Post-Abolition Forms of Servitude and the Legacy of Slavery in Twentieth Century Colonial Ghana

Abstract

Roughly twenty-five years after the abolition of the legal status of slavery, this thesis titled, "Post-Abolition Forms of Servitude and the Legacy of Slavery in Early Twentieth Century Colonial Ghana" explores the transformations within slavery and pawning, as well as the legacy of slavery in the Gold Coast Colony in early twentieth century. Current scholarship on the process of emancipation in the Gold Coast Colony, and later Asante, has demonstrated that despite the claims of success by British colonial administrators, the 1874 Emancipation Proclamation did not bring about an immediate end to slavery. Instead, it resulted in a slow death to slavery and its associated rights and obligations. Focusing largely on Akuapem, located in the Eastern Region of modern-day Ghana, this thesis argues that while slavery was slowly disappearing, pawning became a preferable alternative for unfree labour. Although, pawning did not become slavery and instead underwent its own transformations. It further argues that the status of "slave" continued to hold a social stigma in the colonial period and remained important within Gold Coast society and customary laws regarding matters of inheritance and succession. Using court records, newspapers, an anti-slavery society's periodical and the League of Nations archives, it investigates the strategies Africans adopted to adapt to the changes brought on by colonial rule, abolition, and cocoa cultivation and how these strategies drew on perceptions of rights and obligations within dependency relations between free and unfree individuals. It suggests that conflicts over rights in people, labour and land contributed to a transformation in pawning practices and perpetuated pre-abolition ideas on slave ancestry into Gold Coast social hierarchies and law during colonial period. This thesis examines a period and region in Ghana where the first- and second-generation of enslaved descendants can be found - an area of study in that has received less scholarly attention. Lastly, it combines and contributes to two current waves of historiography, that on slavery and its transformations and on its legacies.