Horton's Pragmatism and After: The “Gold Coast Nation” in Attoh Ahuma's Rhetoric of Political Demand

The epigraph is taken from the context of late-nineteenth-century interethnic diplomacy in colonial Gold Coast. The letter of the ethnic Ga, King Tackie of Accra, to the ethnic Akan, King Kwame Fori of Akwapim (or Akuapem), in which the former urges the worthy example of the ethnic Anlo-Ewe on his addressee, is produced here as an instance of the anticolonial solidarities which, mobilized at the time, were making for the incipient “nationalization” of the Colony. King Tackie's letter is issued in the context of widespread native protests against the heavy-handed usurpation by the British Crown of the sovereign rights constituting the legitimate basis of the indigenous polities of the country.

The King of Accra would likely not have seen the conclusions contained in a memo written by one Sir Edward Cust in 1839. Nevertheless it is a memo worth recalling since the goals that Tackie and others in the 1885–87 Gold Coast Deputation Movement stood for were directly opposed to its conclusions. Titled “Reflections on West African Affairs,” and addressed to the Colonial Office, Cust's piece foretells the shape and direction British policy on the Gold Coast would take, especially in the last few years leading up to, and those following, the promulgation of the Colony in 1874. Cust then wrote: