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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2015
Scholars of children and migration have recently turned their attention to how children mediate home and belonging, especially through contradictory or challenging circumstances. For unfree children in Africa, challenging circumstances of sale or debt-bondage pose particular difficulties. Despite what historians of slavery have noted of their adaptability for survival, questions remain about how the unfree child constructs self, home, and belonging when transferred over long distances, and when age and size precludes running away as a strategy for survival or return. This article focuses on the transcript involving the testimonies of three young, unfree girls transacted in 1930 and redeemed through a district court of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast in 1941. Though their testimonies are provided within the arena of a male, colonial district court, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo reveal how their treatment, duration of bondage, and geographical and cultural distance shaped their constructions of self, home, and belonging.
Research in Ghana for this article was made possible by a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, and a Queen's University Graduate Dean's Doctoral Field Travel Grant, Huntley MacDonald Sinclair Travelling Scholarship, and Timothy C. Franks Travel Grant. The staff at the Tamale archives provided valuable research assistance, as did Ato Quayson and Samuel Ntewusu. I also would like to thank Robert Shenton, Jeff Grischow, Marie Rodet, Elodie Razy, Joey Power, Janice Boddy, and Marieme Lo for their critiques of this article at various stages. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and suggestions. Author's email: jessica.cammaert@ryerson.ca
1 Laoire, C. Ni, Carpena-Mendez, F., Tyrrell, N., and White, A., ‘Introduction: Childhood and migration − mobilities, homes and belongings’, Childhood, 17:2 (2010), 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Much work has been done on children's circulation in the Gold Coast. See, for example, I. Hashim, ‘Research report on independent child migration from northeastern to central Ghana, Research report’, Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalization and Poverty (University of Sussex, 2005) and ‘The positives and negatives of children's independent migration: assessing the evidence and the debates’, Working Paper T16, Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalization and Poverty (University of Sussex, 2006); and ‘Independent child migration and education in Ghana’, Development and Change, 38:5 (2007), 911–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lord, J., ‘Spatial approaches to the history of child labour in Colonial Ghana’, Polyvocia – The SOAS Journal of Graduate Research, 2 (2010), 31–45Google Scholar and ‘Child labor in the Gold Coast: the economics of work, education, and the family in late-colonial African childhoods, c. 1940–57’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 4:1 (2011), 88–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 F. Morton, ‘Small change: children in the nineteenth-century east African slave trade’, in S. Miers, G. Campbell, and J. Miller (eds.), Children in Slavery through the Ages (Athens, OH, 2009), 58. For more on the Gold Coast post-proclamation, where young females from the north of the protectorate made up a large portion of victims of the internal slave trade as they were believed to be less likely than male adults to escape or seek their liberation, see T. Getz, ‘Slaves and masters in the post-proclamation Gold Coast’, in T. R. Getz (ed.), Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens, OH, 2004), 115.
4 I. Hashim and D. Thorsen, Children's Migration in Africa (London, 2011), 17. For a notable exception, see F. Morton, ‘Small change: children in the nineteenth-century east African slave trade’, 55–70.
5 The village would be located in present-day southeastern Burkina Faso and Bawku, in the upper northeast region of Ghana.
6 The term ‘Busanga’ is commonly used in the colonial archives to refer to Busanse or Bisi peoples, who are Mande-speaking inhabitants of southeastern Burkina Faso and northeastern Ghana.
7 National Archives Ghana, Tamale (NAGT) 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs Commissioner of Police, Gold Coast Police (hereafter, C. O. P.), (relative file NAGT 8/2/204 Domestic Slavery, 1928).
8 Koranteng's involvement in moving the case forward is notable. For more on nineteenth-century accounts of police rarely intervening to liberate children in early colonial Gold Coast, see T. Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children in early colonial Gold Coast, 1874–1899’, in G. Campbell, S. Miers, and J. Miller (eds.), Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens, OH, 2011), 168.
9 Campbell, Miers, and Miller (eds.), Children in Slavery through the Ages, 3.
10 M. Aguilar (ed.), Rethinking Age in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2007), 1–2.
11 Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Child Slaves in the Modern World, 2.
12 Not having undergone initiation may have precluded the court's ability to perceive the girls, regardless of their chronological age, as sexual beings. Their initiated status would have likewise contributed to their infantalization or description as ‘young girls’. The case of the 15-year-old Prophetess Nongqawuse is of particular note. Bradford, H., ‘Women, gender and colonialism: rethinking the history of the British cape colony and its Frontier zones, c. 180–70’, The Journal of African History, 37:3 (1996), 366CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 M. Klein and R. Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, in P. Lovejoy and T. Falola (eds.), Pawnship Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2003), 413–14. Klein and Roberts have also noted that these ‘sales’ continued even though the White Fathers had offered to pay the tax if the families promised not to sell their daughters. It should be noted that while the White Fathers enjoyed a certain measure of success in their northwestern missions in Northern Ghana, such as Jirapa, they were never allowed to expand further eastward than Navrongo. The extent to which White Father influence in Navrongo emanated through to Bawku is indiscernible, but archives suggest Catholic influence in the far northeast was marginal at this time.
14 M. Klein, ‘Children and slavery in the Western Sudan’, Child Slaves in the Modern World, 124.
15 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
16 A. A. Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Accra, 2004), 196.
17 The focus on particular ‘markers’ of treatment based on physical abuse and/or cruelty as evidence of slavery dates at least to the 1870s. See T. R. Getz and L. Clarke, ‘Abina Mansah's 1876 court testimony’, in T. R Getz and L. Clarke, Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford, 2012), 83–93.
18 M. Rodet, ‘“I ask for divorce because my husband does not let me go back to my country of origin with my brother”: gender, family, and the end of slavery in the region of Kayes, French Soudan (1890–1920)’, in G. Campbell and E. Elbourne (eds.), Sex, Power and Slavery: The Dynamics of Carnal Relations under Enslavement (Athens, OH, 2014), 4.
19 The language of the 1874 law criminalizing slavery, for example, highlights administrators’ difficulty in distinguishing between ‘legitimate’ relationships and slavery: ‘nothing herein contained shall be construed to diminish or derogate from the rights and obligations of parents and of children, or for other rights and obligations, not being repugnant to the laws of England, arising out of the family and tribal relations customarily used and observed in the Protected Territories.’ National Archives Ghana, Accra (NAGA) 11/1, Ordinance Number 2 of 1874, 17 Dec. 1874, section III, ‘An Ordinance to provide for the Emancipation of persons held in Slavery’.
20 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 158.
21 Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana, 49. B. Der points out that ‘pawn slavery’ existed in the north of Ghana prior to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. See B. G. Der, The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana (Accra, 1998), 1.
22 P. Lovejoy and T. Falola, ‘Pawnship in historical perspective’, in P. Lovejoy and T. Falola (eds.), Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2003), 7.
23 Ibid. 5.
24 Coe, C., ‘How debt became care: child pawning and its transformations in Akuapem, The Gold Coast, 1874–1929’, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, 82:2 (2012), 305–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 F. De Boeck and A. Honwana, ‘Introduction: children and youth in Africa: agency, identity & place’, in A. Honwana and F. DeBoeck, Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (Oxford, 2005), 4. See also Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 411.
26 S. Miers and I. Kopytoff, ‘Introduction’, in S. Miers and I. Kopytoff (eds.), Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI, 1977), 67.
27 G. Austin, ‘Human pawning in Asante, 1820–1950: markets and coercion, gender and cocoa’, in Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, 188.
28 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 158.
29 B. Grier, ‘Pawns, porters, and petty traders: women in the transition to cash crop agriculture in colonial Ghana’, Signs, 17:2 (Winter 1992), 304–28.
30 Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 422.
31 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, C. C. R. Amory Asst. District Commissioner, Bawku to Chief Commissioner, Northern Territories, Tamale.
32 G. Austin, ‘Human pawning in Asante, 1820–1950: markets and coercion, gender and cocoa’, 188.
33 M. Rodet, ‘“Under the guise of guardianship and marriage”: mobilizing juvenile and female labor in the aftermath of slavery in Kayes, French Soudan, 1900–1939’, in B. N. Lawrance and R. L. Roberts (eds.), Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, OH, 2012), 87. For a discussion of the role of kinship in slavery and rights-in-persons, see, C. Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago, 1991) and I. Kopytoff and S. Miers (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, WI, 1977).
34 C. Coe, ‘Domestic violence and child circulation in southeastern Gold Coast, 1905–1928’, in E. Burrill, R. Roberts, and E. Thornberry (eds.), Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Athens, OH, 2010), 60.
35 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 87.
36 Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 411.
37 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 91.
38 NAGT 8/2/204, Domestic Slavery, ‘Memo on the Vestiges of Slavery in the Gold Coast’, J. C. de Graft Johnson, Asst. Secretary for Native Affairs, Accra, 18 Oct. 1927.
39 Ibid.
40 The defendant, Kwaku Anin, was an example of such a wealthy person. He was a kola trader and the kola trade was tied to commercial circuits of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades, and with the expansion of Islam in the nineteenth century, demand for kola nuts grew. This was especially the case in the Sokoto Caliphate where kola was an alternative to substances prohibited by Islam, such as alcohol. Along the interior trade routes, kola traders like Kwaku Anin could engage in small-scale trade. For Anin, the town of Bawku provided an especially convenient base and it was through his commercial connections in Bawku that Anin explained his acquisition of Atawa.
41 B. L. Shadle, ‘Girl Cases’: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 (Portsmouth, NH, 2006), xxii.
42 Klein and Roberts, ‘The resurgence of pawning in French West Africa during the depression of the 1930s’, 419.
43 Coe, ‘Domestic violence’, 65.
44 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 91. See also Igbafe, P. A., ‘Slavery and emancipation in Benin, 1897–1945’, The Journal of African History, 16:3 (1975), 416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45 Shadle, ‘Girl Cases‘, xxiii.
46 Getz notes that in post-proclamation times, those caught owning or trading slaves – particularly young female slaves from the northern interior – commonly claimed the girls had been purchased in the ‘traditional way’ to be a wife. At the time, the ploy was an effective defense. Getz, ‘Slaves and masters in the postproclamation Gold Coast’, 115.
47 Rodet, ‘Under the guise of guardianship and marriage’, 91.
48 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 160.
49 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, C. C. R. Amory Asst. District Commissioner, Bawku to Chief Commissioner, Northern Territories, Tamale.
50 NAGA 57/5/1, Kusasi Informal Diary, 5 Apr. 1929.
51 Adding to this image of lawlessness was District Commissioner Cardinall's report in 1927 that the Upper East, Upper West, and Northern regions of Ghana continued to act as reservoirs for slave raiding and dealing, with states such as Mossi resembling ‘islands of anarchy’. Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana, 55.
52 Morton, ‘Small change: children in the nineteenth-century east African slave trade’, 55.
53 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave dealing 1937–48, ‘Pawning of Persons as Security for Debt’, Colonial Secretary's Office, Accra, 24 Aug. 1948.
54 Ibid.
55 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Pawning of Persons as Security for Debt’, Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Office Administering the Government of Gold Coast, 16 July 1948.
56 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 M. Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (London, 1993), 36.
60 See Burrill, , ‘“Wives of circumstance”: gender and slave emancipation in late nineteenth-century Senegal’, Slavery & Abolition, 29:1 (2008), 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women, 4. Moreover, as Getz points out, for slaves of northern origin, and particularly those captured as children, little advantage was perceived in returning to kin groups that may have voluntarily sold them into slavery; their assimilated status could be deemed preferable to the risks of return. Getz, ‘Slaves and masters in the post-proclamation Gold Coast’, 124.
62 J. Allman and V. Tashjian, ‘I Will Not Eat Stone’: A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Portsmouth, NH, 2000), 46–50. Further, P. Haenger argues that such marriages ‘covered over the divergences of unequal social backgrounds’. See P. Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa, J. J. Shaffer and P. Lovejoy (eds.), trans. C. Handford (Basle, 2000), 3.
63 Allman and Tashijian, ‘I Will Not Eat Stone’, 73.
64 NAGA 57/5/ Informal Diary, Bawku, Apr.–July, 1928. Wright references incidences of women being captured after raids in East-Central Africa and being ‘tied in pairs to logs’. Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa, 36. This strongly indicates the presence of slavery or slave-like conditions for women in early twentieth-century Bawku. The term ‘logging’ refers to being imprisoned in a log for a period of time, or chained to one. Getz and Clarke, Abina and the Important Men, 43.
65 For a discussion of market women's activities in southern Ghana, see C. Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington, IN, 1984).
66 Akurang-Parry, K. O., ‘Slavery and abolition in the gold coast: colonial modes of emancipation and African initiatives’, Ghana Studies, 1 (1998), 26–7Google Scholar.
67 Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women, 35.
68 Interestingly, when asked whether he agreed to the use of translators in the court, Kwaku Anin attempted to block the court's use of a Busanga translator.
69 Campbell, Miers, and Miller (eds.), ‘Editors' Introduction’, Children in Slavery through the Ages, 1.
70 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
71 R. E. Dummet, ‘The work of slaves in Akan and Adangme regions of Ghana in nineteenth century’, in J. Spaulding and S. Beswick (eds.), African Systems of Slavery (Trenton, NJ, 2010), 70.
72 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
73 Her widowhood reminds us of what Kenda Mutongi has said of widows in Maragoli, Kenya, who in the 1940s used ideas of masculinity to their advantage to gain sympathy. K. Mutongi, ‘Worries of the heart: widowed mothers, daughters, and masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940–60’, in A. Cornwall (ed.), Readings in Gender in Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 71.
74 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
75 Ibid. The fact that the Magistrate invoked ‘human sacrifice’ in his concluding remarks shows the extent to which his pre-existing perceptions about the slave trade influenced his decision.
76 Ibid.
77 See S. Hawkins, ‘“The woman in question”: marriage and identity in the colonial courts of Northern Ghana, 1907–1954’, in J. Allman, S. Geiger, and N. Musisi (eds.), Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 118; and R. Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH, 2005).
78 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 169.
79 De Boeck and Honwana, ‘Introduction: children and youth in Africa: agency, identity & place’, 4.
80 B. Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH, 2005), 7.
81 Ibid.
82 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
83 Wright, Strategies of Slaves & Women, 15.
84 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 169.
85 See A. Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Oxford, 2005); Burton, A., ‘Raw youth, school- leavers, and the emergence of structural unemployment in late-colonial Tanganyika’, The Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 363–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. L. Hodgson and S. A. McCurdy (eds.), ‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2001); L. White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990); Thomas, L., ‘The modern girl and racial respectability in 1930s South Africa’, The Journal of African History, 47:3 (2006), 461–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allman, J., ‘Rounding up spinsters: gender chaos and unmarried women in colonial Asante’, The Journal of African History, 37:2 (1996), 195–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Waller, R., ‘Rebellious youth in colonial Africa’, The Journal of African History, 47:1 (2006), 77–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
86 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
87 Kibadu, especially, would have been cause for concern as her desire to remain with Kwaku as his wife reflects a certain level of maturity and independence. Bradford notes how the Prophetess Nongqawuse's independence contributed to her being rendered a ‘young girl’ or ‘orphan girl’ in need of protection. Bradford, ‘Women, gender and colonialism’, 366.
88 NAGT 8/2/205, Slave Dealing 1937–48, ‘Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P.’.
89 J. Cammaert, ‘Undesirable Practices’: Women, Children, and the Politics of the Body in Northern Ghana, 1930–1972 (Lincoln, forthcoming 2016).
90 Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 169.
91 See Getz and Clarke, Abina and the Important Men, 120; Getz, ‘British magistrates and unfree children’, 168–9.
92 K. Olwig, ‘Children's places of belonging in immigrant families of Caribbean background’, in K. Olwig and E. Gullov (eds.), Children's Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York, 2003), 231.
93 Grier, Invisible Hands, 3.
94 De Boeck and Honwana, ‘Introduction: children and youth in Africa: agency, identity & place’, 3.