting Paradigms,” 10Google Scholar.

20 E.g., Davis, Slavery and Human Progress; and Eltis, , Rise of African Slavery, 281–84Google Scholar.

21 See, e.g., Gilroy, Black Atlantic; Hine/McLeod, Crossing Boundaries; and Walvin, James, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

22 E.g., Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; and Eltis, Rise of African Slavery.

23 Mann, , “Shifting Paradigms,” 14Google Scholar.

24 E.g., Davis, Problem of Slavery. One recent epitome of this genre on Africa is Sanneh, Abolitionist Abroad.

25 See, e.g., Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor, eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977), 73–75Google Scholar; Kopytoff, Igor, “The Cultural Context of African Abolition” in Miers, /Kopytoff, , Slavery in Africa, 497–502Google Scholar; and Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 85, 88–89Google Scholar.

26 E.g., Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 85, 92Google Scholar; and Kopytoff, Igor, “Cultural Context,” 485–503Google Scholar.

27 For the summary of such studies see Lovejoy, Paul, “Fugitive Slaves: Resistance to Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate” in Okihiro, Gary, ed., In Resistance: Studies in Afro-American, African and Caribbean History (Amherst, 1986), 74–77Google Scholar. For specific studies, see, e.g., Klein, Martin and Roberts, Richard, “The Banamba Slave Exodus of 1905 and the Decline of Slavery in the Western Sudan,” JAH 21(1980), 375–94Google Scholar; and Manning, , Slavery and African Life, 157–64Google Scholar.

28 E.g., Adams, John, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo, Including Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants with an Appendix Containing an Account of the European Trade with the West Coast of Africa (London, 1823), 86–86Google Scholar; and Winterbottom, T., An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighborhood of Sierra Leone to Which is Added an Account of the Present Medicine Among Them (London, 1969), 154–58Google Scholar. I thank Femi Kolapo for drawing my attention to these two sources. For studies of resistance to slavery in the precolonial period see Rathbone, Richard, “Some Thoughts on Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa,” Slavery and Abolition 6(1985), 11–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGowan, Winston, “African Resistance to the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa,” Slavery and Abolition 11(1990), 5–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovejoy, , “Fugitive Slaves,” 74–77Google Scholar; Rashid, Ismail, “Escape, Revolt, and Maronnage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sierra Leone Hinterland,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 34(2000), 656–83Google Scholar; and Kolapo, Femi, “Documentary ‘Silences’ and Slave Resistance in West Africa During the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” paper Presented at the Harriet Tubman Seminar, Founders College, York University, 9 October 2002Google Scholar.

29 Rashid, , “Escape, Revolt, and Maronnage,” 656–62Google Scholar.

30 Roberts, Richard and Miers, Suzanne, “The End of Slavery,” in Miers, /Roberts, , End of Slavery in Africa, 8–9Google Scholar. See also ibid., 10-25.

31 For example, the Dahomian state, in collaboration with the British authorities, had made efforts to abolish slavery; see Law, Robin, “An African Response to Abolition: Anglo-Dahomian Negotiations on Ending the Slave Trade, 1838-48,” Slavery and Abolition 16(1995), 281–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Miers, Suzanne, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York, 1975), 3–7Google Scholar; Turley, David, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (New York, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Midgley, Clare, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; and Oldfield, J. R., The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade 1787-1807 (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

33 Curtin, Philip D., The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge, 1990), 182Google Scholar. For a detailed account of cultural change on the eve of colonial rule see, e.g., Boahen, , African Perspectives, 1–26Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 1

35 Sanneh, , Abolitionists Abroad, 156Google Scholar.

36 Foster, , Education and Social Change in Ghana, 68Google Scholar.

37 See, e.g., Kimble, Political History; Gocking, Facing Two Ways; and Parker, Making the Town.

38 Rathbone, Richard, “The Gold Coast, the Closing of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Africans of the Diaspora” in Palmie, Stephan, ed., Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (Knoxville, 1995), 57–63Google Scholar. Rathbone delineates several groups within the African-Caribbean and African-Brazilian groups. Within the African-Caribbean groups were repatriated African soldiers, who had served in the Dutch East and West Indies. They were “predominantly Moslems” and had settled between Elmina and Cape Coast. The African-Caribbean group also included African-Jamaicans recruited by the Basel Mission and Africans drawn from the British Caribbean serving with the British West Indian Regiment. The African-Brazilians included those deported in 1831 and 1835 following a series of slave revolts in Brazil, and who settled between Cape Coast and Winneba. This group also included Christians who intermarried with the local African elites.

39 Kimble, Political History; Gocking, Facing Two Ways; and Parker, Making the Town.

40 See Akurang-Parry, , ““Smattering of Education’,” 49–50Google Scholar. See also M. A. Kwamena-Poh, “The Basel Mission Period 1828-1918: The Planting of the Presbyterian Church in Mamfe-Akuapem, 1858-1993” in Presbyterian Church of Ghana: Dedication of the Emmanuel Presbyterian Chapel, Mamfe, On Sunday 9 May 1993 (n.p., n.d.). 11-22. I thank my sister Gladys Akurang-Parry of Adenta-Accra, Ghana, for bringing this essay to my attention. The essay reveals that by the 1880s there were several Akuapems working as teachers, pastors, catechists, traders, and farmers. Kwamena-Poh's essay points to the rich possibilities of the historical reconstruction of the intelligentsia in Akuapem.

41 Gocking, Facing Two Ways.

42 See, e.g., Coleman, , Nigeria, esp. 169–77Google Scholar.

43 For this argument see Akurang-Parry, “‘Smattering of Education’.” For the reformist interpretation that inform the literature see Kimble, , Political History, 537–62Google Scholar.

44 Boahen, , African Perspectives on Colonialism, 67–75Google Scholar.

45 This perspective has been mostly used to explain the continuity in women's activism in the colonial period. See, e.g., Johnson-Odim, Cheryl, “Actions Louder than Words: The Historical Task of Defining Feminist Consciousness in Colonial West Africa” in Pierson, Roach and Chaudhuri, Nupur, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington, 1998), 81–82Google Scholar; and Amadiume, Ifi, Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women's Struggle for Culture, Power and Democracy (London, 2000), 7Google Scholar.

46 For biographical account of Brew see Gold Coast Times (30 November 1874); and African Times (1 March 1875). For a fuller biographical exposition see Kimble, , Political History, 409–20Google Scholar; Priestley, Margaret, “The Emergence of an Elite: A Case Study of a West Coast Family” in Lloyd, P.C., ed., The New Elites of Tropical Africa (London, 1966), 87–99Google Scholar; idem., West African Trade; and Akurang-Parry, , “‘Smattering of Education’,” 55–58Google Scholar.

47 E.g., July, Origins of Modern African Thought, 345-73.

48 Rowand, Evelyn, “Press and Opinion in British West, 1855-1900: The Development of a Sense of Identity Among Educated British West Africans of the Later Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D., University of Birmingham, 1972), 4Google Scholar.

49 Gocking, , Facing Two Ways, 10Google Scholar.

50 Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., “‘We Cast About for a Remedy’: Chinese Labor and African Opposition in the Gold Coast, 1874-1914,” IJAHS 34(2001), 370Google Scholar.

51 Gold Coast Times (30 November 1874), and African Times (1 March 1875), 30.

52 Rowand, , “Press and Opinion,” 47–52Google Scholar.

53 Priestley, West African Trade, 166.

54 Jones-Quartey, K. A. B., “Thought and Expression in the Gold Coast Press,” Universitas 3(1958), 73Google Scholar.

55 Ibid.

56 Kimble, , Political History, 91Google Scholar.

57 E.g., Gold Coast Times (9 June 1975).

58 Gocking, , Facing Two Ways, 10Google Scholar.

59 See, e.g., African Times (23 August 1866), 16Google Scholar. On page 22 of the same issue, an African responding to Colonel E. Conran's disparaging reply to a petition submitted to the colonial authorities by Accra merchants regarding a colonial expedition to the Voltaic districts and the persistence of declining trade due to slavery and violence, noted that the European authorities in the Gold Coast did not like the African Times, but the African intelligentsia and Africans in general did. Also, in 1865 the African intelligentsia of Sierra Leone paid a special tribute to the African Times. See the African Times (23 December 1865), 64Google Scholar. For the Gold Coast readership of the other British newspapers see Bannerman to Rowe, 21 December 1881, Encl. in No. 16, in Further Correspondence Regarding Affairs of the Gold Coast, Parliamentary Papers, 1882, C. 3386 (hereafter C. 3386).

60 E.g., Rowand, “Press and Opinion,” 1-63.

61 Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “Ritual, Rumor, and Colonialism: The Alleged Human Sacrifice of Two-Hundred Girls by Asantehene [King] Mensa Bonsu in Asante and the Gold Coast in 1881-1882,” unpublished manuscript.

62 Zachernuk, , Colonial Subjects, 12Google Scholar.

63 Parker, John, “Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, 1860s-1920s” (Ph.D., University of London, 1995), 124Google Scholar. See also Parker, , Making the Town, 83Google Scholar. For a detailed account of the Basel mission's slave emancipation efforts of the 1860s see Haenger, , Slaves and Slaveholders, 1–111Google Scholar.

64 Parker, “Ga State,” 124n37.

65 Parker, , Making the Town, 95Google Scholar.

66 There are numerous examples of the coastal people's condescension and a feeling of moral superiority toward the interior peoples in the Gold Coast. See, e.g., Gold Coast Times (20 April 1874); and Gold Coast Times (24 December 1881). The reason for the uneasy relationships between the littoral states and Asante was the latter's political and economic threat to the former in the African-European trade. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the increasing presence of the Europeans on the coast and their incipient colonial policies had exacerbated the conflict between the coastal states and the Asante kingdom, see, e.g., Kimble, , Political History, 267–70Google Scholar.

67 Yarak, Larry, “West African Coastal Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Afro-Europeans of Elmina,” Ethnohistory 36(1989), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Akurang-Parry, , “‘Smattering of Education’,” 48–55Google Scholar.

69 For this conclusion, see Dumett/Johnson, “Britain and Suppression of Slavery,” 108. They assert that abolition was “a quieter revolution.”

70 Akurang-Parry, , “‘Smattering of Education’,” 48–49Google Scholar.

71 Miers/Roberts, End of Slavery; and Miers/Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule.

72 Gold Coast Times (30 October 1874).

73 See African Times (29 August 1874), 16Google Scholar. Several of the British newspapers had correspondents based on the Gold Coast due to the coverage given to the Sagrenti War (Sir Garnet's war in the local parlance) or the Anglo-Asante War of 1873-74. It is not clear whether the correspondent was an European or an African. See, e.g., African Times (29 August 1873), 173Google Scholar.

74 Akurang-Parry, , “Administration,” 149–50Google Scholar.

75 African Times (30 June 1874), 69Google Scholar. See also C. 1139, Carnarvon to Strahan, 20 August 1874, No. 2; and “Draft Proclamation Defining the Nature and Extent of the Queen's Jurisdiction on the Gold Coast” in C. 1139, Encl. No. 2. The British Parliamentary debates were published verbatim in the African Times and the Gold Coast newspapers, including the Gold Coast Times. The Gold Coast newspapers also culled news on the Gold Coast from British newspapers. The Gold Coast Times issue of 24 May 1874, included the British government's official policy statement on colonial rule in the Gold Coast, subtitled “British Policy on the Gold Coast” from the following British newspapers: Manchester Guardian (29 April [1874]); Times (28 April [1874]); Morning Post (28 April [1874]); and Standard (29 April [1874]).

76 African Times (30 June 1874), 69Google Scholar.

77 See, e.g., C. 1139, Carnarvon to the Officer Administering the Gold Coast, 21 August 1874, No. 3; and C. 1139, Strahan to Carnarvon, 19 September 1874, No. 5.

78 Gold Coast Times (20 October 1874). Strahan had met the chiefs of the Central and Western Provinces to prepare them for the impending abolition. See C. 1139, Strahan to Carnarvon, 19 September 1874, No. 5.

79 This falls within the area of British jurisdiction that came with the Bond of 1844, which enabled the British authorities to intervene in African affairs. For a fuller account of the Bond see Kimble, , Political History, 193–95Google Scholar. For a copy see Hayford, J. E. Casely, Gold Coast Native Institutions (London, [1903] 1970)Google Scholar, app. D5., 367-80.

80 Gold Coast Times (20 October 1874).

81 Ibid.

82 Quoted by the Standard (no date) and culled by the Gold Coast Times (31 March 1875).

83 See, e.g., C. 1139, Carnarvon to the Officer Administering the Gold Coast, 21 August 1874, No. 3; and C. 1139, Strahan to Carnarvon, 19 September 1874, No. 5.

84 C. 1139, Strahan to Carnarvon, 28 November, 1874, No. 17.

85 See Akurang-Parry, , “Administration of Abolition Laws,” 152–53Google Scholar.

86 Johnson, Marion, “The Slaves of Salaga,” JAH 27(1986), 349–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Akurang-Parry, , “Rethinking the “‘Slaves of Salaga,’” 40–48Google Scholar.

87 For freed slave habitats or homes in the colonial period see, e.g., Olusanya, G. O., “The Freed Slaves' Home—An Unknown Aspect of Northern Nigerian Social History,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3/3(1966), 523–38Google Scholar; and Ubah, C. N., “The Colonial Administration of Northern Nigeria and the Problem of Freed Slave Children,” Slavery and Abolition 14(1993), 208–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Gold Coast Times (20 November 1874).

89 Ibid.

90 Freed slaves themselves developed autonomous villages near the active centers of colonial rule, for instance, on the Accra plains; e.g., Lees to Hicks Beach, 5 July 1878, Encl. in No. 2, in Report by Sir David Chalmers on the Effect of the Steps Which Have been Taken by the Colonial Government in Reference to the Abolition of Slavery Within the Protectorate, Parliamentary Papers, 1875, C. 2148 (hereafter C. 2148); and Fraser to Hodgson, (n.d.), Encl. 27 in No. 59, in Correspondence Respecting the Slave Trade, Parliamentary Papers, 1890 (hereafter C. 6053). For a fuller account see Dumett/Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 89-90.

91 For this argument see Roberts, /Miers, , “End of Slavery,” 56–57Google Scholar.

92 See, e.g., Case No. 104, 3 November 1875, National Archives of Ghana, Accra (hereafter NAG/A), SCT 17/4/2; Despatches from the Governor to the Secretary of State, 1879-80, 7 February 1880, No. 57, NAG/A ADM 1/23; C. 6053, Holmes to Hughes, 27 July 1889, Encl. 26 in No. 59; C. 6053, Cole to Hughes, 17 September 1890, End. 8 in No. 59; and No. S.P.11/09, 21 June 1909, in Slave Children, National Archives of Ghana, Cape Coast (hereafter NAG/CC).

93 See Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 90–91Google Scholar; and Akurang-Parry, , “Administration,” 156–58Google Scholar.

94 There were several official expressions that slavery was benign. See, e.g., C. 6354, Griffith to Knutsford, 26 January 1891, No. 7. See Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 90–91Google Scholar, and Perbi, Akosua A., “A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Centuries” (Ph. D., University of Ghana, 1997). 262–63Google Scholar.

95 Akurang-Parry, “‘Smattering of Education’.”

96 E.g., Miers/Roberts, End of Slavery.

97 Gold Coast Times (30 November 1874). Akurang-Parry, , “‘Smattering of Education’,” 58Google Scholar, has argued that historians of slavery in the Gold Coast have overlooked this flaw in the abolition process. Most scholars writing about the subject have presumed that abolition inaugurated on 3 November 1874 was supported by a legal document in hand. See, e.g., Grace, John, Domestic Slavery in West Africa (New York, 1975), 36Google Scholar; and Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 80Google Scholar.

98 For this explanation, see Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 37–38Google Scholar; McSheffrey, , “Slavery,” 354Google Scholar; and Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 80Google Scholar.

99 For this argument see July, Origins, 327-35.

100 Gold Coast Times (30 November 1874).

101 C. 1159, Strahan to Carnarvon, 8 January 1875, Encl. 1 in No. 2.

102 Gold Coast Times (30 November 1874).

103 Ibid.

104 African Times (31 December 1874/1 January 1875), 8.

105 Gold Coast Times (30 November 1874).

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid. For the expansion of pawning in the aftermath of abolition, see Dumett, /Johnson, , “Britain and Suppression of Slavery,” 94–95Google Scholar. Others agree with Dumett and Johnson, but have argued that post-proclamation pawning involved more females than men. See Austin, Gareth, “Human Pawning in Asante, 1800-1950: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa” in Falola, Toyin and Lovejoy, Paul, eds., Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, 1994), 119–59Google Scholar; Beverly Grier, “Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders: Women in the Transition to Cash Crop Agriculture in Colonial Ghana” in ibid., 178-82; and Akurang-Parry, “‘What is and What is not the Law’.”