Accra Survey: A Social Survey of the Capital of Ghana, Formerly Called the Gold Coast, Undertaken for the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1953-1956

1960 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Edwin S. Munger ◽  
Ione Acquah
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Economic Research ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Survey

Human Sacrifice

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
The West ◽  
Southeastern Nigeria ◽  
Forms Of Violence

This chapter recounts the broader Akan world's or Asante's human sacrifice. It notes that the practice, as established by Law, was widespread in those parts of the West African coastal and forest zones largely untouched by Islam, both in powerful states such Benin, Dahomey and Asante and among non-centralized peoples such as the Igbo in present-day southeastern Nigeria. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that human sacrifice may well have increased in magnitude in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, as increasing levels of militarization and accumulation generated new forms of violence, predation and consumption. The earliest evidence for human sacrifice in the region, however, came from the Gold Coast itself, where, as elsewhere in West Africa, it was identified as an integral part of mortuary customs for the wealthy and powerful. The chapter then shows seventeenth-century accounts about the slaves who composed the majority of those immolated at royal funerals. It also explores how the self-sacrifice of certain individuals served on the early Akan states.

Saving and Indebtedness among Cameroons Plantation Workers

Africa ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Warmington
Keyword(s):  
Labour Force ◽  
West African ◽  
Economic Research ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Main Field ◽  
The West ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Economic Studies

Opening ParagraphFrom 1953 to mid-1955 a team from the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research was investigating various problems caused by the employment of a large labour force in the plantations of the Southern Cameroons. The whole survey, which it is hoped soon to publish, covered a fairly wide field of social and economic studies. The purpose of this paper is to examine only one small aspect, somewhat outside the main field of the investigations.

John Kabes of Komenda: An Early African Entrepreneur and State Builder

1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henige
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Entrepreneurial Ability

The flowering of the Atlantic trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries caused many of the West African societies of the near hinterland to orient themselves increasingly toward the coast. This new focus created new geopolitical conformations. Given the nature of the stimulus, trade and politics went hand in hand and entrepreneurial ability could reap political rewards. These possibilities were greatest along the Gold Coast and in the Niger delta where the actual European presence was small in relation to the extent of the trade.Such a trader cum political leader was John Kabes who, in a career spanning nearly forty years, established the paramount stool of Komenda, hitherto part of the inland state of Eguafo. Kabes began as a trader for the English (and sometimes for the Dutch) and gradually achieved political status which, however it may have been acquired, proved to be lasting because it was acceptable to existing political mores.Such of Kabes's activities as are known suggest that his success sprang from his ability to wring advantage from the new exigencies of the time and place in ways which enabled him to acquire legitimacy as well as wealth and influence. Although Kabes's career is uniquely documented there is no reason to suppose that it was particularly unusual in its other facets. On this argument it can suggest ways in which other West African trade-derived polities, particularly in the Niger delta, may have coalesced.

The Ounce in Eighteenth-Century West African Trade

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Exchange Rates ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Permanent Change ◽  
Local Currency ◽  
Prime Cost ◽  
A Value ◽  
Low Costs

The Ounce as a unit in the West African trade was originally applied to the goods which could be exchanged on the Gold Coast for one ounce of gold; it was generally reckoned that such goods would cost about 40s. in Europe, or half the European value of the gold. Calculations based on actual transactions show that the prime cost of an Ounce of goods was sometimes lower than this, when a favourable assortment of goods had been chosen. In the 1760's and 1770's gold was no longer being exported from the Gold Coast, but was demanded as part of the price of slaves; an ounce of gold was then valued at two Ounces of trade goods. The price of gold had risen, partly owing to a local stoppage of trade, and perhaps also because of a permanent change in the direction of Ashanti gold exports.At Whydah, the Ounce was not in use in the first half of the eighteenth century; values of goods, including cowries, the local currency, were expressed in terms of the quantity equivalent to one slave. By 1772 the Ounce had come into use at a value similar to that on the Gold Coast. The French selling cheap brandy, and the Portuguese selling cheap Brazilian tobacco, were able to operate at very low costs per Ounce.The ‘slave-price’ rigsdaler of Christiansborg, with regular exchange rates both with gold and with cowries, forms a link between the Gold and Slave Coast systems.A table of slave prices at various dates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is given in terms of Ounces and other units.

The Original Manuscript Version of William Snelgrave's New Account of Some Parts of Guinea

1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 367-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
The West ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
Principal Subject

Captain William Snelgrave's A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade, first published in 1734, is a work well known to historians of West Africa. The largest and most valuable section of it comprises a detailed account of voyages by the author in 1727 and 1730 to the ports of Whydah and Jakin on the Slave Coast, then recently conquered by Dahomey, and offers the earliest extended account of the latter kingdom to be published. The information in Snelgrave's book can also be supplemented by records of testimony which he provided on two occasions, in 1726 and 1731, before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London.Snelgrave was a slave-trading captain with, at the time of his book's publication, some thirty years' experience of the West African trade. The details of his career are documented principally from his book, which in addition to the voyages of 1727 and 1730 (which form its principal subject), also alludes to several earlier slave-trading voyages undertaken by him. Snelgrave's first voyage to Africa, in which he served as purser on a ship commanded by his father, was to Old Calabar in 1704; a second voyage to Old Calabar was undertaken in 1713, a voyage to Sierra Leone (on which Snelgrave was captured by pirates) in 1719, and a voyage to the Gold Coast in 1721-22. This is not, however, a comprehensive catalog of Snelgrave's voyages, since he also alludes to having visited Whydah on “several voyages” before 1727. Other evidence documents two such earlier voyages by Snelgrave to Whydah, in 1717 and 1725. He was apparently still alive in 1735, the year after the publication of his book, when he is mentioned among a group of people involved in legal proceedings to press claims on the estate of Patrick West, a recently deceased merchant of Antigua.

A Note on the Construction of the Gold Coast Reception Statute

1969 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-51
Author(s):  
Robert B. Seidman
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
General Application ◽  
The Common ◽  
Colonial Office

From the evidence of the minute paper which preceded the drafting of the first African reception statute, it may be asserted that the intendment of the Colonial Office officials was:(1) that the limiting date in the statute was to apply as well to the common law and the doctrines of equity as to the statutes of general application;(2) that the phrase “Imperial Laws”, refers as well to the common law and doctrines of equity as to the statutes of general application, so that the West African courts were granted a plenitude of power to determine the applicability to local conditions of judge-made law as well as legislation.It is difficult, however, to determine the intendent of the phrase, “statutes of general application”, in the premises.

PAWNS ON THE GOLD COAST: THE RISE OF ASANTE AND SHIFTS IN SECURITY FOR DEBT, 1680–1750

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUDITH SPICKSLEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
Secure Control ◽  
African Coast ◽  
European Trade ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Debt Recovery

AbstractIn the seventeenth century, Europeans on the Gold Coast took gold pawns as security for debt, but from the early eighteenth century, they turned increasingly toward the use of human pawns. This shift was the result of a transformation in levels of demand for gold amongst African sellers, most notably the Asante, who began to secure control over local gold sources from c. 1700. The change in demand for gold was accompanied by a rise in slave prices on the West African coast, but it was the indigenous system of debt recovery that proved crucial to the success of European trade.

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