The persistent instructor: 45 years of Kofi the Good Farmer in Ghana

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Blaylock
Keyword(s):  
Instructional Film ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Government Service ◽  
Postcolonial State ◽  
Grading Scale ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Cocoa Farmers ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Postcolonial Governance ◽  
And Control

In 1950, the Gold Coast colonial government published the 52-page pamphlet titled Kofi the Good Farmer. In 1953, it was adapted into a thirteen-minute instructional film of the same name. The film, like the booklet, follows a farmer named Kofi as he demonstrates proper cocoa-farming methods. Depicted as a remote, rural farmer who becomes successful because of his implementation of foreign farming techniques and his acceptance of the colonial government’s authority to determine and control the cocoa grading scale, Kofi provides evidence of paternalism and racialist colonial rhetoric in British colonial filmmaking. However, 34 years after the making of Kofi, it was re-shown to rural audiences. Why was a dutiful colonial subject like Kofi instructing cocoa farmers over 30 years after Ghana’s independence? And what can his use by the postcolonial state tell us about national governance? This article argues that the persistent use of Kofi by Ghana reveals the entangled relationship between colonialism and nationalism in postcolonial governance. Following the subtle changes that Kofi has undergone in his 45 years of government service, I highlight how government-sponsored films construct their audiences as remote in order to reinforce the power of the state in moments of political uncertainty.

scholarly journals HONG KONG SAR IMMIGRATION IN THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICS, POLICY AND INSTITUTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
Andry Indrady
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
Power Domination ◽  
The Public ◽  
Hong Kong Sar ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Government ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
And Control

The Bureaucratic System of the Immigration Department of Hong Kong SAR is one of the legacies from British Colonial Government seen from legal and also immigration bureaucratic perspectives reflect the executive power domination over immigration policymaking. This is understandable since Hong Kong SAR adopts “Administrative State Model” which means Immigration Officer as a bureaucrat holds significant roles at both stages of policymaking and also its implementation. This research looks at transition period of the Immigration Department and its policies since the period of handover of Hong Kong SAR from the British Government to the Government of China especially throughout the concern from the public including academics about the future of immigration policies made by the Department that arguably from colonial to current being used as political and control tools to safeguard the interest of the Ruler. This situation ultimately will question the existence of Hong Kong SAR as one of the International Hub in the Era of Millennium.  

scholarly journals Motor Transportation, Trade Unionism, and the Culture of Work in Colonial Ghana

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (S22) ◽  
pp. 185-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hart
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Labor Organization ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
International Discourse ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
And Control

AbstractThe emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s highlights the wide range of strategies for social and economic organization available to workers in the Gold Coast. Particularly among workers who operated outside the conventional categories of the colonial economy, unions provided only one of many models for labor organization. This article argues that self-employed drivers appropriated unions and an international discourse of labor organization in the early twentieth century in order to best represent their interests to the colonial government. However, their understanding of the function and organization of unions reflected a much broader repertoire of social and economic organizing practices. Rather than representing any exceptional form of labor organization, drivers highlight the circulation of multiple ideas surrounding labor organization in the early decades of the twentieth century, which informed the ways in which Africans engaged in the wage labor economy and implicitly challenged British colonial assumptions about labor, authority, and control.

scholarly journals How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation

2020 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 1189-1223
Author(s):  
Jutta Bolt ◽  
Leigh Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Rural Population ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Quantitative Comparison ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Local Taxation ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Institutions ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Indirect Rule ◽  
Economic Inequalities

The institutions that governed most of the rural population in British colonial Africa have been neglected in the literature on colonialism. We use new data on local governments, or “Native Authorities,” to present the first quantitative comparison of African institutions under indirect rule in four colonies in 1948: Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Nyasaland, and Kenya. Tax data show that Native Authorities’ capacity varied within and between colonies, due to both underlying economic inequalities and African elites’ relations with the colonial government. Our findings suggest that Africans had a bigger hand in shaping British colonial institutions than often acknowledged.

Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1901: a Reappraisal

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald M. McSheffrey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
Benign Nature ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Involuntary Servitude ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The Impact

It has long been held by historians of the Gold Coast and more recently by historians of slavery and emancipation in Africa that the formal abolition of slavery by the British colonial government in 1874 had little discernible impact on that institution per se or on the socio-economic and political status quo in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. This was so, it is argued, largely because the relatively benign nature of domestic slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast tended to minimize the demand for emancipation from among the servile population in the Gold Coast after formal emancipation in 1874. A wider survey of the available evidence and a reappraisal of official sources suggest, however, that not only is this view of the consequences of abolition misleading, but it has also helped to perpetuate some equally misleading myths concerning the nature and role of slavery and other forms of servitude in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. What is demonstrated is that the servile response to abolition in the Gold Coast was much greater than historians have hitherto believed and that this was a spontaneous reaction on the part of this class against what were increasingly exploitative and oppressive forms of slavery and servitude in the nineteenth century. The latter, it is shown, was a prominent by-product of the process of socio-economic change in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast which has all but been ignored by historians, most of whom have been taken in by what is described as the official mythology of domestic slavery in the Gold Coast. This official mythology which was rooted in the belief that slavery and other forms of servitude in the Gold Coast were domestic or patriarchal in character and relatively benign in practice was, it is argued, simply an attempt to rationalize the retention of an institution which was essential to the operation of the system of legitimate trade in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The extent of the servile response to formal emancipation in 1874 was a surprise, however, to inexperienced British officials on the Gold Coast who had come to believe in their own mythology, so that abolition presented a short-lived crisis for the British colonial administration. Successive colonial administrations on the Gold Coast, therefore, were forced to all but nullify the operation of the abolition ordinances of 1874 until the advent of a colonial economy after 1900 made traditional forms of involuntary labour expendable.

THE ADJUDICATION OF HOMICIDE IN COLONIAL GHANA: THE IMPACT OF THE KNOWLES MURDER CASE

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROGER GOCKING
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The Other ◽  
Government Official ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Legal Counsel ◽  
Capital Crimes ◽  
The Right ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACTIn keeping with the law in place in the Colony of Ashanti in 1928, Dr Benjamin Knowles was tried and convicted for the murder of his wife without the benefit of a jury trial or the assistance of legal counsel. His trial and sentencing to death created outrage in both colonial Ghana and the metropole, and placed a spotlight on the adjudication of capital crimes in the colony. Inevitably, there were calls for reform of a system that could condemn an English government official to death without the benefit of the right to trial by a jury of his peers and counsel of his choice. Shortly after the Knowles trial, the colonial government did open up Ashanti to lawyers, and introduced other changes in the administration of criminal justice, but continued to refuse the introduction of jury trial. Nevertheless, the lasting impact of the Knowles trial was to make criminal adjudication in Ashanti, if anything, more lenient than the other area of colonial Ghana, the Gold Coast Colony.

scholarly journals Forced Labour, Roads, and Chiefs: The Implementation of the ILO Forced Labour Convention in the Gold Coast

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-476
Author(s):  
Sarah Kunkel
Keyword(s):  
Gold Coast ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
The North ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Indirect Rule

AbstractThis article analyses the implications of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 on colonial labour policies for road labour carried out under chiefs in the Gold Coast. The British colonial administration implemented a legal application of the convention that allowed the continuation of the existing system of public works. In the Gold Coast, the issue of road labour was most prominent in the North, where chiefs maintained the majority of roads. Indirect rule became crucial in retaining forced labour in compliance with the convention. This article focuses on “hidden strategies” of British colonialism after 1930, contrasting studies of blatant cases of forced labour. The analysis is based on a close scrutiny of the internal discourse among colonial officials on the question of road labour and the Forced Labour Convention.

scholarly journals Narrative Realism at the Interplay of Traditionality and Modernity in Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Woods and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Moustapha Ndour
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
West African ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Effects ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
African Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
And Control

This paper articulates the interactions between a traditional and modern world as embodied by the colonizer and the colonized, focusing on Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Woods (1960) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965). It argues that both narratives can be read as realist novels that counter the hegemonic power of the European empire. While Sembène engages in critiquing imperialism and its social and cultural effects in the West African community –Senegal, Mali and Niger – Ngugi concentrates on the internal problems of the Gikuyu as they respond to the contact with the Western culture. The essay claims that the sociopolitical agendas in these novels should be understood within the context of French and British colonial regimes concerned with finding a legitimizing basis and control in an era when social and political forces of the colonies were energetically asserting themselves.

W. R. Bascom and the Ife bronzes

Africa ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Tignor
Keyword(s):  
American Anthropologist ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
The Us ◽  
Eventual Return ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The City ◽  
Small Museum

Opening ParagraphIn 1938 an African building a house in the city of Ife, the cultural capital of the Yorubas and the mythical cradle of Yoruba civilisation, came upon an extraordinary cache of ancient Nigerian bronzes. In all, at least fifteen bronzes were uncovered in 1938 in a compound only 100 yards from the palace of the Oni of Ife. These bronzes were to prove of great historical and artistic significance. Until that time only two other bronzes had been unearthed in the Yoruba area, and one of those had disappeared, leaving Nigeria only a single original and a replica. In the disposition of the priceless new finds there ensued a tale of intrigue, prevarication, outraged nationalism, and narrow-minded ethnocentricism that drew into its maelstrom the British colonial government of Nigeria, the US Consulate in Lagos, and the USA's Department of State. Although the Ife bronzes, which today reside in a handsome if small museum in the city of Ife, are not so well known as, for example, the Elgin marbles or certain other antiquities taken from the Third World, the controversy surrounding their removal from Nigeria and their eventual return was filled with the same emotion and employed the same arguments heard today over the rightful location of national cultural treasures. The Nigerian dispute is made all the more poignant in that one of the major protagonists was not a money-seeking antiquities dealer, but a young American anthropologist destined to be one of the most astute and sympathetic interpreters of Yoruba culture.

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