Anticolonial Public: From Slavery to Independence in Southern Ghana, c. 1500-1957

Abstract

This thesis reveals how human geographies of the Atlantic slave trade shaped the rise and fall of the British colonial state in the Gold Coast (present-day southern Ghana). In 1957, the country of Ghana became the first state in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence from colonial rule. This study suggests that it is no coincidence that it was also the colony where the imperial state owned the lowest proportion of land—a consequence originating in spatial transformations during the Atlantic slave trade. In addition to radically altering the bonds between human beings, the slave trade changed human-land relationships. Massive internal migration encouraged Gold Coast societies to become as defensive in their political organization as they were of their land. Strong internal borders divided communities whose rulers charged rent to migrants as the cost of incorporating newcomers. Even as the slave trade decreased the population density of West Africa, internal displacement had an effect akin to population pressure, leading to a division of the commons. When British state builders arrived in the 1870s, they were surprised to find what they could only describe as the pre-existence of “private property”—that, to quote one official, “every square yard of land in the Gold Coast had its owner.” Whitehall’s decision to call this system “private property” not only prevented the colonial state’s later attempts to annex the land, but it made for a problem that persisted throughout colonial rule. The British had to govern a people whose land they did not own, on a territory entirely consisting of private estates. Their solution was to reorganize all land, sovereignty and property in the colony according to a public/private divide—in other words, to build, alongside the pre-existing private spheres, a true “colonial public.” This sphere involved public spaces for social rituals, governance, and mass surveillance. Cemeteries, prisons, sanitation programs and agricultural commons relocated what once had been domestic responsibilities into the public domain. The colonial state conferred all political and social functions on the public. What they did not count on was how these changes would give birth to a new vision of political community: an “anticolonial public,” united by the transformations of the British state. Even more than the Pan-African activism of figures like Kwame Nkrumah, popular protests surrounding the functions of public land made the colony ungovernable by the 1940s. Against studies that analyze decolonization through identitarian categories like race and nationhood, this thesis traces the evolution of a body politic—“the anticolonial public”—through changes to human geographies over nearly five hundred years.