Chapter 6 is concerned with the role of the West India Regiments in maintaining and expanding Britain’s African empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The particular focus is the 1873-74 Anglo-Asante War, the first colonial campaign to capture the British public’s imagination and one which made a household name of commanding officer Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913). The Asante were among Britain’s most consistent antagonists in the imperial theatre and held a long-standing place within European discourses of African ‘savagery’. Warfare against them was cast as an interracial struggle. However, the involvement of the West India Regiments complicated this picture and the chapter compares the depiction of the regiments’ soldiers with that of Britain’s Asante enemies and local Fante allies. It also considers the military role allotted to the West India Regiment soldiers as the campaign developed, including the fact that they were used as baggage-handlers for the White regiments during the final march on Kumasi and were not permitted to enter the Asante capital. This shows that the way in which their constrained martial image, such that they were neither White ‘soldiers’ nor African ‘warriors’, had consequences in the military field.

This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

This unpublished essay of 1946 examines the West African cocoa industry as a case study of the attempt by African agricultural producers to resist exploitation by European capital. On the Gold Coast, native farmers developed robust cocoa production without European investment or other assistance; if they were white, they would soon have become a prosperous community of independent peasant farmers, begun processing raw material, and eventually achieved Dominion political status. Because they were Black they faced unhindered exploitation, refusals to give them voice in industry or the state, and ignorance and betrayal on the part of British officials. Merchant cartels monopolized the market and suppressed the price paid for raw cocoa, farmers were prevented from hedging against fluctuations on the world market by storing their crop, and they were driven into ruinous loans by moneylenders. The farmers’ early success in boycotting the cocoa market was disrupted by the advent of World War II, when the British government established a government monopoly and fixed cocoa prices. The cocoa farmers’ self-organization should be recognized as a model for the emancipation of colonial populations.

Placemaking creates environments which are more active, memorable, and meaningful for people. It can provide several benefits, such as a high quality of life, a strong sense of community, and the creation of distinctive places. There is, however, a paucity of theoretical literature on placemaking in master-planned communities (MPCs). Therefore, this chapter develops a 4-P framework for placemaking in MPCs with the four important factors of Place, Programme, People, and Perception. It then applies the framework to a case study of Varsity Lakes, an MPC on the Gold Coast of Australia. It analyses the placemaking performance of the MPC in terms of social sustainability using the four factors and draws implications from the study. The chapter shows the importance of physical design as well as the process of placemaking to build sustainable communities. Some of the key ideas for placemaking include provision of places for social interaction, walkability, community governance, stakeholder engagement, legibility, safety, and sense of place. These ideas and the proposed framework could be relevant for the sustainable development of MPCs in the Asia-Pacific region.

This chapter explores the contrasting use of ordinances to detain two men thought to be Britain’s principal political enemies in West Africa in the 1890s. It begins with the deposition and exile of Prempeh of Asante in 1896. Under Prempeh, the Asante kingdom began to revive after its decline since the war of 1873–1874. Britain now sought to bring it under its influence, by inducing Prempeh to sign a treaty of protection. When he persistently refused to accept a Resident, colonial officials in Accra generated a pretext to invade Asante. Once there, Governor Maxwell decided to detain Prempeh, though he was no rebel, had not engaged in war, and had breached no treaty. His detention and ultimate exile was the result of pure imperial aggression and the perception that he needed to be removed to secure British control of Asante. It was unconstrained by any conception of the rule of law. By contrast, Bai Bureh, who was held responsible for the outbreak of the Hut Tax revolt in Sierra Leone in 1898, was held under an ad hominem ordinance after the Law Officers reported that he could not be tried for treason or rebellion in the newly proclaimed protectorate, not being a subject.

This chapter examines the beginnings of the use of ad hominem detention laws in West Africa, in an era during which Britain sought to expand its influence over areas in which the nature of its jurisdiction was often uncertain or contested. In the 1860s and 1870s, a number of African leaders were detained without any lawful authority, at the behest of local officials. In 1881, the Colonial Office began to insist that legal mandates for such detentions were necessary, in the form of ordinances. A raft of such ordinances followed. They were used for a number of purposes: in Sierra Leone, they were used to deal with African leaders who attacked areas under British protection, or engaged in local wars. In the Gold Coast, they were used for political purposes, notably to deal with agitators who threatened to unsettle British policy towards Asante. Detention by means of ordinance was used not only where the nature of British jurisdiction was in doubt, but also where there were doubts over whether convictions could be secured of those over whom there was jurisdiction. With little political pressure in the metropolis to counter such policy, detention by ordinance became routine.

In 1873, Ashanti forces invaded the British Gold Coast Protectorate over a territorial dispute, inflicted serious harm on the Protectorate Fante population, and took hostage several European missionaries. A British force under General Sir Garnet Wolseley was dispatched, and in less than six months, defeated the Ashanti army and burned their capital of Kumasi. The hostages were freed and the Asantahene, Karikari, was forced to sign a harsh treaty. Wolseley employed a highly-mixed force and cadre of handpicked officers achieving great results. His force utilized advanced, and often untested, technology such as Martini-Henry rifles, light Armstrong cannons, Hale rockets, and telegraph lines which played significant roles in Wolseley’s military success, as well as Gatling guns and Steam Sappers (traction engines) which did not. Wolseley had to overcome engineering and biological obstacles: building 274 bridges while keeping disease under relative control. The Battle of Amoaful, fought on 31 January 1874, in which the British employed a square formation and marched straight into thick enemy-occupied bush, proved to be the decisive battle of the war. The success of the expedition opened up political, military, and public opinion to the notion that European armies could reliably operate in the West African interior.