Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T13:57:24.305Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Working Committee of the United Gold Coast Convention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Dennis Austin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When I was in Ghana last year, Dr Danquah very kindly allowed me to read and make notes on an early Minute Book belonging to the Working Committee of the United Gold Coast Convention. I thought it was very interesting, for it covered the years 1947–51 when discontent with colonial rule came to a head, and produced first the U.G.C.C.—as it is easier to call it—and then its radical offspring, the Convention People's Party. The Minute Book was carefully, clearly written; it runs parallel to the early part of Nkrumah's Autobiography (ch. 5 to 12)—itself a valuable source of information—and it confirms, adds to and occasionally corrects the account given by Nkrumah of these interesting years when the colonial administration was beginning to retreat and the nationalists to advance. Moreover, in its beginning lay its end: the two chief protagonists in 1947 were Dr J. B. Danquah and Dr Kwame Nkrumah; and, thirteen years later, they were still opposed, as rival candidates for the presidency of the new republic.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 1961 , pp. 273 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1961

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Col. no. 231, and the record of evidence submitted to the Commission.

2 These were titles which the Ashanti Confederacy Council abolished in 1936, when it was unanimously agreed ‘that the positions of nkwankwahene and asafoakye and also Asafo should be abolished from the whole of Ashanti in view of the fact that they are the cause of political troubles throughout Ashanti’. But as late as 1944 four subjects of the Nkoranza stool in north-west Ashanti were charged with undermining the authority of the chief, brought before the local court, found guilty and removed from the district by order of the Ashanti Confederacy Council because ‘they were the cause of political unrest and disorder in the Nkoranza Division’. One of them was said to be ‘though not officially recognized … the acknowledged leader of the “youngmen” [and] this would appear to have been the cause of much misfortune, for organized leadership of the nkwankwa or the common people, called nkwankwahene, is abolished in Nkoranza’. Their crime was to question the collection of the levy; they were illiterate, and wrote their petition through a letter-writer who used ‘unhappy and misguided words’. See Appendix U, A.C.C. Minutes, 1945. The Chief Commissioner of course supported the chiefs. Sir Alan Burns paid tribute to ‘the chiefs and other public men’ who helped in ‘the setting up of Native Authorities … who are proving themselves the true leaders of their people. Their conduct is in marked Contrast to that of those disturbers of the peace who, for their interests, endeavour to sow discord in the states and to stir up stool disputes’ (Debates, 18.3.47). Within five years the ‘disturbers of the peace’ were in office; within seven the chiefs were stirring up trouble in their districts.

3 It was this conference that published First Steps Towards a National Fund; its members consisted of representatives from the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society, the Provincial Councils, municipal parties and local youth and literary societies—the Sekondi Optimists Literary Society, the Accra Young People’s Club, the Moonlight Literary and Social Club, the Anum Improvement Society, the Ewe League, the Asante Kotoko Society, and similar groups.

4 Started in 1938–9 by members of the Achimota School staff who held their first study conference in Jan. 1939, publishing its discussions under the title Quo Vadimus/or Gold Coast Future.

5 See Pointers to Progress … The Gold Coast in the Next Five Years (1942), and Towards National Development: Post-War Gold Coast (1945). The 1944 conference called for the solution of problems by ‘united and positive action’—a phrase taken up again later by the C.P.P. with great effect.

6 See especially Danquah's scheme for constitutional reform, approved by the J.P.C., the Ashanti Confederacy Council and the municipal members on the legislative council, submitted to the Secretary of State during his visit to the Gold Coast in 1943.

7 An early report on cocoa—Tudhope, W. S. D., Enquiry into the Gold Coast Cocoa Industry, 1919—said ‘an extraordinary feeling of pessimism had taken possession of the majority of people everywhere’. Farmers ‘complained of the high prices they have to pay for European articles or goods they want to buy whereas everything they have to sell is at a discount’. A 9d. or 1s. 6d. cutlass had gone up to 3s. 6d. or 4s. 6d.; cocoa in Kumasi was 5s. a load: it had been 25s. to 30s. a load at the end of 1915, but by 1917–18 ‘very large quantities of cocoa had to be destroyed … in the remoter districts because it could not be sold for anything in their own villages and to transport it to the nearest market would have cost more in carriage fees than they could have obtained for it’. There was a ‘strong feeling that of recent years they have been unmercifully exploited by the local buyers and shippers’. Therefore the ‘formation of Associations of Cocoa Growers is being very much thought of especially among the older growers… their one ambition … appears to be to enable them to ship their own cocoa’. These are the conditions described again by the better known (Nowell) Commission on the Marketing of West African Cocoa, Cmd. 5845 of 1938.Google Scholar

8 1919 the formation of the African and Eastern Trading Co. out of F. A. Swanzy, Miller Bros. and others; 1929 formation of the United Africa Company.

9 See the case of Inspector of Police v. Asare Panyin, 1931, when judgement was given that a chief had no power to stop the sale of cocoa, and that an oath sworn to prevent such a sale would be a criminal offence.

10 Notwithstanding Danquah's membership of the Board.

11 Watson Commission Report, S.263. The price paid per load of 60 lb. went up from 40s. in 1947–8 to 65s. in 1948–9, but this did not help the farmer whose trees were being cut down because of swollen shoot.

12 ‘An official observer had this to say about the atmosphere prevailing immediately after the war in a swollen shoot area: “It is a widespread economic depression which has affected the social and moral life of the community…. it has created a sensation. The disaster is felt appallingly”.’ Hill, P., The Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer, 1956, 67.Google Scholar

13 Watson Commission Report, S.192.

14 ‘An Index of Real Wages of the Unskilled Labourer in Accra’, Birmingham, W. B., The Economic Bulletin (Ghana), IV, 2, no. 3, 1960.Google Scholar

15 Most of the ‘Syrians’ are from the Lebanon. The near-monopoly that these hardworking, family businessmen had over the hire-purchase of lorries and of motor-cars for taxi use was greatly modified early in the 1950s when the big commercial companies began to offer hire-purchase terms.

16 See the statement made to the Watson Commission by representatives of the Antiinflation Campaign Committee who said people had no objection to restrictions during the war; ‘they understood that and were glad to help win the war. [But] the war had been over three years’. A good account of the boycott campaign can be found in Nii Kwabena Bonne's Milestones in the History of the Gold Coast, 1953, ch. IX.Google Scholar

17 See the representation by the T.U.C. before the Watson Commission. ‘Putting it plainly,’ said Mr Wood, ‘years ago they were not accustomed to seeing European children with their mothers … in the streets of the Gold Coast; … every mail boat, one or two hundred [Europeans] landed, and some came by air.’ He thought this followed a deliberate policy of ‘population dispersal’ by the United Kingdom Government. The belief that U.A.C. were starting cocoa plantations in East Africa probably owed something to the groundnut scheme, something to the great argument after the First World War between Leverhulme and the Nigerian and Gold Coast governments over palm-oil plantations.

18 And yet it was the President of the Aborigines' Society who sent £50 through Mr Ashie Nikoe to the Fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in October 1945. Formed in 1897, the A.R.P.S. slowly faded Out of existence in the 1940s.

19 See the Foreword by George Grant to The ‘P’ Plan, issued by the U.G.C.C. Jan. 1952. Williams=Mr F. A. Awooner-Williams; Blay=Mr R. S. Blay—both lawyers.Google Scholar

20 G. A. Grant, Chairman; R. S. Blay, Vice-President; J. B. Danquah, Vice-President; F. A. Awooner-Williams, Treasurer; W. E. A. Ofori Atta; J. Quist-Therson; E. Akufo Addo; J. W. de Graft-Johnson; W. O. Essuman, Asst. Secretary; A. Mends, Financial Secretary. A third vice-president—K. Bentsi Enchill—was sick, died shortly afterwards, and his place was filled by S. W. Duncan.

21 Made up of donations by Grant£100, Awoonet-Williams £25, Blay £50.

22 Danquah's son had volunteered for service with the army in 1943 and was in Burma until the end of the war; two queen-mothers of Accra spoke at the rally, recounting people's sufferings during the war. Ako Adjei quoted from a copy of the Burmese Independence Bill then before the United Kingdom parliament. Events in Asia were very much in people's minds.

23 ‘… on my way from Tafo as I was going to Kibi I was tackled by a large number of farmers with their drums, and with their faces marked with red ochre. They said they had come to meet me and asked the reason why I had signed the Beeton Report [on the cutting out of swollen shoot-infected trees] agreeing with the cocoa trees being cut down. It took a considerable explanation to make them understand that I did not sign the Beeton Report … but that my name appeared in the report as the first witness …’ [Danquah’s evidence given before the Watson Commission.]

24 Padmore, G., The Gold Coast Revolution, 62.Google Scholar The Gold Coast government saw clear evidence of a communist bid for power, planned terrorism and assassination. Danquah published an article saying ‘The hour of liberation has struck’; in which he wrote that ‘in this crusade the Working Committee is acting constitutionally but it will not be afraid to act’. Nkrumah had a communist party membership card; and, said the government public relations office, the ‘release of convicts [from Ussher Fort] is of a pattern familiar in communist disorders when the communists are seeking power’ … But then the government, like the ex-servicemen and the farmers, were in an uneasy state.

25 Timothy, Bankole, Kwame Nkrumah, 47.Google Scholar

26 This and subsequent quotations are taken from the record of evidence given before the Watson Commission.

27 Nkrumah told the Watson Commission that this ‘was “a dream” which he had carried round with him for some years’. It was used by a student group (says Nkrumah) within the West African National Secretariat. Autobiography, 60.

28 The idea of a ‘National College to serve the needs of the students’ who had gone on strike in Cape Coast, and were expelled in May 1948, was agreed on by the Working Committee on 6 June but it was Nkrumah who carried the idea through.

29 This was the ‘Coussey’ Committee on Constitutional Reform, appointed in Dec. 1948, which produced its Report in Aug. 1949. There were six U.G.C.C. members on the Committee—B. D. Addai, E. Akufo Addo, J. B. Danquah, George Grant, E. O. Obetsibi Lamptey, W. W. Taylor, and many of the forty members (thirty-one ‘commoners’ and nine chiefs) were, like Nana Ofori Atta II, sympathetic with the Convention.

30 Quoted in Timothy, B.: Kwame Nkrumah, 62–3.Google Scholar

31 The amount usually mentioned was £25,000, because this was the amount asked for by Kojo Thompson, a member of the former legislative council, from the representative of the Chamber of Commerce as the price of withholding criticism of the Association of West African Merchants. See Wight, Martin, Gold Coast Legislative Council, p. 173.Google Scholar

32 Autobiography, 100.

33 Autobiography. ‘The younger elements among the youth, led by Kofi Baako and Saki Scheck, were opposed to the formation of a political party as they insisted that by remaining within the U.G.C.C. the C.Y.O. would eventually capture the initiative. The other section, headed by Kojo Botsio, Komla Gbedemah and Dzenkle Dzewu … maintained that under the circumstances the C.Y.O. should immediately capture the political initiative of the rank and file from the U.G.C.C. by completely breaking away from the movement and forming itself into a separate political organisation’, 100.

34 Autobiography, 105. The ‘six-point programme’ of the new party is given on 101.

35 Autobiography, 106.

36 Ibid. 106–7.

37 See the ‘Coussey Report’ (Col. No. 248) Sections 443–64. The Minority Report also wanted the abolition of the Governor's power of veto. Signatories were B. D. Addai, W. G. Essien, Nana Ofori Atta II, E. Akufo Addo, George A. Grant, Cobina Kessie, Dr J. B. Danquah, E. O. Obetsibi Lamptey.

38 What would have happened had, say, Mr Gbedemah become the Working Committee's first general secretary? He refused early in 1949 but by that time the dispute had already arisen between Nkrumah and the Committee.

39 Autobiography, preface, ix.

40 Ibid. 62.

41 See the brief account by Sir Charles Arden-Clarke of ‘positive action’: ‘I have good reason to believe that some at least of the party leaders would have preferred not to resort to “positive action” but to await the results of the general election, of the outcome of which they were fairly confident. But they found themselves enmeshed in the toils of their own propaganda. The tail wagged the dog …’, African Affairs, Jan. 1958.Google Scholar

42 George Grant in his Foreword to The ‘P’ Plan, 1952.

43 Autobiography, 100–1.

44 See the early pamphlet Freedom for the Gold Coast? by Thomas Hodgkin, who thought that ‘the C.P.P. interprets democracy in its more traditional radical sense—the rule of the common people, the poor, the illiterate. The U.G.C.C. interprets democracy in its modern Tory sense, the rule of the enlightened and prosperous minority.’ This was probably true in 1949, but before we can see the Gold Coast revolution in class terms, much more work needs to be done (e.g. in the cocoa-farming area and among local business interests) on evidence that is only now becoming available.Google Scholar

45 By the officials, too, ex post facto: the Annual Report for 1947 said that ‘the Gold Coast is still the peace-loving country which it has so often been described to be’; the U.G.C.C. was not welcomed: ‘a new movement, the United Gold Coast Convention … sprang up during 1947 and declared as one of its main objectives the attainment of full self-government in the shortest possible time. The movement has not so far contributed to the solution of the practical and urgent problems facing the country but has confined itself to an appeal to nationalistic feelings’. By the end of 1948, on the eve of being displaced by the C.P.P., the U.G.C.C. had become respectable. But then, so had the C.P.P. by the end of 1951. The administration had great powers of adaptation.