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The communities along the coastline of Ghana boast a long and vibrant maritime culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region experienced creeping British imperialism and incorporation into the British Gold Coast colony. Drawing on a wealth of Ghanian archival sources, historian Kwaku Nti shows how many aspects of traditional maritime daily life—customary ritual performances, fishing, and concepts of ownership, and land—served as a means of resistance and allowed residents to contest and influence the socio-political transformations of the era. Nti explored how the Ebusua (female) and Asafo (male) local social groups, especially in Cape Coast, became bastions of indigenous identity and traditions during British colonial rule, while at the same time functioning as focal points for demanding a share of emerging economic opportunities. A convincing demonstration of the power of the indigenous everyday life to complicate the reach of empire, Maritime Culture and Everyday Life in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Coastal Ghana reveals a fuller history of West African coastal communities.
Facing Two Ways explores the interaction between European and African cultures within the setting of Ghana's main coastal communities. Roger S. Gocking focuses on the emergence of a distinctive ethno-cultural constellation that arose from the interaction between African and European cultures and between African cultures in the heterogeneous social setting of the coast. He recognizes nationalism as the most visible, but not necessarily the most important feature of life in coastal Africa from the late nineteenth century through the 1940's. Instead, Gocking emphasizes local initiatives in shaping African reactions to the colonial situation, including the policies of the mission churches, the operation of the judicial system, political life, and the institution of the family. He also discusses the escalation of cross fertilization of African cultures, known as the "Akanization" of the Southern Ghana area indirectly caused by colonialism.
This study offers a "social interpretation of environmental process" for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition. As a fishing community the Anlo have a strong attachment to their land. In the twentieth century coastal erosion has brought about a collapse of the balance between nature and culture. The Anlo have sought spiritual explanations but at the same time have responded politically by developing broader ties with Ewe-speaking peoples along the coast.
As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.
In the late 19th century, the port of Massawa, in Eritrea on the Red Sea, was a thriving, vibrant, multiethnic commercial hub. Red Sea Citizens tells the story of how Massawa rose to prominence as one of Northeast Africa's most important shipping centers. Jonathan Miran reconstructs the social, material, religious, and cultural history of this mercantile community in a period of sweeping change. He shows how Massawa and its citizens benefited from migrations across the Indian Ocean, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, and the African interior. Miran also notes the changes that took place in Massawa as traders did business and eventually settled. By revealing the dynamic processes at play, this book provides insight into the development of the Horn of Africa that extends beyond borders and boundaries, nations and nationalism.
For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history -- the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.
Everyday practice often goes unquestioned. Yet in Gold Coast society during the early twentieth century, everyday habits and practices served as an important device for both subalterns and elites to negotiate status or contest colonial control. Between 1900 and 1920, the Gold Coast was experiencing many changes that offered opportunities for actors to influence, negotiate, or contest emerging everyday habits and experiences. The monitoring and modification of everyday habits provided a way for the British colonial government to consolidate its rule in the Gold Coast following the period of military expansion in the late nineteenth century. For many Gold Coasters, increased access to education, the expansion of wage labour and the cocoa industry, led to a reconfiguration of social status and relations affecting daily life. While scholars are increasingly examining the theme of everyday practices, many tend to focus on the experiences of subaltern peoples. This study focuses instead on the role of an emerging, yet subjected, urban elite comprised of educated Africans. Caught between their understanding of African ztraditiony and Western ideas of modernity, educated African elite attempted to influence everyday experiences and habits as a way to claim greater authority and enhance their position in the colony. Furthermore, this study examines how colonial administrators, too, used everyday habits and experiences to reinforce colonial governance in Gold Coast. In early twentieth century Gold Coast society, everyday habits and practices served as a battleground for contests for authority and influence as educated Africans and colonizers narrativized their own concepts of modernity and visions of the Gold Coast's future in the pages of colonial reports, diaries, missionary correspondence, and Gold Coast newspapers. Using this and other primary source material, this thesis demonstrates how space, personhood, and food became important arenas through which various actors --African and European --vied to control, construct, and influence everyday habits and experiences in early twentieth century Gold Coast.
This timely book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Katrina Daly Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community. She offers a unique understanding of how media reflect and contribute to Zimbabwean culture, language, and ethnicity.
Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.