Colonial Forced Labor Policies for Road-Building in Southern Ghana and International Anti-Forced Labor Pressures, 1900-1940

Abstract

Once the European colonial conquest of Africa was over, colonial governments embarked on economic intervention and development. G. St. J. Orde Browne, who investigated the subject of African labor for the International African Institute in 1933, concluded that communication networks, the "commonest in the form of road maintenance,"' were important to colonial economies. He contended that Africans were unaccustomed to wage-earning, and that colonial governments lacked money to pay laborers. As a result, "coercion was resorted to freely by almost all the various [colonial] administrations" to recruit labor.2 Consequently, forced or compulsory labor3 was fundamental in the implementation of colonial economic ventures, such as mining, building of roads and railways, plantation agriculture, and head-porterage.4 Despite Orde-Browne's conclusion that