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The Perspectives of African Elites on Slavery and Abolition on the Coast (1860–1900)

— Newspapers as Sources

STEFFEN RUNKEL

HEN THE BRITISH founded the Gold Coast in 1874, they abolished slavery and the slave trade there. Earlier, in the 1860s, W the Basel Mission Society had ordered its indigenous members to emancipate their slaves. Beginning in the 1860s, there was growing discus- sion, mainly in the coastal towns and especially among the Gold Coast’s elites, about the legitimacy of slavery.1 Relying on the contemporaneous Gold Coast press2 as a source for specific African perspectives, this essay investi-

1 The Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate comprised the southern part of today’s . See David Kimble, A Political : The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850–1928 (1963; Oxford: Clarendon, 1971): 303. For definitions of the Gold Coast’s elites, see Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, 92 and 135–41; Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West : The Gold-Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens & Oxford: Ohio UP, 1998): 98–99; Kwabena Opare Akurang–Parry, “Aspects of Elite Women’s Activism in the Gold Coast, 1874–1890,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 37.3 (2004): 463–82; and Stephanie Newell, “Introduction” to Marita: Or the Folly of Love; A Novel by A. Native (Leiden, Boston MA & Cologne: Brill, 2002). 2 Here, the nineteenth-century Gold Coast press comprises all periodicals published mainly in Cape Coast and Accra between 1874 and 1900. They were primarily direc- ted at a local Gold Coast readership. Examples are the Gold Coast Times, the Western Echo, the Gold Coast Chronicle, and the Gold Coast Independent. For a complete list, see section II of K.A.B. Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 1822–1960 (Accra: Ghana Publications, 1974). To a certain degree, the London-based 244 S TEFFEN R UNKEL ™ gates the attitudes and arguments of African elites on the Gold Coast about slavery and abolition during the period after abolition. It was only recently that research started to pay more attention to African domestic slavery and slave emancipation.3 This new interest has been espe- cially concerned with the transformation of slavery and slave labour that took place after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807.4 Research on the Gold Coast up to the 1980s did not consider such themes. Historiogra- phical texts that mentioned slavery at all described it as a benign institution and did not consider significant the social and economic changes which resul- ted from the British Colonial Government’s abolition of slavery on the Gold Coast in 1874.5 In so doing, authors uncritically reproduced the arguments of colonial authorities in 1874 and afterwards to defend the results of the Eman- cipation Act and their reluctance to deal with ongoing slavery.

African Times is also part of this Gold Coast press. Started as the publication of Lon- don’s African Aid Society, this paper circulated mainly in the towns of the Gold Coast and had the same readership as the other papers. Its first editor (1861–84), Ferdinand Fitzgerald, was born in . For further information about the Gold Coast press, see below and Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press; Evelyn Rowand, “Press and Opinion in British , 1855–1900: The Development of a Sense of Identity Among Educated British West Africans of the Later Nineteenth Century” (doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1972); Audrey Gadzekpo, “Wo- men’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957” (doctoral dis- sertation, University of Birmingham, 2001); and the introduction to Newell, Marita. All of the newspapers are available on microfilm at the British Library Newspapers repository at Colindale, London. I wish to thank Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University, for granting me access to the DIVA web page of SFSU, which contains digitized copies of the African Times from 1862 to 1874. 3 See Raymond E. Dumett, “Traditional Slavery in the Akan in the Nine- teenth Century: Sources, Issues, and Interpretations,” in West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson, ed. David Henige & Tom C. McCaskie (Madison: African Studies Program, U of Wisconsin, 1990): 7–22. 4 See Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 1983). 5 See, for example, Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, and John Grace, Domestic Slavery in West Africa: With Particular Reference to the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1896–1927 (London: Muller, 1975).