A Brief History of the Railway

Secondi-Takoradi is a twin city in the Western Region of Ghana, in the Tarkwa district, where in the late 1870s Europeans first began large-scale gold mining using modern machinery– the enterprise that in fact led to the building of the country’s first railway.Footnote ⁴ The organization for the railway began in 1901 as a department of the Gold Coast Civil Service in headquarters located at Sekondi, where construction of the first Ghanian railway line had begun in 1898. Then, in 1934, the headquarters was moved to a new administration block in Takoradi, which had been completed along with a newly built harbour there. Railway and harbour both came under the joint supervision of the Railway and Harbours Administration.

The Railway Company Archives

The Ghanaian railway was potentially of great value to the social, economic, and political development of the country, and its establishment and operations were documented in various ways and to such an extent that the amount of information generated led to a decision to set aside a special two-storey building to accommodate all documents relating to the subject. This was to become known as the Takoradi Railway Archive. Takoradi itself is 221.6 km away from Accra, the capital city of Ghana; researchers may get to Takoradi by road or by air. The archive itself is very close to the sea and shares a boundary with the Takoradi harbour.

It is important to point out that although the Railway Company kept copious records, unfortunately they were not maintained in chronological order, a situation not helped by the fact that it was only after the 1960s that the separate archive building became available. The archive is stored on both floors of the dedicated building on approximately two dozen metal shelving installations spread over the two levels, ranging in size from 20–24 feet long by 10–24 feet high. Depending on their exact dimensions, each division of the shelving can house as many as from 70 to 100 files and folders. However, as a result of unfavorable climatic conditions, almost all the material is in poor condition, as we shall see.

The storage has been labelled according to activities or actions; for example: “Personnel Department, Accounts, Stores, Security, Traffic, All Departments, CME-Chief Mechanical/Electrical Department, Electrical Department, and Civil Engineering.” Most of the records refer to the period from about 1910 up to the 1950s, and the greater proportion of the files listed above deal with mechanical and civil engineering because those departments employed most staff among Railway personnel.

Data contained in the files in the archives is “uncorrupted,” meaning that it exists exactly as it was recorded by the record keepers, with no input from statisticians nor the authorities. Moreover, the contents of the earliest files date from the first decade of the twentieth century, meaning that much of the archive’s material is “pre-independence.” Most of the personnel files are arranged in sequence by end-date or year of termination, for example, those on Rows 76 and 77 titled “Hunisu” and “Fura-Prestea” contain discussions of the date and establishment of a railway shed at a settlement called Hunisu. The shed was needed to facilitate the movement of people and goods; the request for it had become necessary as a result of the operations of mining companies around the area, particularly those of the Arison Gold Mining Company and Tarkwa and Abosso Mining Company. By way of further example, the Fura-Prestea file contains correspondence between Mr. Cozens Hardy, a consultant from England, and the Gold Coast Railway Company. Among his other duties Mr. Cozens Hardy was required to survey the Fura-Prestea Line and advise on its economic viability.

Importance of the Railway Archive to Historical Research

Information in the Railway Archive highlights the importance of the railway to the labor history not only of Ghana, but of West Africa in general, and indeed of Europe. The files contain invaluable information on the lives and families of individuals employed since the late 1890s on the railways of what was then the Gold Coast and is now Ghana, people not only from Ghana and other West African countries, but Europeans too, particularly British citizens. Some names from the personnel files include J. Bard, Thomas Bebro, Josia Biney, and Patrick Ayinsah among others. The Railways Archive also features individuals from the former German colony of Togo who were taken prisoners of war during the two World Wars. The voluminous personnel and operations records of the mechanical and civil engineering files are indeed well kept, perhaps precisely because those departments employed the largest numbers. Concerning freight, the 1910s to the 1950s saw the most intense mining of minerals and their export, along with timber and cocoa, while a variety of manufactured goods were imported to the Gold Coast.

As academic researchers’ interest grows in biography and autobiography as a means of recounting the history of labor, the Railway Archive is increasingly being recognized as a rich source (Bellucci et al., Reference Bellucci, Larissa Rosa, Jan-Georg and Chitra2014). Railway workers were especially important first of all in that they were among the workers on the continent for whom detailed records were kept. Second, they became influential in labor movements all across the continent, and in Ghana particularly.Footnote ⁶ The archive material therefore offers much to assist a properly critical understanding of transport labor’s role in the institutionalizing of organized wage labor and the development of labor-related institutions.Footnote ⁷

Thus, the material in the Railway Archive is very important to the historical perspective not only on the labor history of railways, but on British imperial, African, and Ghanaian social and economic history. In fact, historians in other disciplines too, such as those concerned with epidemiological history, will be able to derive great benefit from the vast and largely intact data contained in the archives. Most importantly, the personnel files are an invaluable source to understand the history of working conditions and industrial relations of the African working class. Inevitably this history coincides with the history of capitalism in Ghana– then the Gold Coast.

Finally, agricultural and mining history, especially of farmers and miners in Ghana, cannot be disassociated from that of the railways. Indeed, the differences made to cocoa cultivation and to the mining industry in Ghana by the railway’s capacity for bulk transport over long distances is very clear and obvious from the merest glance at the Railway Archive’s records.

Conditions of Access, Usage, and State of the Archive

There is standard protocol in the use of the PRAAD in Ghana. One needs to obtain a“searchers ticket” or card which gives a researcher access to all its offices in Ghana. Incidentally, such a card cannot be used as entry into the Railway archives because the archive is not managed by PRAAD. Unlike PRAAD, accessing the railway archive could be a difficult task. The Railway Company’s headquarters is in Takoradi, but it is under the Ministry of Railways which is located in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The implication is that for one to gain access, authorization needs to be given from Accra. Despite the stringent protocol, there are instances where the management in Takoradi can use their discretion to allow access to the holdings. Since there is no designated archivist, the researchers upon getting permission may be directed to the Human Resource Manager or the Principal Computer Operator– the latter is one of the authors of this article. In most cases researchers who succeed in getting clearance are warned of the possible problems and dangers at the archives, such as lack of a catalogue and one’s safety due to the structural integrity of the building which houses the documents.

Even though approximately half its files have been destroyed in the last five years the Railways Archive nevertheless contains a great deal of information. For example, as part of the pilot digitization project, the researchers team prepared a brief summary of the collection’s holdings with digital copies of various archival files, including personnel files, correspondence, and a range of employment files for specific individuals for which researchers can access partial holdings of the archive without going to Takoradi.Footnote ⁸

Unfortunately, the roof of the building housing the documents has caved in, and the resulting inward leakage of rainwater has led to rusting away and collapse of a number of the metal shelves and the eventual destruction of dozens of metres of archive material. The information that was in the destroyed files can to an extent be reconstructed from sources in other archives, such as the PRAAD,Footnote ⁹ or from the Diaries of the Railway Company that were usually given to staff to help record their daily activities. There were also yearly diaries, kept by individual staff who consider them as their personal or private property.

The yearly staff diaries contain important and detailed information on the history and evolution of the railway system, and researchers looking for snapshot references to the early history of the railway company will indeed find in them much of great interest. In the 2008 diary, for example, can be found operational information about all 947 km of the railway network, with details of how it was divided into Western, Eastern, and Central Lines. The 340 km of the Western Lines linked Takoradi Port to Kumasi and Awaso and until the 1990s was by far the busiest; the Eastern Line was made up of the 307 km stretch from Accra-Tema to Kumasi, while the Central Line covered the199 km linking the Western and Eastern lines.

Other materials that could complement the materials in the archives and the diaries are publications of Komla Tsey, Komla Tsey and Stephanie D. Short, Raymond Dumett, and Richard Jeffries.Footnote ¹⁰ Tsey provides a detailed story of railway construction in the Gold Coast and its social and economic consequences. Even though the author did not make use of the Railway archives his archival sources on the Gold Coast Railway from Public Records Office (PRO), Kew, London (UK) could be useful to researchers. Tsey’s co-authored paper with Stephanie Short provides an analysis of the health implication of the railway construction on African and European staff as well as communities where the rail line passed through. The paper is an important addition to the social history of workers that are found in some of the files. Raymond Dummet’s paper, which focused on the design, personnel, administration, financing, and operation of the Sekondi–Kumasi railway could help researchers put into perspective the nature and operations of the railway from 1903 to 1911. The nuances that Richard Jeffries introduced in his book on class, power, and ideology is a contribution that needs to be considered in the use of the archives. As the first to be unionized in Ghana, the railway workers became very powerful both as a political and economic entity. The allusions to some of the staff in his book– such as Pobee and Biney, among others– aligns with some of the names that we found in the course of our researchers in the archives. In essence, published material such as those mentioned could serve the additional purposes of filling out the gaps in the archives or provide guidelines on how information generated from the archives could be processed by researchers.