Slavery and Reform in West Africa by Getz Trevor R.;

Author:Getz, Trevor R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2004-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

MODES OF LIBERATION

Although it can be argued that the position of some slaves was altered very little by the 1874 decrees and I will argue that the majority of “former” slaves remained local and affiliated with their masters, it must be acknowledged that some slaves chose to liberate themselves completely from their dependent relationships. This group has been the subject of a widespread but somewhat shallow historical debate on emancipation. The main argument of Gerald McSheffrey’s 1873 article, for example, was that “the demand for emancipation seems to have been both immediate and widespread [and] was not just confined to the servile populations of the towns . . . but was equally evident in the traditional communities of the interior.”88 Dumett and Johnson, partly in rebuttal to McSheffrey, posited that “only a tiny number of slaves took advantage of the colonial courts” and that the number who deserted was “relatively small.”89 However, they found it equally difficult to quantify slave liberations.

Perhaps this reluctance on the part of historians to propose numerical solutions to the question of “how many slaves” was in fact a responsible choice. Akurang-Parry, by contrast, has stirred together figures suggested by various sources for slave cases during diverse periods of time and within regions that are not analogous, and proposes the figure of 632 for the number of slaves liberating themselves by judicial means between 1874 and 1918 in the colony alone.90 He uses this information to support his thesis that the demand for and reaction to emancipation within the colony was greater than that in the protectorate. Because this research does not reflect information from a number of primary sources, Akurang-Parry has made a number of errors in producing this figure. First, he accepted all cases dealing with slavery as instances of self-liberation, whereas many were brought by witnesses or family, or discovered by the constabulary. Additionally, Akurang-Parry fails to recognize that many of these cases refer to crimes that took place outside the minuscule colony, but were brought to courts in Accra or Cape Coast because, initially, those were the only criminal courts in the protectorate and because the legal mandate of magistrates based in Accra and Cape Coast covered large portions of territory that were not part of the colony.91 The dangers of trying to quantify the unquantifiable are obvious from this.

Although I therefore decline to produce numbers, there is a large body of evidence available that can be used to reveal new information about modes of liberation. There appear to have been two principal types of liberations: those that were carried out by slaves themselves and those that were organized by their families.92 The chief magistrate presiding over the initial period of emancipation, David Chalmers, noted that “nine-tenths” of slave-related cases brought before the judicial bodies immediately following the emancipation ordinances were brought by kin, and this statistic has, unfortunately, been accepted by some historians.93 An actual investigation of cases brought before colonial courts undermines this theory. Of those cases heard by the

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