As was the case in other parts of the world, the discovery of gold in Wassa in the 1870s stimulated the development of infrastructure for the exploitation of this metal, as well as the implementation of governance mechanisms to keep in check a large wave of unruly immigrants. Yet the slow speed and limited capacity of such advancements in the region set West African mining apart. Many of the earliest entrepreneurs in Wassa during the first gold rush in the 1870s and 1880s were former political officials and local European traders who tried to keep up production in spite of rather costly and irregular means transportation, since their petitions for public investment and services for the mining centers largely fell on deaf ears. Still, they hoped to make a considerable return from local gold deposits using alluvial mining techniques and light stamps that were generally transported to the interior either on the Ankobra river or on the heads of female porters. The construction of a government railway was slow moving. As a result, it took some twenty years for it to connect the area to the coast. Still, this was an accomplishment that played a key role in attracting an influx of significant South African mining capital, which in turn drew in more experienced mining directors and working-class miners from Britain, South Africa, and Australia in the early twentieth century. Also instrumental to the making of the second gold boom, which was referred to as the “jungle boom” in the international press, was the installation of heavy machinery, which brought West African gold-mining capacity up to global technological standards starting in the 1890s.

Debates over the labor question show that if efficient transportation was slow to arrive, proper colonial administration lagged even further behind. Therefore, this chapter introduces the colorful group of entrepreneurs whose ideologies, politics, and cutthroat promotion helped to shape large-scale mining in this loosely governed British protectorate, located far from colonial headquarters in Accra. It attempts to capture the character and background of the most prominent mining men during both boom periods. In the nineteenth century, when lobbying for the mining sector was in its earliest stages, mining magnates held a wide range of opinions on how best to tackle the labor question.

By 1910 the port of Sekondi in the western protectorate of the Gold Coast had already been serving as an entrepôt between Wassa and the expansive Atlantic world for several centuries. Dutch officials initially took an interest in the location because it possessed a good landing beach that was fairly well sheltered from strong winds and because of its close proximity to Wassa, which was known to be a rich source of gold. Although initially only land and water trade routes led to the gold-producing interior region, under the British colonial administration a government railway was constructed, reaching Tarkwa in 1901, Obuase in 1902, Kumase in 1903, and Prestea in 1911. Unlike the cocoa and palm oil trade that determined the success of colonial ports in the eastern protectorate, to the west, the gold trade stood above all else, putting Sekondi in a dominant position as neighboring ports fell into a state of decay. It was a place of comings and goings, not just in trade (other primary exports included timber and rubber) but also in people. When the mechanized gold mines were established in the 1870s, miners from Britain, Australia, and the United States landed there in large numbers by way of a surfboat on their way to Wassa, as did most Liberian contract workers, for whom it was safer to travel along the coast by sea. By the turn of the century, Sekondi began to attract a growing number of migrant workers traveling on foot as well. Although some undertook the risk of a solo voyage, most of them arrived in Sekondi as part of a small gang led by an African labor agent. Sekondi was where agents serving the gold mines usually came to engage new recruits for contract work on the concessions or other types of wage work.

But if a port is the greatest signifier of a region's integration into the world economy, then the story that Sekondi told was one of haphazard incorporation. Although British officials had clearly invested time and money in the port city, its potential had simultaneously been tempered by mediocre expectations and missed opportunities. After a brief stay here during her travels through West Africa, the novelist Mary Gaunt described “a pretty place” straggling “up and down many hills.”

This study provides a number of important insights into the global labor history of imperial gold mining in Wassa, as well as in a wider West African context. It has shone a spotlight on West African male and female laborers and labor agents in the mining sector to highlight their contributions to and positions in the socioeconomic and political transformations that touched their societies during the first decades of colonial rule. Capitalist intensification evoked a variety of responses by local actors. We have seen that mining concessions in Wassa relied on a wide variety of labor relations to keep up production, including contract workers, piece workers and tributary workers. This study demonstrates these laborers’ active and creative engagement with casual and contract work, and the related processes. Indigenous labor agents, responsible for bringing groups of contract men to the mines, negotiated much of the politics of labor control for European employers in the mechanized gold mines. Mine managers did not fully dictate the process of limited class formation, either. Many local and migrant laborers also worked out their potential gains and losses, using their bargaining power to develop a work schedule that fit their lifestyles and priorities. The bargaining power of African mine workers in Wassa also helped them to secure regular cash advances, high wage rates, and better treatment by their employers. They employed a variety of political and economic tools to carve out the best possible future for themselves, a future that tended to involve a continued preoccupation with agricultural production. Rarely were they wage slaves, though the coercive power of the mining firms should not be understated.

Mediators, Contract Men, and Colonial Capital takes a more nuanced view of colonial commerce by illustrating the impact of political culture on economic conditions in the Gold Coast. Although the actions of foreign mining entrepreneurs often indicated a strong intention to limit the process of industrialization (especially as it related to restricting workers’ tactics), the labor market was also shaped by their lack of control and limited influence over their new surroundings. In the context of imperial gold mining, mining magnates encountered different socioeconomic and political obstacles in different parts of the globe.

As we saw in chapter 1, rapid commercial expansion and the loose political relationship between the mines and the colonial administration promoted a special brand of economic pragmatism in West African gold mining. This chapter examines the consequences of these conditions through the lens of the labor market. Although the Gold Coast's emancipation proclamation of 1874 might have helped to bring some individuals into the employment of the mines who otherwise would have been forced to work for their masters, most former slaves did not seek out wage labor as a primary means of supporting themselves. And although the mines drew the large part of their labor force from southern Ghana during the first and second gold booms, many mine managers still viewed local labor as a problem that needed solving. Local Akan men and women tended to work on a casual and flexible basis, which in the eyes of the managers was too costly and inconsistent an option. On the other side of the labor spectrum stood one particular category of employee: the “agreement boy,” or contract man. Most managers agreed that it was vital “to encourage the boys to work on contract.” As one manager in neighboring Asante explained, “We get more work done and its [sic] far cheaper [and] it gives better satisfaction to both parties.” Men working on a contract-basis were favored by the companies because they required less supervision and less immediate capital due to the extended pay system. Furthermore, over the course of time they achieved a level of skill and efficiency that was essential to underground mining. Migrant laborers made up the bulk of this group in the nineteenth century. They were overwhelmingly Liberian Kru laborers, whom foreign employers often referred to as the “Irishmen of West Africa,” due to their humble yet hard work in the burgeoning palm-oil trade, as well as their diligent service in the British Royal Navy's antislavery patrols. They became the mining sector's most valuable workers during its initial decades of existence for their ability “to handle machines, to stoke, and generally to show the other natives both how to work and to exercise care.” Nevertheless, mine managers did not always get what they wanted.

The influx of capital into the Wassa mines reached a new low in 1905, leading many mining companies to cease production, and leaving just a few more-established and technically better-equipped ventures to prove that the industry could indeed pay its way. This period marked the end of the second gold boom in Wassa. The reduction in the number of competing mines did not, however, improve recruitment in the long term. The surplus of labor that had resulted from the closing of the smaller companies was quickly neutralized, because laborers continued to opt for work in the agricultural sector, especially cocoa farming. Therefore, within just a few months’ time, the gold mines found themselves on the verge of another severe labor shortage. For 1906, Frank Cogill, the secretary for mines, reported that as anticipated, “there has been a shortage of labour, which, although not sufficient to stop the mines from working, had the effect of forcing some companies to pay higher wages than those adopted by the Mine Managers’ Association.” This was the moment when the mines and the administration came together to collaborate on a new labor experiment, one made possible by colonial territorial expansion into the north as well as the expansion of the government railway. The discovery of labor-dense pockets in the savanna region of the north brought employers in the gold mines significant relief. Recruiting from these areas, generally directly through chiefs and colonial officials, forcibly detached wages from the demands of the market. As political promises infiltrated the recruitment machinery from the Northern Territories and became a huge motivating factor for local authorities, wage rates no longer had to adhere to the laws of supply and demand. However, in spite of all the cost-cutting measures and deception involved, this pattern of recruitment became the source of sharp political and social conflict.

This study has thus far aimed to show indirect recruitment through African labor agents as a system of voluntary bondage that could be precarious for both recruits, as well as recruiters, albeit in different measure and with different implications. It has done so in order to expand the discussion of the mobilization of African workers after the legal end of slavery, which has been dominated by the theme of colonial forced labor and other forms of mobilization similar to slavery.

The story of the government transport office complicates the narrative of the Gold Coast colonial government's reluctance to assist the gold mines in Wassa. In 1903, with the approval of officials in Accra, the transport office expanded it duties beyond supplying laborers for government needs and began to assist the recruitment efforts of local mine managers, although the system of labor organization that it introduced was not far removed from what already existed in Wassa. Transport officers subcontracted gangs of laborers out to individual mines for a six-month period against a fee. The greatest change was in the powers invested in the gang leaders, which became severely limited. The leader of a transport department gang did not chose the members of his own gang; he was stripped of all judicial and financial authority; and he earned a wage strictly on the basis of merit and seniority with the agency. At the same time, there were clear signs that Chief Transport Officer F. W. H. Migeod had bigger plans for his bureau. He anticipated a radical transformation in the way of disciplining African workers in the mining sector. To the dismay of top-ranking officials his vision gradually coalesced with those of the members of the Mine Managers’ Association. In his determination to support the gold mines, Migeod gradually broke ranks with the larger colonial body.

Proposals for Colonial Assistance by the Mine Managers’ Association

With the introduction of deep-level mining, and as a result of the crisis over the shortage of Kru contract laborers, mine managers for the first time came together in a central body, the Mine Managers’ Association, in 1902. The organization rested on the leadership of the Abbontiakoon mines and the Tarkwa and Abosso mines. It was modeled after the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, because most members in Wassa at the time reportedly had “experience in the labour questions of South Africa.” It is not surprising, therefore, that paying a fee to contract gangs through the transport department was not what its members initially had in mind when they petitioned for colonial assistance in recruitment.

The large and flexible supply of Liberians laborers so prevalent in Wassa in the 1870s and 1880s was severely disrupted by the 1890s, when mine managers experienced the rupture of the trusted bonds that they had so carefully built with Liberian labor agents. Instead, new recruitment networks were forged that often entailed fewer checks and balances. The first female labor recruiters appeared on the scene during this period. Even European men now sought to get into this lucrative business. But most of all, African men from other parts of West Africa managed to successfully participate in the recruitment business in growing numbers. The government transport department's recruitment activities for the mines which began around this period will be discussed in detail in the following chapter. This chapter examines the dissolution of the dominance of Liberian labor agents and its aftermath, but especially the opening up of opportunities for new types of labor agents, including some who were ultimately too independent to really be trusted by mine management in the context of what were described as epidemic levels of desertions.

Impacts of Recruitment Bottlenecks in Liberia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Two key incidents generated bottlenecks in the recruitment system from Liberia around the turn of the twentieth century. The first was French territorial conquest into southeastern Liberia, starting in the 1890s. The shortage of Kru recruits was immediately felt in the goldmining concessions of the Gold Coast Colony and its surroundings. In 1896, Edwin Cade, the founder of the Ashanti Mining Corporation, reported to his board in London that although Kru men had been greatly sought-after underground workers until this point, it “is regrettable that the supply is running short.” He went on to explain that “the French have put an export duty on them.” French officials had first made claims to Liberian territory in 1885, coincidentally, or not, the year that marked the end of the first gold rush in Wassa.

Given the extent of influence the George North manuscript had on the Shakespeare canon, its size is relevant. At 13,000 words, “Discourse” is shorter than Shakespeare's shortest play, The Comedy of Errors (14,369 words), but it is densely packed with pre-Shakespearean passages, events, and themes, with numerous subjects that are represented in the canon. Indeed, the impact of “Discourse” exceeds that of most other known sources. Recall Kenneth Muir's focus on the use of the single word insculpt in the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice and his linking it to Robinson's translation of Gesta Romanorum (1577); compare this with the extensive correspondences between the Shakespeare canon and “Discourse,” which include dozens of parallel passages, offered in the same context and sharing multiple words, phrases, and word groupings that were not merely unusual for Shakespeare but unique in the EEBO database. In Poor Tom's reciting of a canine hierarchy (trundle-tail, mastie(ff), greyhound, spaniel, cur(rish), dog), words are not strewn about but appear, as in “Discourse,” in analogous tetrameter stanzas, making the same unusual point about hierarchies. Moreover, EEBO confirms that trundle tail was not only rare for Shakespeare but rare for everyone else as well, appearing in only one other work prior to the publication of the First Folio (1623). When we expand our focus to the rest of Jack Cade's poem in “Discourse,” we find traitors all, rebel like, pight, and flesh and fell – all phrases and terms that reappear in King Lear (5.3.274, 4.3.14, 2.1.64, 5.3.24). Indeed, Shakespeare is the only writer to use flesh and fell in the searchable EEBO texts of the seventeenth century. Other scholars have concluded that Jack Cade was the model for Poor Tom; hence the conclusion that North's description helped the playwright create Edgar's alter-ego is inescapable. Indeed, on the same page as the beginning of Cade's poem, we also find North's description of the suffering Glendower, who must “… feed on … / … mire and filthy mud: / And in the end to eat my dung / my flesh and eke my blood” (fol. 46). Again, we immediately think of the starving, filthy, dung-eating Poor Tom of the quagmire, whose flesh and blood …

A comparison of King Lear and George North's “Discourse,” especially fols 35v–37, once again suggests a relationship between North's writing and Shakespeare's. Indeed, North's conflating of a prophecy by Merlin with a description of role-reversals in a topsy-turvy world offers a primary example of King Lear's debt to the earlier text. “Discourse” may even have provided the basis for the character of the Fool, who quotes Merlin explicitly, emphasizing the sixth-century Prophet with whom he has much in common. Or, to be more precise, Lear's Fool resembles the peculiar version of Merlin described in “Discourse.” Moreover, North's poems on the hunted and famished rebels, Glendower and Cade, figured in the crafting of the hunted and famished Poor Tom. Many of Jack Cade's lines in “Discourse” also appear in King Lear, and they are frequently associated with Poor Tom.

The following excerpt is just one example of the myriad descriptions in King Lear of a world turned upside-down:

With Lear's imagining of a thief playing a justice and a dog commanding a beggar, we see allusions to Jack Cade and Edgar/Poor Tom. In the English history play, Cade, the commoner rebel and thief, switches places with Lord Say, a fair and noble justice: Cade, the play's force for chaos, sits in judgment of Say, and his verdict is beheading. Similarly, in King Lear, when the desperate, pursued, and starving Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom, he witnesses Lear's mad trial, playing the role of a “learnèd justicer” (3.6.21), though, of course, Edgar's noble impulses remain. William C. Carroll is one of many scholars who have emphasized the resemblances between Cade and Poor Tom, including in this scene: