Scholars of children and migration have recently turned their attention to how children mediate home and belonging, especially through contradictory or challenging circumstances.Footnote 1 For unfree children in Africa, challenging circumstances of sale or debt-bondage pose particular difficulties.Footnote 2 Despite what historians of slavery have noted of their adaptability for survival, questions remain about how the unfree child constructs self, home, and belonging when transferred over long distances, and when age and size precludes running away as a strategy for survival or return.Footnote 3 In the Gold Coast, with the exception of nineteenth-century court cases, there is little known, and this is especially true for children sold or pawned amidst major economic transformations of the global depression. However, although only a few personal accounts from children exist, the narratives of these children and particularly those transferred from the interior to cocoa and palm oil farms in the south, can tell us much about how self, home, and belonging are constructed through geographical distance, duration of bondage, and redemption.Footnote 4
This article focuses on a transcript involving the testimonies of three young, unfree girls transacted in 1930 and redeemed through a district court of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast in 1941. From the transcript, Kwaku Anin vs Commissioner of Police, Gold Coast Police (C. O. P.), we learn that the three girls, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo, came from the village of Zatugu, located beyond the Gold Coast's northeastern border and brought across, at different times, to the British-administered town of Bawku.Footnote 5 The man to whom the girls were transacted, Kwaku Anin, was a kola trader from Ashanti who had established a commercial base in Bawku. Founding a friendship with the chief of Zatugu, Anin acquired the girls, described by the court along tribal lines as ‘Busanga’.Footnote 6 Atawa was acquired first, followed by Kibadu and Abnofo. Atawa was taken from her widowed mother, Lawunda, at approximately four or five years old, and described herself as ‘quite small’ but ‘old enough to walk’.Footnote 7 Kibadu and Abnofo's chronological ages are unclear because although the magistrate reports ages of 13 and 11, he does not specify which girl is the elder. Moreover, neither Kibadu nor Abnofo mention chronological age in their testimonies. Kibadu's testimony suggests she is the elder, living in Bawku at the time of her transaction, and having no parents or relatives left in Zatugu, while Abnofo appears as the youngest, testifying to having no recollection of her parents or where she was from, with her first memory being in Anin's compound in Bawku. All three being quite young, the girls were brought by Kwaku Anin to the southern Gold Coast. The distance from Bawku to the town of Ankasi, near Kumasi, in the Ashanti region, was over 600 kilometers. For over a decade, they worked on farms and performed domestic duties in Ankasi, returning to Bawku with Anin in 1941. Upon their return, information about Anin's alleged slave dealing was brought to police sergeant Francis Hayford Asare-Koranteng.Footnote 8 Slave dealing charges were laid by C. G. Amory, magistrate and district officer in Bawku, and over the course of the trial, testimonies were given by a range of actors, not least the three girls of focus in the case. Though their testimonies are provided within the environment of a male, colonial district court, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo reveal how their treatment, duration of bondage, and geographical and cultural distance shaped their constructions of self, home, and belonging.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: KWAKU ANIN VS C. O. P. AND UNFREE CHILDREN IN COLONIAL WEST AFRICA
The time between their transfers as young children and the trial in 1941 calls into question whether the category of ‘children’ may be applied descriptively and analytically to this case. In the nineteenth century, young slaves were often distinguished as children based on their physique, including height, teeth, and perceived maturity, but as Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller note, documentation improved in the colonial period, with children being distinguished by their chronological age.Footnote 9 The use of chronological age as a marker was more a product of nineteenth-century British conceptions of ‘childhood’ than local African constructions of age and age-relations, which were often mediated by local social and ritual markers, such as rites of passage.Footnote 10 Thus, the issue of when a child becomes an adult remains indistinct, as it differs from one society to the next.Footnote 11 In this case, it is important to note that the girls were not yet initiated – a point that is mentioned twice in the transcript.Footnote 12 Once, when Anin relates how the chief instructed him not to sleep with the girls until they were brought back to Bawku to have something done to them. And there is mention again in the magistrate's report, which states the desire of their male guardians to have the girls returned to Busanga for female circumcision, a component of initiation performed at puberty. Though the girls can be described as children at the time of their taking, it is unclear whether by 1941 they should be defined as children or youth. As we shall see, the girls' plural constructions of self and belonging complicate any straightforward categorization.
The status of the unfree girls also evades straightforward categorization. From the transcript we know only that the magistrate believed the girls were sold by the chief of Zatugu to Kwaku Anin for approximately 95 francs each. We know from Martin Klein and Richard Roberts' research on western Soudan that in the 1930s, girls were sold by chiefs with the help of administrators in makeshift marketplaces to raise money to pay tax.Footnote 13 There, the price of young females could range from 150–200 francs, but it is likely that in this case the price of 95 was due to their extremely young age and associated high mortality rates.Footnote 14 Moreover, though magistrate Amory convicted Anin of slave dealing, he contradicted himself by hesitating to declare them slaves in the full sense of the term, ‘for the accepted meaning of slave with all the harshness and cruelty it implies could not be applied to the treatment of these girls'.Footnote 15 This excuse of kind treatment of indigenous slaves worked, as Akosua Perbi points out, to justify officials' ‘soft’ positions following abolition.Footnote 16 The treatment of the girls therefore becomes an important point of inquiry for the magistrate, and is reflected in the structure of the girls' testimonies.Footnote 17 Amory's refusal to categorize them as full slaves also has much to do with officials' confusions regarding the absence of clear distinctions between categories of wife and slave.Footnote 18 It was believed women were easily assimilated into their new environments, performing activities akin to a domestic slave or pawn, rather than slave intended for trade or export. It was a belief linked to transformations following British abolition in 1807, and following the 1874 law criminalizing slavery, as officials struggled to distinguish between ‘legitimate’ relationships and slavery.Footnote 19 The Atlantic slave trade had done much to entrench and institutionalize slavery in West Africa, and when the booming cash economy, fueled by palm oil and cocoa production, necessitated a growing labor force, officials looked to the masses of newly-freed peoples along the coast. It was during this time that domestic slavery and debt bondage were reconceptualized as commercial rather than lineage-based institutions. This meant that in places like the Gold Coast, commercialization made the distinctions between traded slaves, domestic slaves, and pawns rather hard for officials to discern.Footnote 20
An additional aspect complicating their status was the question of whether the girls were pawned, or perhaps bought with the intent to pawn. Pawning, also known as debt bondage, was common practice in precolonial Ghana,Footnote 21 serving initially as a strategy for acquiring temporary additional labor. Regulated by the rules of relationships within and among lineage groups, pawns were held as collateral for loans.Footnote 22 These lineage group relations meant that creditors were from the same society as the debtor, increasing the likelihood for loans to be repaid, as families had a vested interest in the eventual return of the pawned relative.Footnote 23 Children were often chosen as pawns because of their productive work in the family and their value as a source of capital for elders and as a future security. As Catie Coe has argued of southern Ghana, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, diffuse webs of obligations between young people and adults were being negotiated, which led to new ways of organizing production and labor. Increasingly, adults tried to secure rights to children through debt, and pawning became, generally speaking, ‘debt relations with children, in which care and maintenance of children gave adults rights to children's residence, labor, marriage payments'.Footnote 24 Indeed, child pawns were valuable precisely because a society's prosperity and status was often dependent on wealth in people.Footnote 25 When a lineage was in need of money, or forced to pay compensation to someone, or unable to feed all its members in times of crisis, the lineage might transfer all of its rights in a person to another lineage in return for goods or money.Footnote 26 Though pawns were not ‘sold’, slaves were often pawned and debt-bondage served as yet another method of transferring wealth for ‘one-sided enrichment’.Footnote 27
By the nineteenth century, interest rates on debts rose to such levels that pawning essentially became a permanent institution.Footnote 28 In times of crisis, girls in the Gold Coast were often pawned and trafficked to the south by family heads in desperate need for cash to buy land or trading credit.Footnote 29 The global depression exacerbated these trends with a sharp drop in commodity prices in 1931 and 1932. Conditions were particularly difficult in interior regions, where the absence of revenue from migrant labor meant taxes went unpaid and options for credit remained few.Footnote 30 From the magistrate's report, it seems these conditions facilitated the sale and cross-border pawning of Busanga girls to Bawku. In an effort to provide context for Atawa, Abnofo, and Kibadu's sale, the magistrate noted in his report to the chief commissioner of Tamale that the ‘sale of children for money in French territory’ was ‘not at all uncommon’ and that there were ‘many such girls now living in Bawku’. He believed the close proximity of ‘French Busanga to British Bawku’ made this type of pawning ideal, as it ensured the girls were ‘well looked after’, and that they could ‘return easily to attend family funerals’ or, if ill-treated, ‘run-away back to their parents’ homes’.Footnote 31 These statements reveal magistrate Amory's bias against French administration, facilitated by borderland grievances and believed mismanagement. In his opinion, the ‘ruthlessness’ of the French in extorting and exerting the l'impot (the tax imposed in colonial French West Africa), encouraged the trade in children.
Though cross-border pawning was prevalent in Bawku, magistrate Amory refused to view the girls as pawns, noting in his final report that in this case parents were not pawning their children. Realistically, it was difficult to decipher their true status. Pawning was entrenched and, as Gareth Austin has pointed out, increasingly ‘feminized’ due to women's lack of access to land.Footnote 32 It was hardly distinguishable from slave dealing and guardianship.Footnote 33 Though the Gold Coast administration considered pawning a form of slavery, outlawed by the Emancipation Ordinance of 1874, few cases of pawning were brought to trial since ‘colonial officials were concerned about overly disrupting the existing social order’.Footnote 34 Similarly, in French Soudan, administrators were not opposed to pawning or debt-bondage as they saw it as a social tool to control the circulation of an ‘increasingly juvenile and female workforce’.Footnote 35 It was a conveniently ambiguous middle ground between ‘free labor’ and slavery.Footnote 36 And as a result, many officials simply chose to turn a blind eye.Footnote 37 In the Gold Coast, this attitude was enshrined in 1927, by secretary for native affairs, J. C. de Graft Johnson:
There is probably no condition in life more hateful to man than slavery – even in this country where the domestic slave is not necessarily a drudge and has many privileges which some free people in other countries might envy. It is quite possible that primitive communities like those in the Northern Territories might be disturbed by an investigation regarding the extent to which slavery still forms a part of the local domestic arrangement or political economy. It may break up compounds or weaken the authority of the local Chiefs and it seems doubtful whether any real benefit will be gained by anyone.Footnote 38
De Graft Johnson's reluctance to intervene extended to the persistence of pawning as well, adding that while pawning was ‘still practiced to some extent’ there was ‘no criminal intention behind it’ and it would diminish in time.Footnote 39 De Graft Johnson was no ordinary British administrator, but rather an important African intellectual and scion of an influential Eurafrican family. This stated commitment to non-intervention makes the Kwaku Anin vs C. O. P. case so unique, begging the question of what provoked magistrate Amory to charge and convict Anin.
Magistrate Amory believed the girls were not pawned, but rather sold by the chief of Zatugu who, by the time of the trial, was deceased. His death provided Anin an advantage, as the chief was not alive to corroborate or discredit his story. In his defense, he argued the 95 francs he paid for each girl was in bride-wealth payments and that because he was an Asante foreigner in the northeast, he could not pay the bride-wealth in cattle.Footnote 40 Anin's defense was clever, since bride-wealth was becoming increasingly liquid throughout colonial Africa. In Kenya, for example, bride-wealth inflation and the uneven spread of wealth in the cash economy had sparked a marriage crisis.Footnote 41 However, this liquidity also made it harder to distinguish bride-wealth payments from loans and commodity transactions.Footnote 42 In the Gold Coast, for example, marriage began to look more like pawning.Footnote 43 In turn, pawning persisted in some areas of the interior ‘under the guise of marriage’.Footnote 44 Despite Anin's lengthy testimony outlining payments in cash and gifts, magistrate Amory, like many officials at the time, persisted in his belief that the transfer of livestock was essential to the making of marriage.Footnote 45 Thus, he dismissed Anin's claim, believing rather that the transaction was indeed a sale.Footnote 46
Amory's dismissal of Anin's bride-wealth defense demonstrates how the magistrate's perceptions were shaped by his role as administrator, calling into question his fitness in adjudicating this extremely complex case.Footnote 47 The Gold Coast was a junior station, and it is probable that magistrate Amory was a lower or middle-ranking official, especially since he was stationed in the Northern Territories. As such, he probably had little understanding of social status and only a vague knowledge of English common law.Footnote 48 Though he believed the girls were sold, he felt Anin had acquired them with the ultimate aim to, ‘dispose of them as surety for a “never-to-be-repaid-loan” to someone in Ashanti for some substantial sum’.Footnote 49 Here, he frames the transaction as a sale and an investment, which can only be understood by his experience administering Bawku, a growing commercial trading town. Situated along the kola, salt, and cattle trade routes, Bawku served as a base for many West African traders, like Anin. By the 1920s, the town was booming with an excess of building permits, making it an attractive place for migrants.Footnote 50 Kusasi, Mamprusi, Mossi, Hausa, and others – including Busanga and Yanga peoples – crisscrossed the fluid colonial borders of the northeast, participating in trade, seasonal migration, or in the case of those under French administration, tax evasion. The result was that by the 1930s, Bawku was constructed in colonial imagination as lawless.Footnote 51
Amory's claim that Anin viewed the girls as an investment for a never to be repaid loan explains why the girls were taken at such a young age, before they were of productive or reproductive value. Traders in nineteenth-century East Africa, for example, acquired child slaves not only for their labor, but also as small capital, which could then be exchanged, sold, or used to balance an existing debt.Footnote 52 In this sense, his view of Anin was a product of 1940s suspicions among officials that southern men were engaging in illegal recruitment and transportation of labor from the Northern Territories to the southern Gold Coast.Footnote 53 This increasing concern was spurred on by the prevalence of cases involving the purchase, smuggling, or sale of northerners. This suspicion persisted into the 1940s when Gold Coast officials lamented ‘small boys’ were falling prey to ‘unscrupulous people from the South’ engaged in illegal recruiting of labor.Footnote 54 As late as 1948, the colonial state admitted that pawning still existed, as did a ‘a trade in children from the Northern Territories’.Footnote 55
THE STRUCTURE OF ATAWA, ABNOFO, AND KIBADU'S TESTIMONIES
The testimonies of Atawa, Abnofo, and Kibadu were shaped by the setting of the male, colonial court, exemplified in the structure of the girls’ responses: disjointed and abrupt, yet transcribed in paragraph form so as to convey unbroken testimony. The absence of the magistrate's questions makes it appear as though their testimonies were self-guided, and not influenced or coerced by the court. Despite this questioning, similarities exist between the girls’ testimonies and most importantly their references to treatment while in Ankasi. A portion of Atawa's testimony, for example, describes her identity and treatment.
I am a girl also known as Akwesia Sekyereh living in Ankasi, near Kumasi. I work in the farm. I know the accused Kwaku Anin by name: I have known him for a long time; he came to my country. He took kola there … I lived [in Ankasi] with the accused's senior wife. I used to do farm work; I got no pay. I got good food and I was well treated: I was given clothes – two cover cloths – I was occasionally beaten if I did not do my work properly.Footnote 56
These statements frame the beginning and close of her testimony, but in the middle, she provides nuance to these statements, as she discusses her taking and cross-border journey with Anin to Bawku, in narrative form.
Two men came to get l'impôt money in our house. My mother's foot had swollen: She could not go out to get food. ‘How can I get money to pay l'impôt?’ she said. The two men returned: the following day the chief's son came and took me to the chief's house; I was taken by force: I saw the accused with some kola. In three days’ time I was given to the accused to go to the Gold Coast. I was very sad to go; I saw that I had done nothing wrong yet I was taken to chiefs [sic] house. We left Zatugu and came to Bawku. I was quite small, but I was old enough to walk.Footnote 57
The emotional detail of her narrative is striking; she may be answering a question directed by the magistrate regarding her taking, but the transcription suggests a fluid response, peppered with the emotional experiences of her transfer. Though she does not discuss her transaction, she does imply she was taken because her mother could not pay l'impot. This grounds her claim of forced taking while also pointing directly to the chief of Zatugu's culpability. Similarly, Abnofo's testimony is structured around the question of treatment, but because she was taken so young, she is unable to recollect how, when, or at what age she was taken.
I am a girl living in Ankasi. I know the accused. I know Atawa Busanga. I did not know where I came from, or my father's name; or my mother's name. My first recollection was being in the accused compound in Bawku. Then we went to Ankasi. I am Busanga by tribe: it was only recently I was told this by my landlord when we came to Bawku … I am not unhappy. I did not used to cry: no one used to make fun of me.
Abnofo's testimony is different from that of Atawa, who focuses on the forceful nature of her taking. In contrast, Abnofo emphasizes her young age, explaining she was not aware she was Busanga. She does not articulate mistreatment and in this way, her testimony mirrors that of Kibadu, whose description of her experiences in Ankasi, and particularly her treatment at the hands of Anin, differs markedly from Atawa. Like the other girls, Kibadu seems to be directed by the court to define her identity, stating ‘I am a Bawku girl’ and ‘I am a Busanga by tribe’ which, again, suggests the court's fixation with tribal identity as a tool for discerning self and home. However, her broader testimony complicates this tribal construction of self and home by emphasizing her disinterest in her father and mother and her desire to remain in the south, with Anin.
I am a girl living in Ankasi. I used to help in farming. I know the accused Kwaku Anin by name. He is my husband. I cannot remember how long I have been with him. I am a Bawku girl: my mother brought me forth here [Bawku]. I did not know who my mother is or was; -my father is called Kuka. I should not recognize my father if I saw him. I lived for a long time in Bawku before going to Ankasi. I am a Busanga by tribe. I know myself that I am a Busanga, but I cannot speak Busanga. I like Ankasi more than Bawku. I have been well treated by Kwaku I am not a bit curious to know about my father and mother in Bawku. I want to follow Kwaku.Footnote 58
Kibadu's testimony hinges on her claim that Anin is her husband and her forgetting of how long she had been with him demonstrates an entrenched dependency. Though we are uncertain whether Kibadu was slave or pawn, her desire to position herself as a wife is an example of how women slaves sometimes conceived bondage as a condition of junior kinship.Footnote 59 Seeking protection as a ‘wife’ can be read as a strategy used by Kibadu, which negates the question of whether or not she was actually his wife.Footnote 60 Though it is impossible to know if alternative options were available, it is likely that Kibadu viewed her situation as a choice between Anin and redemption to an unknown male relative, thus highlighting Marcia Wright's caution against romanticizing women slaves’ agency, since women were often limited to choosing among male protectors.Footnote 61 But Kibadu's desire to remain with Anin was not simply a choice of wife over ‘daughter’ to an unknown male relative. Marriage to Anin – that is, marriage between a free man and a pawn (awowa awadie) or a slave (afona awadie) – would have provided her wifehood/childbearing status which, at least in early twentieth-century Asante, was imbued by notions of honor, respectability, physical, and spiritual protections.Footnote 62 By the 1930s, husbands acquired greater control over wives’ labor, and distinctions between pawn and free wife collapsed.Footnote 63 It remains likely Kibadu attempted to avoid a potentially more dangerous situation of paternal control, since informal district diaries from the early twentieth century reveal incidences of women being held in chains for months and women being ‘logged’ (tied to trees as a method of punishment) in Bawku.Footnote 64 To this end, remaining in Ankasi could promise some modicum of personal control over her treatment, mobility, and livelihood, and greater opportunities for market activity and capital accumulation.Footnote 65 If Kibadu truly viewed herself as junior kin, and the institution of marriage as a ‘negotiation’ of her position, then the prospect of returning to the northeast, a region susceptible to famine and drought, was decidedly less attractive.Footnote 66
CONSTRUCTIONS OF SELF
Similarities can be found in the girls’ varying recollections of treatment at the hands of Anin, but it remains unclear why their constructions of self – and in Kibadu's case, home – vary so considerably. Here, the length of the journey is important to complicating their testimonies, as certain facts of their experiences in the south suggest a plurality of identities. It must be remembered that the girls were taken to the south in the early 1930s and when they were very young, traveling a considerable distance from their natal homes, and crossing geographical and cultural boundaries. The length of the journey combined with the duration of their bondage resulted in their adoption of necessities for assimilation to their new situation. For example, each of the girls renamed themselves, adopting names common in the south. Atawa became Akwesia Sekyereh, Abnofo became Ama Dankyeh, and Kibadu became Ama Yeboa. Renaming was about incorporation and the partial masking of one's alien status; a necessary response to new situations and environments.Footnote 67 They also adopted the southern dialects of Akan. Interestingly, the mention of Abnofo's use of Twi in her testimony – Twi being a literary dialect of Akan – was possibly a reference to literacy acquired by Abnofo while in the south. The use of translators was integral to their communication in the Bawku court, as each girl had forgotten to speak Bissi, a Mande language referred to in the transcript as Busanga.Footnote 68 The girls’ adoption of southern names and use of southern languages became very important facts in the case, as they complicated the magistrate's fixation on tribal identity by suggesting a weakening connection between the girls and their natal home.
Alhough renaming and language adoption were common strategies of survival for child slaves, where it was crucial for them to adapt quickly into their new environments, they nevertheless provided a point of tension between where they were from, where they had been, and where they belonged.Footnote 69 This task was especially difficult for Atawa, who testified that her facial scarification cemented her as an outsider in the south. ‘I used to cry because I had marks and other girls had not. The other girls used to make fun of me and say I had cheeks like calabash. Generally speaking I was not happy.’Footnote 70 As Raymond E. Dummet notes, southerners often distinguished slaves in the southern Gold Coast during the Atlantic slave trade by their tribal markings indicating their northern origin. By the nineteenth century, this association was conveyed in the use of a common Twi term – odonko – referring to persons from northern polities such as Wa, Gonja, Dagomba, Chakosi, or Mamprusi who were captured in warfare or purchased on the market as slaves. Over time, odonko came to be associated with foreigners in the south, or people were identified as being of northern origin because of their tribal markings.Footnote 71 Atawa's discussion of treatment by Anin, in terms of food, cloth, and abuse, did not vary greatly from Abnofo, but her narrative of ridicule does, as it positions her as an unassimilated foreigner in Ankasi. In emphasizing her foreignness, Atawa solidifies her redemption to her mother, Lawunda, who had in her own testimony cited the importance of Atawa's tribal markings in her ability to recognize her grown daughter after ten years. The link between Atawa's home, belonging, and redemption is strengthened by Lawunda's statements: she had ‘put [the tribal marks] there when she was a baby’ and ‘I called her Atawa; she had no other name.’Footnote 72
HOME AND BELONGING
The testimony of Lawunda, Atawa's widowed mother, is central to Atawa's construction of home, and redemption. Through her own testimony, we are told that Lawunda was a sickly widow at the time of Atawa's taking.Footnote 73
A long time ago, when my leg was sick; the chief called my daughter because I could not pay my l'impôt [sic]: I was unable to go because my leg was sick. My husband was dead; he died when I was pregnant with my daughter Atawa. A month later I went to the chief when my leg was better to ask him where my daughter was. The chief gave no reply. The girl was then about 4 years old. The chief's wife Kari told me that my daughter had been sold to one Ashanti man. I only went back to my house crying: it was not usual for a woman with no husband though quite usual for women with husbands. They could never tell me what they did with my daughter.Footnote 74
As in Atawa's testimony, there is an emphasis on Lawunda's inability to pay tax. Moreover, both narratives cast the chief as the greedy and rapacious villain who, according to the magistrate, had ‘caused these three girls who were then mere babies to be torn from their mothers’ side without regard to their ultimate fate, selling them into a country where for all he knew they might become victims of human sacrifice’.Footnote 75 Both serve as veiled critiques of French administration, something that seemed to appeal quite strongly to the magistrate. Though the magistrate found difficulty in understanding the precise nature of the girls’ transactions, through Lawunda and Atawa's testimony he became quite certain of the chief's culpability. For Lawunda and Atawa, blaming the chief of their village would have had little repercussions; given the chief had recently deceased. His son, the current chief, could not be brought to testify given, as Amory explains, the ‘strict border controls of the French’. Additionally, Lawunda's testimony was effective enough to preclude any question of her involvement in the transfer of her daughter: ‘certainly not the mother whose daughter was taken away forcibly from her’.Footnote 76 Like many women in colonial Africa, Lawunda realized colonial courts as an effective tool.Footnote 77
The effectiveness of Lawunda and Atawa's testimonies demonstrates their success in working together to construct Atawa's self, home, and belonging. Trevor Getz argues in his analysis of unfree children and courts in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast that child slaves’ fates were most often shaped by magistrates’ perceptions and adult manipulation of the court system, and less frequently by children and youth's ‘own initiatives in seeking adult advocates to guide or represent them’.Footnote 78 This was mainly because at this early stage of colonial rule, children had little conception or understanding of these new courts. In contrast, Atawa's testimony is effective precisely because she capitalizes on the construction of children as ‘passive, dependent, subordinate, and lacking in human agency’ to explain her sale.Footnote 79 As Beverley Grier has shown of Zimbabwe, European understandings of childhood were that it was a ‘time of dependence upon, nurturing from, and guidance (control) by adults’.Footnote 80 Atawa and Lawunda's testimonies are also effective in that they speak to colonial perceptions of African societies as ‘rigidly hierarchical, unchanging, and without tension or conflict, particularly between generations’.Footnote 81 Though slaves’ fates remained in the hands of British officials, whose conceptions of British morality, English common law, and local conditions, including customary law shaped judgments, the similar testimonies of Atawa and Lawunda, as well as Kibadu and Anin, suggest that by the early 1940s, children and youth had a greater knowledge of the court system, enlisting adults as advocates or collaborators. Kibadu states very clearly that she wished to remain in Ankasi as Anin's wife, substantiating Anin's testimony that he acquired Kibadu as a wife through cash payment of bride-wealth. Although Atawa does not state outright her desire to remain with her mother, their similar testimonies, and the emphasis placed by both on her forceful taking, unhappiness, and foreigner status in Ankasi, constructs Atawa's overlapping identities of slave, child, and Busanga – not only by birth, but now, at this point of redemption – by choice.
Unlike Atawa and Kibadu, Abnofo did not have a direct adult guardian as advocate. Rather, she links her experience with that of Kibadu and refers to herself and Kibadu by their southern names.
I am called Ama Dankyi. At Ankasi I live in the accused's house: I know Ama Yeboah (alias Kibadu Busanga) identified in court. Ama and I are the only two girls in the compound all the rest are boys. We eat together: we used to share the food. I had enough to eat. I used to help the accused to farm but his boys were too young.Footnote 82
Her testimony suggests a strong relationship with Kibadu, and perhaps a desire to remain with her friend. At the close of the trial, Atawa is claimed by her widowed mother and though Kibadu is clear in her desire to remain with Anin, their bride-wealth story is dismissed. Thus, the question of to whom Abnofo and Kibadu would be redeemed became important; so important that it necessitated a pause in the trial, during which time police were sent to search for Abnofo and Kibadu's parents. Following a weeklong search, two males were found, both of whom Lawunda testified were the girls’ guardians. Kibadu was redeemed to her cousin, Lali, and Abnofo to the son of the deceased chief, whom Lawunda had testified was Abnofo's ‘small father’. This desire of the magistrate to redeem the girls to Busanga lineage structure demonstrates the gap between officials’ perceptions of female slavery and that of local realities, since, as Wright reminds, for women, the opposite of slavery was not simply belonging.Footnote 83 Also, this satisfies two important themes cited by Getz, which seem to have concerned magistrates: the young girl as victim and the young girl as threat.Footnote 84 Magistrate Amory could not allow Abnofo and Kibadu, now adolescents, to roam the streets, perhaps choosing a path of vagrancy.Footnote 85 This is in one sense perfunctory, and about Amory fulfilling his duties as a district officer, since he believed that following the trial Kibadu would probably marry Kwaku Anin. This further indicates the gap between the magistrate's construction of ‘home’ and belonging and that of the girls’ own conceptions expressed in testimony.Footnote 86 But their age at the trial makes the threat of vagrancy all the more immediate, as the girls were now reaching sexual maturity.Footnote 87 Anin mentioned the chief had instructed him not to sleep with the girls before they were brought back to Zatugu ‘where something could be done to them’. Their sexual maturity became an important element of control for their male guardians, who agreed to take guardianship so long as the girls were allowed to return to Busanga to undergo the procedure of female circumcision.Footnote 88 The magistrate's inclusion of this point in his report to the chief commissioner in Tamale is exemplary of what I have argued elsewhere about officials’ reluctance to intervene in female circumcision practices in the northeastern Gold Coast.Footnote 89
At the close of the trial, Kwaku Anin was found guilty of slave dealing, and a detailed transcript of the case was sent to the chief commissioner in Tamale, with the stated aim of publicizing the conviction through the radio. Clearly, the verdict was intended to demonstrate the seriousness with which the state dealt with slave dealing. However, it is interesting to note that the girls’ testimonies did not emphasize ill treatment by Anin. Through the narrative portions of their testimonies, Atawa and her mother, Lawunda, emphasize the chief's role in Atawa's taking. Moreover, the most difficult aspect of Atawa's treatment in Ankasi seems not to have been at the hands of Anin, but rather residing in an environment in which she is ridiculed due to her facial scarification, an outward marker of her outsider status. Similarly, Abnofo's testimony directly impacts Anin's fate, as she recalls her first memory as being in Anin's compound in Bawku. This negates the cross-border slave dealing charge for which he is found guilty for Atawa. Lastly, Kibadu ascribes no culpability to Anin and indeed goes further to align her testimony with his story of bride-wealth, dismissed by the magistrate. Their testimonies thus assist in the court's leniency toward Anin: he was found guilty on four charges of slave dealing with intent to deal, transfer or become a slave and charged a fine of 25 pounds for each girl or three months’ imprisonment. Unable to pay on time, Anin was given an extended period to pay in installments, thus exemplifying continuity from nineteenth-century tendencies toward leniency in early colonial courts.Footnote 90 The chief, whom the magistrate believed was most culpable, had recently died and thus accomplished the greatest evasion of all.
With the help of adult advocates, Atawa, Kibadu, and Abnofo constructed their own ideas of self, home, and belonging. Though mediated by the confines of a male colonial court, the girls’ testimonies to identity and treatment were very important to constructing their own notions of self and home. Certainly, they were guided by the magistrate's questioning, but the nature of their responses to their taking and migration suggest attempts to assert their own voice. This is given further grounding when one considers where they were housed before and during the trial. Following Anin's arrest by Sergeant Koratang, the magistrate ordered the girls to be housed at the Busanganaba's compound in Bawku, the Busanganaba being the chief of the Busanga peoples in Bawku, as recognized by colonial officials. During this period it is entirely possible that the girls devised their own strategies for the trial, demonstrated by the noticeable agreement between Atawa and her mother, Lawunda, and Kibadu with that of Anin. With parents deceased, Abnofo was left without an adult advocate or guide, a problem which seemed to be rectified by Lawunda, who assisted the authorities in locating Abnofo's male relative, to whose guardianship she was ultimately placed. There is no evidence from the transcript whether Abnofo welcomed this outcome, or whether Lawunda had taken advantage of Abnofo's situation for her own benefit.
Aside from enlisting adult advocates, the girls attempt to shape their redemption through contrasting conceptualizations of home and belonging. Though chronologically they may be identified as child or youth, Atawa invokes nineteenth-century British constructions of the child as innocent and agentless in order to achieve the agency she realizes as a youth. Though Atawa is the eldest, Kibadu constructs herself as a young woman and wife. Ultimately, this backfires as it only underlines the magistrate's need for her control. Amidst burgeoning nationalisms, African youth were viewed as vigorous agents of instability, provoking strikes, protests, and boycotts and young women's urban lifestyles and livelihoods were in particular judged as transgressive to the gendered order of colonial governance. Kibadu's attempt at constructing self by adopting the identity of a female youth, rather than child, further substantiates the constraints imposed on young females in colonial courts, while also problematizing how we as historians conceptualize female youth as agents.Footnote 91 At the same time, Kibadu exemplifies how lived migrations alter the way children view home and how geographical sites of origin do not necessarily constitute children's primary sites of belonging. As Karen Olwig points out, sites of belonging connect to various spheres of life children encounter, and migrant children do not necessarily need to choose between two cultures or identities.Footnote 92 Each girl capitalizes on the difficulties of administrators in discerning cases of slavery, demonstrating what Beverley Grier has noted of ‘young people's efforts to establish control over their labor and to reconstruct childhood along lines more advantageous to themselves’.Footnote 93 The duration of their time in bondage, combined with the girls’ distance from their natal home was so much that their adoption of southern languages, names, and conflicting narratives of treatment transgresses easy categorization. Effectively, and amidst challenging circumstances of bondage, Atawa, Abnofo, and Kibadu ‘made’ themselves through contrasting notions of self and indigenous identity.Footnote 94
