Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T14:25:33.111Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1901: a Reappraisal*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Gerald M. McSheffrey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It has long been held by historians of the Gold Coast and more recently by historians of slavery and emancipation in Africa that the formal abolition of slavery by the British colonial government in 1874 had little discernible impact on that institution per se or on the socio-economic and political status quo in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. This was so, it is argued, largely because the relatively benign nature of domestic slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast tended to minimize the demand for emancipation from among the servile population in the Gold Coast after formal emancipation in 1874. A wider survey of the available evidence and a reappraisal of official sources suggest, however, that not only is this view of the consequences of abolition misleading, but it has also helped to perpetuate some equally misleading myths concerning the nature and role of slavery and other forms of servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. What is demonstrated is that the servile response to abolition in the Gold Coast was much greater than historians have hitherto believed and that this was a spontaneous reaction on the part of this class against what were increasingly exploitative and oppressive forms of slavery and servitude in the nineteenth century. The latter, it is shown, was a prominent by-product of the process of socio-economic change in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast which has all but been ignored by historians, most of whom have been taken in by what is described as the official mythology of domestic slavery in the Gold Coast. This official mythology which was rooted in the belief that slavery and other forms of servitude in the Gold Coast were domestic or patriarchal in character and relatively benign in practice was, it is argued, simply an attempt to rationalize the retention of an institution which was essential to the operation of the system of legitimate trade in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The extent of the servile response to formal emancipation in 1874 was a surprise, however, to inexperienced British officials on the Gold Coast who had come to believe in their own mythology, so that abolition presented a short-lived crisis for the British colonial administration. Successive colonial administrations on the Gold Coast, therefore, were forced to all but nullify the operation of the abolition ordinances of 1874 until the advent of a colonial economy after 1900 made traditional forms of involuntary labour expendable.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , July 1983 , pp. 349 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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 See Miers, S. and Kopytoff, Igor (eds.), Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1977).Google Scholar

2 Ibid., ‘African “slavery” as an institution of economic marginality’ 3–81, and I. Kopytoff's defence of the functionalist approach to African slavery in his response to Paul Lovejoy's criticism in Craton, M. (ed.), Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies (Toronto, 1979), 62–77.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Cooper, Fred, ‘The problem of slavery in African studies’, J. Afr. Hist. II, I (1979), 103–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klein, Martin, ‘The study of slavery in Africa’, J. Afr. Hist. XIX, 4 (1978), 590–609Google Scholar; the multiple reviews of Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa and Meillassoux, C. (ed.), L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar, in African Economic History, v (1978), 37–61Google Scholar; Watson, James L. (ed.), Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford, 1980), 1–15Google Scholar; and Lovejoy, Paul, ‘Indigenous African slavery’ in Craton, , Roots and Branches, 19–61.Google Scholar

4 Some of the most notable of these works are Cooper, Fred, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977)Google Scholar; Klein, Martin and Lovejoy, Paul, ‘Slavery in West Africa’, in Gemery, H. and Hogendorn, J. (eds.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), 181–207Google Scholar; Terray, E., ‘La captivité dans le royaume abron du Gyaman’, in Meillassoux, , L'esclavage, 389–453Google Scholar; and Lovejoy, Paul (ed.), The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Beverley Hills, California, 1981).Google Scholar

5 For specific expressions of this viewpoint by historians of the Gold Coast, see Claridge, W. W., A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti, (2 vols., London, 1915), II, 177–86Google Scholar; Kimble, David, A Political History of Ghana: 1850–1928 (London, 1953), 303–4Google Scholar; and two recent general studies of abolition in Africa: Miers, Suzanne, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York, 1975), 157–9Google Scholar, and Grace, John, Domestic Slavery in West Africa (London, 1975), 34–8.Google Scholar

6 The studies of Miers and Grace, for example, rely almost exclusively on official sources and both cite Claridge's earlier work as an authority on the subject although it is based on the same official sources. See Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 37Google Scholar, and Miers, , Ending of the Slave Trade, 158–9.Google Scholar

7 For a concise statement of the essential elements of this mythology, see Ellis, A. B., A History of the Gold Coast of Africa (New York, 1969), 352–3Google Scholar; and Claridge, , History, II, 177–8.Google Scholar For a contemporary anthropological reworking of this myth, see Klein, A. Norman, ‘African unfree labour before and after the rise of the Atlantic slave trade’ in Foner, L. and Genovese, E., Slavery in the New World (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), 87–95.Google Scholar

8 See, for example, Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 15–17, 37Google Scholar; Miers, , Ending of the Slave Trade, 129–31, 159Google Scholar; Reynolds, Edward, Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast: 1807–1874 (London, 1974), 18–19Google Scholar; and Claridge, , History, II, 183.Google Scholar

9 Much of the most relevant missionary material is located in a special collection of correspondence in the Basel Mission Archives filed under the heading ‘Slave Emancipation Commission Correspondence: 1868–1875.’ This must be used, however, in conjunction with the reports of individual Basel missionaries stationed in the eastern Gold Coast both before and after 1874. Unless otherwise indicated, I have used the more readily available abstracts of this material in English contained in Jenkins, Paul, ‘Abstracts of Basel Mission Correspondence’ (typescript; Basel, 1970).Google Scholar The only work which makes any reference to Basel Mission accounts of the impact of abolition is Grace, 's Domestic Slavery, 37.Google Scholar Seemingly on the basis of a somewhat superficial reading of missionary documentation, Grace arrives at the inexplicable conclusion that they support the argument that there was no widespread demand for emancipation in 1875.

10 See for example, the post-mortems on abolition in Governor H. T. Ussher to Secretary of State M. E. Hicks-Beach, 21 Jan. 1880, CO 96/130 (Public Record Office, London); and W. B. Griffiths to Secretary of State Earl of Granville, 22 April 1886, Ghana National Archives, ADM 12/3/1 (hereafter referred to as GNA).

11 See, for example, the critical remarks of A. W. L. Hemming and R. G. W. Herbert in Colonial Office Minutes dated 6 February 1875 and 1 April 1875, CO 96/115 and CO 96/212.

12 See Dummett, Raymond E., ‘Pressure groups, bureaucracy and the decision making process: the case of slavery, abolition and colonial expansion in the Gold Coast; 1874’, J. Imperial & Commonwealth Hist., IX (1981), 193–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the longer original version of this paper presented to the Canadian African Studies Association Conference, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1980.

13 See, for example, the letter from the Secretary of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society to Carnarvon, 12 June 1874, CO 879/7/2775, no. 60, where it was noted that British correspondents covering the war with Asante had reported the existence of thriving slave markets operating openly within the Colony and Protectorate.

14 Carnarvon's cautious approach to abolition is outlined in several despatches to Governor Strahan between August and December 1874. See especially confidential despatch no. 163, Earl of Carnarvon to the Officer Administering the Government of the Gold Coast, 21 August 1874, CO 879/7/2775.

16 The issue first came to light with the British government takeover of the trading establishments on the Gold Coast in 1821. See Sir Charles MacCarthy to Earl Bathurst, 10 May 1822, in Metcalfe, G. E., Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghana History; 1807–1957 (London, 1964), 74.Google Scholar MacCarthy's efforts to deal with the question of slavery had come to nought, and his successor, Major Turner, reported MacCarthy had ‘trusted much to the power of proclamation and fine words’ to the effect that slavery ‘… nowhere exists to a greater degree than under the walls of our forts’. Turner to Bathurst, 1 April 1925, in ibid. 97.

16 See George Maclean to Committee of Merchants, 14 October 1837; Maclean to Committee of Merchants, 14 December 1837; and Maclean to Lord John Russell, 13 April 1841; in ibid. 151–5, 161.

17 Ibid. 151.

18 B. Pine to H. Labouchère, 1 October 1857, in ibid. 264.

19 Ibid. 264.

20 Ibid. 264–5.

21 See Pine to Labouchère in ibid. 265, who notes ‘nor have our efforts sensibly diminished slavery. On the contrary, some think…that it has increased…’ and the comments of Cruickshank, Brodie, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, (2 vols., London, 1853), 11, 244Google Scholar, to the effect that ‘Immense numbers of these slaves are being annually imported into the country through Ashantee from the countries near the range of the Kong Mountains’ and those of Missionary Baum to Basel, Annual Report for Gyadam 1857, who notes the ready availability of slaves for sale at Gyadam in Akyem Abuakwa: Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 36.Google Scholar

22 Governor Strahan to S. S. Carnarvon, 19 September 1874, CO 96/115/2733.

23 See above, note 11.

24 Further Correspondence Relating to the Abolition of Slavery on the Gold Coast, Parliamentary Papers 1875, C 1139. Strahan to Carnarvon, 3 November 1874 and 7 November 1874, enclosures no. 11 and 13 in the above despatches contain the actual transcript of Strahan's statement to the chiefs of the Western and Eastern districts on 3 and 5 November 1874, respectively. For the actual text of the Proclamation itself, see Metcalfe, , Documents, 377–8.Google Scholar

25 See Chalmers to Strahan, 24 December 1875, CO 96/122/2751 for a draft of the Masters and Servants Ordinance which was only implemented a year later when it became apparent that the response to emancipation was much greater than expected.

26 See the testimony to this effect by a number of Gold Coast officials. Correspondence Respecting the Administration of the Laws against Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Parliamentary Papers, 1891, C 6354.

27 See Swanzy, Henry, ‘A trading family in the nineteenth century Gold Coast’, in Trans. Hist. Soc. Gold Coast & Togoland, II, part II (1956), 87–121Google Scholar, who notes that evidence presented to the Madden Commission in 1841 estimated that, of 3, 600 people in Dixcove, a trading settlement in the western area of the Gold Coast, 1, 287 were pawns or slaves. See also Missionary Dieterle to Basel, Aburi, 17 June 1875, who notes a slave population of more than a thousand in the Kyerepong villages of Akwapim, and A. Mohr, ‘Report on Pawning in this Part of Akyem’, in Basel Mission Jahresbericht for 1876, who notes the extremely high proportion of pawns in the population of the Abuakwa towns.

28 Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 585Google Scholar, Mohr, Weiner and Asante to Basel, Kibi, 26 July 1875. See also Owusu, Maxwell, Uses and Abuses of Political Power (Chicago, 1970), 114–25Google Scholar who suggests that emancipation had a decisive impact in Agona, an Akan state of the central interior.

29 The Chalmers report cited by Grace, , Domestic Slavery, 37Google Scholar, to the effect that abolition had little impact on the whole was written considerably after the fact in June 1878. See Chalmers to Lt. Governor Lees, 27 June 1878, enclosure no. 2 in Lees to Secretary of State Hicks-Beach, 5 August 1878 in Further Correspondence Regarding the Affairs on the Gold Coast, Parliamentary Paper C 3386. Chalmers in fact prepared two other contemporary reports which give a decidedly different impression of what actually occurred. These documents are dated 6 March and 24 December 1875, respectively. See Chalmers to Strahan, 6 March 1875, enclosure no. 1 in Strahan to Carnarvon, 6 March 1875, CO 96/115/2733 and Chalmers to Strahan, 24 December 1875, CO 96/122/2751.

30 Ibid., Chalmers to Strahan, 6 March 1875.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 124.Google Scholar Missionary A. Mohr to Basel, 26 April 1880. Although Mohr offered this assessment considerably after the fact, he was an eyewitness to events in Abuakwa between 1874 and 1880. For subsequent reports of depopulation and the abandonment of entire slave villages in Abuakwa, see ibid. 52, David Asante to Basel, 18 October 1875; ibid. 55, Mohr to Basel, 26 December 1875; and ibid. 593, David Asante to Basel, 9 July 1875. Emancipation went on in Abuakwa long after 1875, and it is probable that the number of pawns and slaves who eventually secured their freedom may have reached 10, 000 or more. The Basel Mission congregations, whose membership numbered several thousand in the 1880s, were composed almost entirely of ex-slaves or pawns in Abuakwa.

34 Ibid. 584–86, Slave Emancipation Correspondence. Missionary Dieterle to Basel, Aburi (Akwapim) 22 June 1875; Missionary Eisenschmid to Basel, Akropong (Akwapim) 25 June 1875; Missionary Schoenfeld to Mader, Odumase (Krobo) 8 July 1875; and Missionary Zimmerman, unaddressed, Abokobi (Ga) 26 July 1875.

35 Ibid. Missionary Zimmerman, unaddressed, Abokobi, 21 July 1875. See also the evidence cited in ‘Extract of a letter addressed to the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society by the Rev. T. B. Freeman of the Gold Coast’, 6 February 1875, CO 96/115/2733.

36 Chalmers to Strahan, 6 March 1875, CO 96/115//2733. The pawn (awowa or ahoba ni), was traditionally, at least, a free person who had been pledged or who had pledged him- or herself as surety for a debt or loan. He or she was usually of the same tribal or ethnic group to which they had been pawned. For an excellent discussion of the various servile statuses in the Gold Coast, see de Graft Johnson, J. C., Assistant Secretary of Native Affairs, ‘Memorandum on the Vestiges of Slavery in the Gold Coast’ (1927), GNA ADM 11/975.Google Scholar

37 According to De Graft Johnson, an Akan could never be considered a slave in the sense that a non-Akan or odonko could. See ibid.

38 See Missionary Fritz to Basel, Christiansborg, 18 July 1875, and H. Rottman to Basel, Christiansborg, 30 June 1875, who noted that ‘In the interior, the slaves had a harder lot and the results of emancipation have been different there’: Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 588.Google Scholar

39 See, for example, Carnarvon to Strahan, 21 August 1874, in Metcalfe, , Documents, 373Google Scholar and Missionary Zimmerman, Abokobi, unaddressed, 26 July 1875, in Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 588.Google Scholar

40 See Further Correspondence Relating to the Abolition of Slavery on the Gold Coast, Parliamentary Papers 1875, C 1139, enclosures no. 11 and 13 in Strahan to Carnarvon, 3 and 7 November 1874, which include the petitions and the decision of the government not to pay compensation. See also Agbodeka, Francis, African Politics and British Policy in the Gold Coast: 1868–1900 (Accra, 1974), 56–7.Google Scholar

41 On this point, see Reynolds, , Trade and Economic Change, 153Google Scholar; and Kaplow, Susan, ‘Primitive accumulation and traditional social relations in the 19th century Gold Coast’, in Canadian J. Afr. Studies, XII, I (1978), 30.Google Scholar It was not uncommon for merchants and ‘educated’ Africans to own several hundred slaves who were often hired out to others for one-half to two-thirds of their income. See also evidence presented to the Madden Commission in Metcalfe, , Documents, 167.Google Scholar

42 See, for example, Reynolds, E., ‘The rise and fall of an African merchant class in the Gold Coast: 1830–1874’, Cahier d'études africaines, XIV (1974), 253–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 See memorandum by D. P. Chalmers, 29 June 1875, in Metcalfe, , Documents, 381–82.Google Scholar

44 See Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, I, 336.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., 11, 249–50, and also Swanzy, , ‘A Trading Family’, 45.Google Scholar

46 Chalmers to Strahan, 6 March 1875, CO 96/115/2733.

47 Ibid.

48 See Johnson, de Graft, ‘Vestiges of Slavery’, GNA, ADM 11/975Google Scholar. According to de Graft Johnson, the term odonko was unquestionably a pejorative term reserved exclusively for non-Akan slaves of northern origin who spoke ‘what to them [the Akans] was a barbaric language’.

49 See Chalmers to Strahan, 6 March 1875, CO 96/115/2733 who notes that ‘these [nnonkofoo] have scarcely at all appeared before the court’. It was not uncommon for slaves to assist each other, and numerous instances are mentioned where former slaves enrolled in the Gold Coast Constabulary helped others to escape. See Missionary Mohr to Basel, 18 January 1889, and Missionary Tschops to Basel, 23 May 1893, in Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 82–3, 308.Google Scholar Tschops mentions that the inhabitants of the slave villages on the coast often enticed carrier slaves from the interior to desert.

50 Missionary Asante to Basel, Kibi, 8 October 1876, in ibid. 591.

51 See Tschops to Basel, 23 May 1893, in ibid. 306, who identifies Apenkwa and Abokobi as only two ‘…of a dozen villages inland from Accra peopled by escaped slaves’. See also Missionary Zimmerman, unaddressed, Abokobi, 26 July 1874, in ibid. 586, who notes that Abokobi was populated largely by ex-slaves; and Missionary Mohr to Basel, 7 May 1893, in ibid. 306, who notes that the mission continued to be a haven for ex-slaves long after emancipation in 1874.

52 Although the few mission converts prior to 1874 were of servile origin, their freedom had been obtained by the Mission in the traditional manner by purchasing their freedom through redemption of their debts or, in the case of slaves, by outright payment. For further details on the Basel Mission and emancipation, see my paper entitled ‘Christianity, Colonialism and Crisis in Akyem Abuakwa: 1854–1888’, delivered to the Canadian African Studies Conference, York University, Toronto, 1975, 10.

53 Ibid. 24.

54 Chalmers to Strahan, 6 March 1875, CO 96/115/2733.

55 Missionary Rottman to Basel, Christiansborg, 30 June 1875, in Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 585.Google Scholar See also Missionary Eisenschmidt to Basel, 30 June 1875, and Missionaries Mohr, Werner and Asante to Basel, Kibi, 26 July 1875, who note that missionaries stationed on the borders of Fanteland had written to the effect that ‘many slaves had taken advantage of the proclamation to free themselves’.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 For a detailed examination of the relationship between chieftancy and servitude, see McSheffrey, ‘Christianity’. The economic impact was equally striking as many of the slaves who inhabited the villages between Abuakwa, Kwahu and Asante and who were responsible for maintaining the trade routes deserted en masse. See Mission, BaselHeidenbote, 1876, 10.Google Scholar

59 See Dieterle to Basel, Aburi, 22 June 1875; Widmann to Basel, Akropong, 25 August 1875; Zimmerman, unaddressed, Abokobi (Ga), 26 July 1875; Eisenschmid to Basel, Akropong, 25 June 1875, in Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 585–8.Google Scholar

60 Zimmerman, unaddressed, Abokobi, 26 July 1875, and Schoenfeld to Mader, Odumase (Krobo), 8 July 1875, in ibid. 585B-6.

61 A. Mohr, Annual Report for Begoro (Akyem) 1888, in ibid. 283.

62 See quarterly reports of Missionary Mullings, Kukurantumi (Abuakwa), 31 December 1885, and Missionary Anoba, Anyanim (Abuakwa), 31 December 1886, who observed that most ex-slaves stayed only for a short time on mission stations until they made their way to the coast. Ibid. 673.

63 See Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 229Google Scholar, who notes that many slaves and pawns were freed upon proof of ill-treatment or false enslavement.

64 Swanzy, , ‘A trading family’, 95.Google Scholar

65 Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 234.Google Scholar

66 See J. Binder to Mader, Ada (Anlo), 3 July 1875, in ibid. 585C. According to Binder, ‘kroo boys’ were imported to make up for the loss of the slave labour.

67 See, for example, A. Norman Klein, ‘African unfree labour’ in Foner and Genovese, Slavery in the New World, and his more recent ‘The two Asantes: complementary interpretations of “Slavery” in Akan–Asante culture and society’ in Lovejoy, Paul, Ideology, 79–89.Google Scholar

68 Maclean to Committee of Merchants, 16 December 1837, in Metcalfe, , Documents, 155.Google Scholar

69 Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 233.Google Scholar

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid. 229. See also MacCarthy to Bathurst, 14 September 1821, in Metcalfe, , Documents, 75Google Scholar, where it is noted that upon reprimanding ‘a man of colour’ for flogging his slaves, MacCarthy was told the man ‘had only followed the custom of the country’. See also Maclean to Committee of Merchants, 16 December 1837, in ibid. 134, where he mentions freeing slaves who had been mistreated.

72 Missionary Baum to Basel, 14 July 1857, in Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 36.Google Scholar

73 McSheffrey, , ‘Christianity’, 13–16.Google Scholar

74 See Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 1, 224Google Scholar, where he observes that pawning was often no more than ‘a kind of fiction to disguise slavery by holding out the idea of eventual redemption’.

75 See Meredith, George, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa (London, 1812), 22Google Scholar, and Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 1, 331Google Scholar, both of whom attribute the growth of these practices to the dehumanizing influences of the external trade.

76 Ibid., 1, 322. See also Bevin, J., ‘The Gold Coast economy about 1880’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Gold Coast & Togoland, 11, Part II (1956), 73–86Google Scholar, and Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 35–40Google Scholar, who note that the great number of people involved in the trading economy and the widespread and easy diffusion of credit led to innumerable bankruptcies which ultimately greatly increased the number of people enslaved for the non-payment of debts.

77 Ibid. 336, and on interest rates, ‘Report on pawning in this part of Akyem’, Basel Mission Jahresbericht 1876, and Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 1, 322Google Scholar, who note that interest rates were seldom less than 50 per cent.

78 See Ellis, A. B., The Tshi Speaking People of the Gold Coast of West Africa (Chicago, 1964)Google Scholar, ‘The laws relating to slavery and the custom of pawning’, 228 ff., and S. Kaplow, ‘Primitive Accumulation’.

79 Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 250.Google Scholar Many of the pawns would seem to fall into the category of akoapa, i.e. pawns become slaves or ahoba ni, lit. ‘objects left on a shelf’. See Rattray, R. S., Asante Law and Constitution (Oxford, 1929), 34–5, 37Google Scholar; Swanzy, , ‘ATrading Family’, 95Google Scholar; and Johnson, ‘Vestiges’.

80 Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 244.Google Scholar

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 According to Cruickshank, whose views are substantiated by missionary sources, the odonko was viewed as being childlike, submissive, indolent and reluctant to work ‘without being coerced’. Ibid. 246. These characteristics attributed to the odonko are similar in every respect to those described by Stanley Elkins in his classic study of the impact of slavery on the behaviour of slaves in the Southern United States. Elkins, Stanley, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar, and especially the chapter on ‘Slavery and Personality’, 81–139.

85 Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 11, 246.Google Scholar

86 Missionary Zimmerman, unaddressed, Abokobi, 26 July 1875, in Jenkins, , ‘Abstracts’, 586.Google Scholar

87 The exception in this respect is Emmanuel Terray's excellent study of Gyaman where, if anything, it has been overstressed. Terray, Emmanual, ‘Long distance exchange and the formation of the state: the case of the Abron of Gyaman’, Economy and Society, III, 3 (08 1974), 315–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Terray, ‘La captivité’.

88 Rodney, W., ‘African slavery and other forms of social oppression of the Upper Guinea coast in the context of the Atlantic slave trade’, J. Afr. Hist, vii (1966), 431–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rodney, W., ‘Gold and slaves on the Gold Coast’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Ghana, x (1969), 13–68.Google Scholar

89 Rodney, , ‘African Slavery’, 433 ff.Google Scholar

90 For a further discussion of this point, see my review of Garrard, T., Akan Weights and the Gold Trade, Canadian J. Afr. Studies, forthcoming.Google Scholar

91 Governor Torrane to Committee of Merchants, 12 June 1807, in Metcalfe, , Documents, 7.Google Scholar

92 Dupuis, Joseph, Journal of a Residence in Ashantee (London, 1824), 164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

93 Ibid., and Bowdich, T. E., Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1810).Google Scholar

94 Hopkins, A. G., An Economic History of West Africa (New York, 1975), 127Google Scholar, who argues that the transition to legitimate trade did not involve ‘a prolonged period of economic crisis principally because many areas were able to export legitimate goods and slaves side by side down to the middle of the 19th century’. Clearly, this was not the case in the Gold Coast where the external slave trade was all but eradicated after 1830. See also Wilks, I., Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), 178Google Scholar, who argues that the volume of the northern trade offset the losses of revenue from the slave trade in Asante. However, after 1807, gold not slaves was needed to purchase arms and ammunition on the coast and gold was considerably more difficult to obtain than slaves: on this point, see Cruickshank, , Eighteen Years, 1, 343Google Scholar, who claims that Asante came to prefer gold over slaves as a form of tribute in the 1830s and 1840s and that those sent in tribute often tried to pawn themselves to someone who would pay the ransom in gold to Asante on their behalf.

95 Bowdich, , Mission, 333.Google Scholar The price of slaves rose considerably as demand increased in the Gold Coast during the course of the nineteenth century. According to George Ferguson, slaves could be purchased at Atabu in 1892 for four loads of kola or approximately £4. This was four times the price quoted by Bowdich in 1817. The price of slaves on the internal market remained fairly constant in the nineteenth century and ranged from £4 to £8.

96 See the comments of Osei Bonsu to Bowdich to the effect that there were ‘too many slaves in the country and they wanted to get rid of some of them [as] there might be a deal of trouble from them’, ibid. 382–3, and to Dupuis, three years later, ‘Unless I kill or sell them, they [the slaves] will grow strong and kill my people. Now you must tell my master [the English king] that these slaves can work for him, and if he wants 10, 000 he can have them’. Dupuis, , Journal, 164.Google Scholar

97 On this point, see Chamberlain, Christopher, ‘Bulk exports, trade tiers and development: an economic approach to the study of West Africa's legitimate trade’, J. Economic. Hist., XXXIX, 2 (06 1979)Google Scholar, who notes the labour intensiveness of ‘bulk export’ trade. There are several sources which mention the large-scale utilization of slave or indentured labour in both traditional and non-traditional areas of the economy in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. For two such examples, see Duncan, John, Travels in Western Africa in 1845 and 1846 (London, 1847), 1, 69Google Scholar, who notes the use of large-scale slave labour in the transport of lumber near Cape Coast, and Apronto, E. O. (ed.), Thomas Harrison Odonkor (Accra, 1971)Google Scholar, where it is observed that Olugu Patu, the Chief of Yilo Krobo in the 1860's, ‘could send one hundred pots of palm oil to the coast on the heads of his slaves on one trip’.

98 For critical comments on Hopkins' assumptions, see Goody, Jack, ‘Slavery in time and space’, in Watson, , Systems of Slavery, 34–5.Google Scholar For a contemporary nineteenth century opinion, see Duncan, John, Travels in Western Africa, 144Google Scholar, who suggested slave labour was both expensive and inefficient and its use was defensible only because free labour was not always readily available.

99 In any case, as Fred Cooper has pointed out in a stimulating critique on the concept of a slave mode of production, this form of production is seldom if ever dominant in any society and the ‘control of slaves by different groups could strengthen different and often opposed modes of production, for example the tribute or tribute-collecting state’. Cooper, Fred in Craton, Roots and Branches, 78.Google Scholar On the concept of a slave mode of production, see Terray, ‘Long distance exchange’, and Klein, and Lovejoy, , ‘Slavery in West Africa’, in Gemery, & Hogendorn, , Uncommon Market, 181–212.Google Scholar

100 See Hopkins, , An Economic History, 125–6.Google Scholar

101 See Gann, L. H., ‘The end of the slave trade in British Central Africa: 1889–1910’, in Klein, M. and Johnson, G., Perspectives on the African Past (New York, 1975), 181–205Google Scholar (reprinted from Rhodes-Livingstone J., XVI (1954)), esp. 203–4Google Scholar; and Clarence-Smith, W. G., ‘Slaves, Commoners and Landlords in Bulozi, c. 1875 to 1906’, J. Afr. Hist., xx (1979), 219–234, esp. 232–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar