‘Disrespect and Contempt for Our Natural Rulers’: The African Intelligentsia and the Effects of British Indirect Rule on Indigenous Rulers in the Gold Coast c.1912–1920

Abstract

African responses to British colonial rule in the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana) Inetamorphosed into several forms of anti-colonial protest politics. Although, for the most part, the responses were non-violent they tended to be disruptive.2 One group whose anti-colonialisln is well-known, but which relnains to be fully understood is the African intelligentsia.3 As a group, the African intelligentsia served as agents of creolization, social and economic change, cultural transmission, Euro-Christianity, and political transformation. Their cOlnposite anti-colonialism took the fom1 of petitions and delegations; trade unionism; strikes and boycotts; counter hegemonic intellectual activities in the form of poetry, novels, historical writings; and the use of indigenous newspapers as a political platform.4 The period 1912-1920 witnessed two major stresses of colonial rule in the Gold Coast whose exigencies in turn intensified the African intelligentsia's anti-colonial protest politics that had begun in the late nineteenth century. One stress, the focus of the present study, was the vigorous ilnplementation of indirect rule, that is, the colonial policy of using the African political elite, specifically the chiefs, as the main agents of local administration.5 The other strain, that has ganlered considerable scholarly attention and hence does not fonn a part of the present study, is the wartime policies of labour mobilization, military recruitn1ent, and the InaxiInization of economic resources of the colony in support of the imperial war effort. 6