The Slow Death of Slavery in Nineteenth Century Senegal and the Gold Coast

That Most Perfidious Institution: The slow death of slavery in nineteenth century Senegal and the Gold Coast Trevor Russell Getz Submitted for the degree of PhD University of London, School or Oriental and African Studies ProQuest Number: 10673252 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673252 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Abstract That Most Perfidious Institution is a study of Africans - slaves and slave owners - and their central roles in both the expansion of slavery in the early nineteenth century and attempts to reform servile relationships in the late nineteenth century. The pivotal place of Africans can be seen in the interaction between indigenous slave-owning elites (aristocrats and urban Euro-African merchants), local European administrators, and slaves themselves. My approach to this problematic is both chronologically and geographically comparative. The central comparison between Senegal and the Gold Coast contrasts the varying impact of colonial policies, integration into the trans-Atlantic economy; and, more importantly, the continuity of indigenous institutions and the transformative agency of indigenous actors. By evaluating the different outcomes of attempted reforms both in these regions in general and within sub-regions and societies, this dissertation develops a fuller picture of both slave agency and the resistance of slave owners. Slavery in these regions during the nineteenth century was characterised by a normative model in which local elites were able to resist, divert, and appropriate metropolitan attempts to end or restrict their access to and control of slaves, often with the cooperation of administrators. This contrasted with the ability of slaves to liberate themselves or to take part in mass emancipations in certain situations, illustrating the circumstances under which the political- economic hegemony of slave-owners could be circumvented. The general ‘failure’ of emancipation masks a series of compromises, negotiations, and self liberations which took place largely outside the official record. However, the continuity of indigenous social attributes - especially the social/kinship characteristics of indigenous slavery - constrained the ability of slaves to effect their liberations. This situation could be transformed only by the introduction of new economic opportunities, the decreasing reliance of administrators on slave owners, and politicisation and social change amongst slaves themselves. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction p. 7 Chapter 2: The era of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact p. 18 Chapter 3: The crisis of abolition, legitimate trade, and the p. 42 adaptation of slavery Chapter 4: Rules and reality: ante-proclamation slavery and p. 74 society on the Gold Coast Chapter 5: The grand experiment: emancipation in Senegal p. 92 Colony, 1832-1854 Chapter 6: Pragmatic policies in periods of expansion, p. 112 1854-1880 Chapter 7: Slaves and masters in the post-proclamation p. 146 Gold Coast Chapter 8: Slaves and masters in French administered p. 180 Senegal Chapter 9: Toward the eradication of the overland slave p. 199 trade? Conclusions: African continuity, adaptation, and p. 222 transformation Bibliography p. 235 3 Maps 1.1 The Gold Coast region with principal towns and polities p. 12 1.2 Senegal between the Gambia and Senegal Rivers, with p. 12 principal towns and polities 9.1 Major points of origin, markets, and routes of the slave p. 205 trade into Senegal and the Gold Coast Tables 3.1 Engages registered in Senegal Colony, 1818-1846 p. 66 3.2 Liberations after 14 years, 1831 -1841 p. 70 6.1 Individuals recruited to the Houssa Armed Police, p. 136 September 1873 7.1 Value of coffee exports, Gold Coast, 1882-1897 p. 172 7.2 Value of cocoa exports, Gold Coast, 1893-1899 p. 172 8.1 Suggested slave statistics for protected territories of p. 187 Senegal, 1868-1895 8.2 Slave liberations in Senegal, 1868-1895 p. 190 9.1 Slave related cases by charges, Gold Coast judiciary, p. 214 1871-1899 4 Acknowledgements I am indebted to many people in many ways for their assistance over the past three years; without them it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to complete this dissertation. First and foremost is my supervisor, Professor Richard Rathbone, whose intellectual guidance, friendly encouragement, and diverse contacts facilitated my research and writing every step of the way, and who has been forced to devote at least one weekend a month to reading draft chapters and writing letters of recommendation for the past year. I am also very grateful to Dr. John Parker for his continual assistance and for questioning the minutiae in many of my more difficult chapters, and to Dr. Wayne Dooling and Professor Ian Brown for their support. Several other scholars have helped me to clarify chapters and themes in this dissertation. I must especially thank Professor Suzanne Miers of the University of Ohio at Athens, Dr. Michel Doortmund of the University of Leiden, and Professor Robert Addo-Fening of the University of Ghana, Legon. My gratitude also extends to the staff of numerous archives which I have consulted over the past three years. The imperturbable Mr. Sowah and his reading room staff at the National Archives of Ghana deserve special recognition for their willingness to run up and down stairs for the numerous files I ordered each day. Similarly, Saliou Mbaye’s staff at the Archives Nationales - Senegal were extremely helpful. Peres Joseph Carrard and Paul Coulon kindly assisted me during my brief stint at the Archives de la Congregation de Saint-Esprit. I would also like to recognise the archivists at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Public Records Office, British Library, and the Archives Nationales - France and the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, A number of documents from the Basel Mission Archives were translated and provided for me by Veit Arlt, for which I am deeply indebted, others were available as abstracts produced by Paul Jenkins. Nor would it be possible to ignore the moral support of my friends and relatives in London and overseas. My wife and I spent two wonderful months in the home of Emily Asiedu in Accra, and there met many friends including Serwa, 5 the Afedu brothers, Pietro De’andrea, and Malika Kraamer. In Dakar, Abdou Aziz Ndiaye was indispensable in organising trips, explaining Wolof culture, and entertaining me in his family’s home. Finally, in London, my fellow students Esperanza Brigenzuela-Garcia and Chloe Campbell and my friend Edward Orrell have encouraged and supported me over the past three years. By far my most enduring supporters have been my parents, Wayne and Jennifer Getz, who have guided my efforts to become an academic for the past 25 years. To them, and to my sister Stacey and brother-in-law Robert, I owe an immense debt. My uncle and first historian role model Michael Pincus also helped encourage me along the way. My final word of thanks, however, must be reserved for my wife and traveling companion Jessica, who endured malaria, aggresseurs, and the cold of an English winter and even worse a 9-to-5 job in a merchant bank to get me through all of this, and who this year will become my partner in a still greater undertaking. To our newest joint venture I say, Akwaaba. 6 CHAPTER 1: An Introduction Historiography This dissertation is a comparison of the transformation, reform, and attempted abolition of slavery in French Senegal and the British Gold Coast in the nineteenth century. Comparative studies such as this one are by definition studies in opposition. In some respects, this makes it difficult for the author to achieve the specificity of a purely local study. However, the tension inherent in the contrast of places and times can also reveal overarching themes; and this, in turn, can aid our interpretation of evidence of continuity and change at the local level. In his influential 1983 synthesis Transformations in Slavery, Paul Lovejoy pointed out that the discourse on slavery in Africa has in particular lacked such studies, pointing out that this topic “has suffered from the opposite problem to that of over-synthesis... There are some brilliant local studies, which have their own implications in terms of the study of slavery in general, but these... suffer from a failure to place the particular case in the context of Africa as a whole, or even specific regions within Africa.”1 Lovejoy was writing at the crest of a renewed academic interest in African slavery. Historians of African descent such as Walter Rodney had begun to investigate the evolution of slavery in several regions of West Africa in the late 1960s2 and during the next decade monograph-length studies had been produced on servitude in areas as diverse as Zanzibar and Sierra Leone. 3 The regions of Senegal north of the Gambia River and southern Ghana, the subjects of this study, were no exception. The French priest and missionary Frangois Renault compiled a framework study of the origins and impact of French policies on slavery in Senegal while historians at Dakar’s Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire also approached the problematic of emancipation, most notably M’Baye Gueye’s seminal article on emancipation in St. Louis and Goree.4 Meanwhile in 1982 the African-American 1 Lovejoy, Paul,Transformations in Slavery, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p.xi.

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