Heritage Under Colonialism

This collection of essays examines African agency and anticolonial resistance in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on colonial records and the indigenous press, Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry reconstructs the rumour of the ritual murder of two hundred girls attributed to Asantehene Mensa Bonsu in 1881-82 and its consequences for colonial policy; the entanglement of gold mining, antislavery rhetoric, and anti-chieftaincy politics in Wassa Fiase, including the trial and exile of King Enimil Kwao; colonial responses to labour scarcity and the debate over imported Chinese labour; the protests of the African intelligentsia and the indigenous press against indirect rule; and the grassroots activism of elite women within the gender heritage of the Gold Coast. Rather than rehearsing the facts of subjugation, the essays foreground the variety, complexity, and coherence of African opposition to European colonial rule, and the strategies by which Africans defended their sovereign worldview and heritage. A study for scholars, students, and educators in African history, heritage studies, and colonial history.