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The Failure of European Mining Companies in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Jim Silver
Jim Silver
Affiliation:
University of Winnipeg
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Extract

European mining companies in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast failed because they were unable to solve the problem of ‘primitive accumulation’. Their failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation was attributable to a variety of factors, including financial manipulations by ‘share-pushers’ and ‘concession-mongers’, managerial and technological inadequacies, and the refusal of the colonial state to employ that degree of force which would have been necessary to overcome the resistance by Africans to the sale of their labour-power to the mines. The resistance mounted by African gold diggers was such that they not only refused to sell their labour-power to the mines, but also out-produced the European mining companies for most of the period under review, while those few Africans who did sell their labour-power to the mines formed a small and highly transient labour force which engaged in a largely individualistic form of resistance characterized by their consistent refusal to work at the pace demanded by management, and to turn over to management the entirety of their day's output. Thus not only did the resistance of Africans contribute to the failure to solve the problem of primitive accumulation, and to the consequent weakness of the European mining companies, but conversely the weakness of the European mining companies contributed to the structuring of the mines'labour force, and to the forms of resistance waged by mineworkers.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 1981 , pp. 511 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 For descriptions of the traditional African art of pit-mining, see the follwing: Arhin, Kwame, ‘Succession and Gold Mining at Manso-Nkwanta’, University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies Research Review, vi, iii (1970), 101–9Google Scholar; Burton, R. F. and Cameron, V. L., To the Gold Coast for Gold (London, 1883) II, 115–16Google Scholar; Ferguson, George Ekem, ‘Mission to Atebubu’, in Arhin, Kwame (ed.), The Papers of George Ekem Ferguson (Cambridge, 1974), 6;Google Scholar Holmes, W. F., ‘Notes on the Early History of Tarkwa as a Gold Mining District’, Gold Coast Review 11, i, (1926), 78–117Google Scholar; N. R. Junner, Gold in the Gold Coast (Gold Coast Geological Survey, Memoir no. 4); Louis, Henry, ‘Gold Mining on the Gold Coast’, The Mining Journal (7 09 1901)Google Scholar; McCarthy, E. T., Incidents in the Life of a Mining Engineer London, n.d.);Google Scholar Rickard, T. A. ‘The Primitive Use of Gold’, Transactions of the Institutions of Mining and Metallurgy, xliv (1934–1935), 49–87;Google Scholar Skertchly, H. A., ‘A Visit to the Gold-Fields of Wassaw, West Africa’ J. Royal Geog. Soc. xlvii (1878), 274–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Turner, G. W. E., ‘The Ashanti Goldfields Corporation’, The Mining Magazine (June 1932), 329–37.Google Scholar

2 Other, more advanced, mining techniques were also employed by African miners, including the methods used by the Asante in the Oweri Valley and at King Prempe's Mine. At Asante Akyem in the Oweri Valley, for example, ‘open-cut mining on the reefs, with banking and benching to a depth of some 200 feet, was practised at least from the early 18th century onwards’ (Wilks, Ivor, Asante in the igth Century [Cambridge, 1976], 436)Google Scholar, while at the famous King Prempe's Mine to the southwest of Kumasi, which was not located by the British until 1896, the use of advanced principles enabled the reef to be followed into the hillside for 250 to 300 feet, and timbered galleries measuring 7 feet by 9 feet to be constructed along its entire length (Armitage, C. H. and Montanero, A. F., The Ashanti Campaign of 1900 [London, 1901], 239).Google Scholar Similarly, coastal people such as the Appolonians, Ahantas, and Wassaws, employed a mining technique which involved ‘large pits and long narrow open-cuts and trenches as much as a third of a mile in length and 80 feet deep’ (Rickard, op. cit., 80).

3 Not only did women have a near monopoly on that part of the production process in which the gold was separated from the ore, but Meyerowitz adds that in earlier times certain women, particuarly Queen mothers and chiefs' wives, supervised crews of gold diggers while digging for gold themselves. Meyerowitz, Eva, The Sacred State of the Akan (London, 1951), 201.Google Scholar

4 Rosenblum, Paul, ‘Gold Mining in Ghana, 1874–1900’ (Ph.D., thesis, Columbia, 1977), 50–1. 77. and 88–9.Google Scholar

5 Burton and Cameron, op.cit. I, preface, p. ix.

6 Holmes, op. cit. p. 78, quoting from a letter written by Mr E. J. Foster, Secretary of Tarquah and Abosso Consolidated Limited.

7 Skertchly, op. cit. and Holmes, op. cit.

8 See Junner, op. cit. and Skertchly, op. cit.

9 Holmes, op. cit. 82–6.

10 Dickson, K. B., A Historical Geography of Ghana (Cambridge, 1969), 182.Google Scholar In 1825, the Gold Coast Mining and Trading Company was formed for the purpose, inter alia, of using modern methods to mine the gold of the area. However, the company concentrated on trading, and did not turn its attention to mining. Macdonald, George, ‘Gold in West Africa’, Journal of the African Society, 1 (1901–1902), 421.Google Scholar

11 Rosenblum, op. cit. 149.

12 Holmes, op. cit. 90–1.

13 Bevin, H.J., ‘M.J. Bonnat: Trader and Mining Promoter’, Economic Bulletin of Ghana, iv vii (July 1960), 8.Google Scholar African entrepreneurs played a significant role in the gold mining industry in the 1880s and 1890s. In additon to the lawyers who acted as intermediaries in concession deals, many Africans were themselves the owners of concessions. For example, it is believed that J. A. B. Horton owned more mining concessions than any other individual in the early 1880s – Dumett claims that ‘of approximately 109 different concessions registered at Cape Coast from May 1878 to June 1882, it was estimated that J. A. B. Horton held 31’ (Dumett, R. E., ‘British Official Attitudes in Relation to Economic Development in the Gold Coast, 1874–1905’ [Ph.D. thesis London, 1966], 61)Google Scholar – and it was he who sold the concessions to the Gold Coast Mining Company, and the Tarquah Gold Mines Company, while in 1895 the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation purchased their large concession from three African entrepreneurs, J. P. Brown, J. E. Ellis and J. E. Biney. Brown, Ellis and Biney had been working the concession since 1890, when they started mining operations with a labour force of about 200 men. Other African entrepreneurs also attempted to organize a wage-labour force to mine gold. For example, Horton, in association with Ferdinand Fitzgerald of The African Times, attempted to raise capital for a company called the Wassaw and Ahanta Gold Mines Syndicate in 1880. However, this attempt, like those of other would-be African capitalists, proved to be unsuccessful, owing in large part to difficulties in raising capital. See Kimble, op. cit. 22–4; and Boahen, Adu, Ghana: Evolution and Change in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London, 1975), 94.Google Scholar

14 Holmes, op. cit. 90–1.

15 Rosenblum, op. cit. 150

16 ‘Fourth Monthly Report on the Tarquah Gold Mining District’, 31 July 1882. Further Correspondence Regarding Affairs of the Gold Coast, British Parliamentary Papers (C. 3687)(1883).

17 Rosenblum, op. cit. 74–5, quoting Paulus Dahse.

18 P. R. O., C. O. 879/19, V. L. Cameron to Captain Maloney, 30 April 1882.

19 P. R. O. 879/19, Higgins, Henry, ‘Second Monthly Report on Tarquah’, 31 May 1882.Google Scholar

20 Rosenblum, op. cit. 74, quoting from a European account of the time.

21 Dickson, op. cit. 251.

22 Rosenblum, op. cit. 74–5, quoting from Paulus Dahse, ‘Die Goldkuste’, Deutsche Geographische Blätter, Heft 2, Band v (1882).

23 Rosenblum, op. cit., 149.

24 Ibid. 104.

25 Louis, Henry, ‘Gold Mining on the Gold Coast’, Mining Journal (1901), 1108–9.Google Scholar

26 Figures derived from Ashmead, E., ‘Twenty-five Years of Mining, 1880–1904, A Retrospective Review’, Mining Journal (1908);Google Scholar R. E. Dumett, op. cit. 66; Gold Coast. Chamber, of Mines, , Fifth Annual Report (1932)Google Scholar; Coast, Gold, Blue Books (1875–1901).Google Scholar

27 Bevin, H.J. ‘The Gold Coast Economy About 1880’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, 11 ii (1956).Google Scholar

28 Henry Louis, op. cit.

29 Gold Coast Blue Books, 1879–1889.Google Scholar

30 Rosenblum, op. cit. 2

31 McPhee, Allan, The Economic Revolution in British West Africa (London., 1971, 2nd ed.), 52.Google Scholar

32 Marx, Karl, Capital, I (Harmondsworth, 1976), 874.Google Scholar

33 Ibid. 933.

34 Ibid. 874–5.

35 Holmes, op. cit. 82.

36 Dumett, op. cit. 62.

37 Rosenblum, op. cit. 62.

38 Dumett, op. cit. 64. It should not be inferred from the low payment which was made to the local stool in this particular case that Africans were regularly being duped in these concession deals. In fact, quite the contrary was often the case, since the Africans from whom the Europeans were purchasing the concessions quickly adapted to the rules of this capitalist game. For example, it was not unknown for an African to dig holes around a property and pass them off as pit-mines, thus suggesting the presence of a gold deposit, and raising the price of the concession markedly. A second ruse was to ‘salt’ an abandoned pit-mine. A mine was ‘salted’ by inserting small pieces of gold in crevices of quartz, or by firing a gun which had been charged with gold against the face of a reef, producing specimens which only an expert could detect as fraudulent. See Bowler, Louis P., ‘Notes on the Gold Coast of West Africa’, Transactions of the Institutions of Mining Engineers, xxiv (1902–1903), 413–414.Google Scholar

39 Rosenblum, op. cit. 294.

40 For example, the high rate of turnover at the mines which was a result of the climate is suggested by the claim made in 1901 that ‘About one in four of the men who have gone out to the Gold Coast mines have either died from the effects of the climate or been invalided home dangerously ill or unable to withstand the climate’ (Henry Louis, op. cit.). And a government report in 1893 commented that ‘the general health of the European community has been indifferent, especially at the Gie Appantoo and Essaman Mines from which invalids depart every week’ (Ghana National Archives, A. D. M. 27/1/5, no. 284/62, pp. 62–3).

41 For example, the cost to the African Gold Coast Company of moving heavy equipment from the coast to Tarkwa in 1883 was estimated at £24–26 per ton, while the Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company was moving equipment to Abosso, some five miles beyond Tarkwa, at a cost of £10 per ton throughout the 1880s. Rosenblum, op. cit. 190–1.

42 Ibid. 292.

43 Dumett, op. cit. 62. See also Henry Louis, op. cit.

44 Rosenblum, op. cit. 172.

45 Henry Louis, op. cit.

46 Irvine, James, ‘The Gold Mines of West Africa’, Journal of the Society of Arts (24 02 1889), 305–13.Google Scholar

47 Griffith, W. B., Gold Coast Gold Mines 1889 (London: H.M.S.O. Paper no. 66, 1889).Google Scholar

48 Quoted in Rosenblum, op. cit. 210.

49 Cornish, T., ‘The Gold Coast: A Forgotten History’, Mining Journal (1901), 1049.Google Scholar

50 Moore, Decima and Guggisberg, F. G., We Two in West Africa (London, 1909), 123.Google Scholar Moore and Guggisberg add that: ‘There were cases of mine managers, men drawing anything between £100 and£150 a month as salaries, landing at Sekondi and Cape Coast and never getting any nearer to the mines which they had come out to work’.

51 Rosenblum op. cit. 216. Excessive drinking appears to have been a common problem at the Gold Coast mines. The story is told, for example, of the company doctor who drank 62 bottles of cognac during his 23-day voyage to the Gold Coast (Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11, 286), putting him ahead of the Guinea Coast Mining Company mining engineer who ‘drank 34 bottles of brandy, champagne and beer on his journey of 24 days, landed drunk, lived drunk, and in 21 days died drunk’. James Irvine, op. cit. 308–9.

52 Ibid. 230. Commenting on Cameron's mining abilities, Thomas Cornish, an experienced mining engineer, said that the explorer ‘spent no end of money and knows no more about mining than a pig does about his grandmother’. And Dumett remarks that: ‘As with Fitzgerald’s [i.e. Ferdinand Fitzgerald, founder and editor of The African Times, and one of the leading promoters of Gold Coast mining shares], the Cameron venture was better known for its petitions to the Imperial Government for support than for any productive achievement'. (Dumett, op. cit. 62).

53 T. Cornish, op. cit.

54 Rosenblum, op. cit. 45–6. One example of the degree of skill acquired over the centuries by the African miners is the finding by O. A. L. Whitelaw, a geologist, that ‘the method of prospecting known as “loaming” or sampling the soils to locate the occurrence of gold – a method which came into vogue with success in Australia in the early 1880s – was understood and practised by the natives’. Gold Coast Geological Survey (Memoir Number 1), The Geological and Mining Features of the Tarkwa-Abosso Goldfield, by O. A. L. Whitelaw (1929).

55 Holmes, op. cit. 89, quoting from a report by Harvey Moulton.

56 Ibid. 79.

57 Dumett, op. cit. 65–6.

58 Rosenblum, op. cit. 69.

59 Ibid. 206.

60 Howard, Rhoda, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Ghana (London, 1978), 33.Google Scholar

61 For the role of the colonial state, and more particuarly the state's use of various forms of force, in the creation of a wage-labour force for mining operations in other parts of Africa see, among many others, Johnstone, F. A., Class, Race and Gold (London, 1976)Google Scholar, especially chapter i; Onselen, Charles van, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London, 1976)Google Scholar, especially chapters 3 and 4; Greg Lanning with Mueller, Marti, Africa Undermined (Harmondsworth, 1979)Google Scholar, chapter 8; Arrighi, Giovanni, ‘Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective: A Study of the Proletarianization of the African Peasantry in Rhodesia’, in Arrighi, Giovanni and Saul, John, Essays in the Political Economy of Africa (New York, 1973), 180–234.Google Scholar

62 Earlier efforts to impose a poll tax, for example, had met with such determined resistance that the idea was eventually abandoned. Kimble writes that by 1854‘the natural reluctance to pay taxes as such was becoming equated with a distaste for British authority; and a general emotional reaction began to replace isolated individual protests. Organized retaliation followed’ (Kimble, David, A Political History of Ghana 1850–1928) (Oxford, 1963), 179).Google Scholar It was the fact that the anti-poll tax movement was becoming both organized and political which particularly concerned the colonial authorities, and added to their hesitancy to impose such a tax for the benefit of the mines. Needless to say, had such measures been imposed, and been successful in creating an industrial proletariat, the maintenance of politial stability would have become still more complicated and costly, and this too was a consideration in the colonial state's attitude towards the mines’ problem of primitive accumulation. Thus from the time of the arrival of the first European mining companies in the Gold Coast, colonial officials repeatedly expressed their concern about the effects of mining and its ‘attendant evils’ upon the peace and stability of the Colony. (See, for example, Dumett, op. cit. 54–5 and 74.)

63 O'Connor, James, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (London, 1975).Google Scholar

64 Kimble, op. cit. 181.

65 Dumett claims that the African diggers out-produced the European mines until 1889 (op. cit. 71). However, figures available in the Gold Coast Blue Books suggest that 1893 was the first year when it could be said definitely that the European mining companies produced more gold than the independent African mines. Gold Coast Blue Books (1875–1901); see Table 1.

66 Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11, 333; Rosenblum, op. cit. 265. The early years of capitalist production in Britain saw managers use similar techniques, such as the ‘putting out’ system, and the sub-contracting of work in coal mines to ‘butties’. As Braverman notes, what was lacking in such cases, as in the Gold Coast mines, was ‘the systematic and detailed control on the part of management over the processes of work’. Braverman, Harry, Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974), p. 63.Google Scholar

67 Rosenblum, op. cit. 270.

68 P.R.O., Z HC 1/5148, no. 66, Sir W. B. Griffith to Lord Knutsford, 25 June 1889.

69 Rosenblum asserts that T. B. F. Sam was the only man in the history of gold mining anywhere in the world to have profitably mined underground banket deposits using Western techniques before [his emphasis] the introduction of the cyanide process: op. cit. 289.

70 Ibid. p. 70, 73 and 220. See also footnote 29.

71 J. A. B. Horton, op. cit. 238–9. Horton described another form of African resistance to outside encroachment upon the African mines, when he wrote that‘The natives in the gold disticts are very much prejudiced against having anyone who wears European clothes, or who can speak a European language, in the gold district.’

72 Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11 2, 123.

73 Skertchly, op. cit. 280. See also Kwame Arhin, ‘Succesion and Gold Mining’, op. cit. 107, and Rosenblum, op. cit. 89–94 and 212.

74 Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11, 123.

75 Rosenblum, op. cit. 242.

76 Ibid.

77 Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11, 333.

78 ‘Sixth Monthly Report on the Tarquah Gold Mining District’ (September 1882), Further Correspondence…op. cit.

79 Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11, 333.

80 Speak, S.J., ‘The Gold Producing Regions of West Africa’, The Scottish Geographical Magazine, xviii, 33.Google Scholar

81 Burton and Cameron, op. cit. 11, 289–90.

82 See, for example, Rosenblum, op. cit. 243.

83 Ibid.

84 Burton and Cameron, op. cit., 11, 333.

85 Ibid., 126–7. The fact that such a patently uneconomic scheme could even be contemplated is evidence not only of the extent to which African workers were stealing gold, but also of the astonishing incompetence of some European mine managers.

86 Morel, E. D., Affairs of West Africa, 2nd ed (London, 1968)Google Scholar, appendix, ‘The Gold Coast Gold Mining Industry’.

87 P.R.O., CO. 879/19, Aborigines‘Rights Protection Society to the Colonial Office, 2 April 1883.

88 Rosenblum, op. cit. 294.

89 G.N.A., A.D.M. 27/1/6, No. 185/300, D. C. Vroom to the Colonial Secretary 7 April 1895.