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Colony and Metropolis: Some Aspects of British Rule in Gold Coast and Their Implications for an Understanding of Ghana Today
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
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Ghana is very small, in size, population, and economic and strategic significance. In the history of colonialism the Gold Coast was never remarkable for violent conflict, for spectacular instances of exploitation, for conflict over land or labor, or even as the subject of acute controversy there, in Britain, or elsewhere. Its independence was achieved relatively early, peacefully, over no vigorous opposition. The independence movement was markedly free of violence, extremism, or even sharp ideological conflict. Economically the peoples of the Gold Coast had a higher real income than in comparable areas of the colonial and tropical world and a greater degree of economic security. There were no giant plantation or mining activities which elsewhere have served as a focus of infection for rebellion. Its lands were not alienated; its people were not violently disrupted (at least since the end of the slave trade); and its education and civil and social services were generally superior to those in other parts of Africa. There were problems of political unification facing the new independent government, but the transition to independence was, again in relative terms, orderly, smooth, and well-prepared. There was practically no specifically racial or religious animosity or conflict. The mass bases for radical political movements—an uprooted wage-earning proletariat and/or a land-hungry or rack-rented peasantry did not exist. There was no feudal aristocracy, warrior caste, compradore or white settler group. The Convention People's Party had no political obligations abroad. By African standards, forced labor, the pass system, the color bar, and arbitrary military rule were conspicuously absent.
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- Copyright © The Economic History Association 1961
References
1 This of course does not imply that a more careful and more enterprising colonial regime, such as that of the Belgians, would or could have “succeeded.” Nothing that is said here is inconsistent with the contention that this colonial era had necessarily to finish. Belgians tirelessly and often told me in 1957 that anti-colonialism was a pure abstraction incapable of stimulating action; that there really was no such thing as an anti-colonial movement. The supposed examples were merely either simple protest reactions on specific justified grievances or the result of unrealistic sentimental policies of various other colonial powers. Urban chaos, color prejudice, rural disruption, economic stagnation—all these could be handled by a colonial rule that was vigorous, assertive, imaginative, and stressed rapid economic advance. Hence, there was no colonial “problem” in the Congo, they said.
2 As is often the case following the introduction of higher-yield varieties of some food plants.
3 Belgian activity in these fields was markedly ahead and superior to that of the other colonial powers in Africa. Unfortunately, however, Belgian political and social policy in the Congo was not of a sort which enables much of the advanced agricultural planning to be further implemented by the Congolese today.
4 The dissemination of fertilizers and the techniques of their application is usually uneconomic in the African context of small scattered cocoa groves and relatively isolated villages and patches of clearings. The same holds for the provision of insecticides and mechanized equipment and its service and maintenance. In the Belgian Congo, the introduction of scarcely any of the indicated new practices of intensification was found to be practicable outside the formal framework of the semi-collective organization of the paysannats indigenes.
5 Allowance can be made for the 1951–57 transitional period of self-government. The real extent of African power during this period was uncertain, and there was need of a period of familiarization and the stabilization and consolidation of power before full responsibility could be assumed.
6 Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morrocco, and the United Arab Republic.