Abstract
This chapter is a much-needed examination of the nineteenth-century transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce and its impact on coastal Ghanaian foodways. The coastal Fante, the Gã, and the Ewe experienced changes to their economic, political, and social conditions which resulted in people from dissimilar regions coming into greater contact with each other in urban centres and in mission schools. Despite the adoption and adaptation of imported foods, local food retained its importance as a marker of traditional social boundaries and of ethnic difference. Traditional structures and domestic economies contribute to the success, survival, and expansion of local food consumption even as the commercial export trade in palm oil expands.
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Notes
- 1.
See Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. the chapters by Ray A. Kea, ‘Plantations and Labour in the South-East Gold Coast from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid Nineteenth Century’, Martin Lynn, ‘The West African Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century and the ‘Crisis of Adaptation’ and Gareth Austin, ‘Between Abolition and Jihad: The Asante Response to the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1807–1896’. See also Parker, Making the Town.
- 2.
Ulrike Sill, Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Akyeampong, Drink; Kea, ‘Plantations and Labour’.
- 3.
Paul Erdmann Isert, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade, trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (Legon, Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007); Hans Christian Monrad, Two Views from Christiansborg Castle, trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (Legon, Accra: African Books Collective, 2009); Henry Meredith, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812); William Hutton, A Voyage to Africa (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821); Brodie Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa (London: London, Hurst and Blackett, 1853).
- 4.
Kea, ‘Plantations and Labour’, 120–22.
- 5.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (London: Merlin Press, 1964), 64–72; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.
- 6.
G. A. Acquah, The Fantse of Ghana: A History (Hull: Hull University, 1957).
- 7.
Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
- 8.
Akyeampong, Between the Sea and the Lagoon, 49; Greene, Gender, 141.
- 9.
Carl Christian Reindorf, History of the Gold Coast and Asante (Basel: Missionsbuchhandlung, 1895), 200.
- 10.
McCarthy, Social Change, 33.
- 11.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 269–81.
- 12.
W. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London: Cass & Co., 1967), 124.
- 13.
Meredith, Account, 88, 111.
- 14.
De Marees, Description, 272.
- 15.
De Marees, Description, 112.
- 16.
Ibid., 111; Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 274.
- 17.
Ibid., 278–80.
- 18.
Akyeampong, Drink, 87.
- 19.
Isert, Letters, 167; La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 125.
- 20.
Hutton, Voyage, 101–02.
- 21.
La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 124; ‘BetumiBlog: Ghana-Style Kenkey’, accessed 18 May 2020, https://www.betumi.com/2007/03/ghana-style-kenkey-italy-has-polenta.html.
- 22.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 275.
- 23.
Mary Obodai et al., ‘Kenkey Production, Vending, and Consumption Practices in Ghana’, Food Chain 4, no. 3 (October 2014): 275–88.
- 24.
Patience Mensah et al., ‘Antimicrobial Effect of Fermented Ghanaian Maize Dough’, Journal of Applied Bacteriology 70, no. 3 (1991): 203–10.
- 25.
George Macdonald, The Gold Coast, Past and Present (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), 204.
- 26.
Obodai et al., ‘Kenkey Production’.
- 27.
Monrad, Two Views, 184.
- 28.
La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 163.
- 29.
Reindorf, History, 276.
- 30.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 118.
- 31.
La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 168.
- 32.
Monrad, Two Views, 102.
- 33.
Reindorf, History, 201.
- 34.
J. G. Christaller, Collection of Three Thousand Six Hundred Tshi Proverbs (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 1990), 244.
- 35.
La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 168.
- 36.
C. D. Adams, ‘Activities of Danish Botanists in Guinea 1783–1850’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 3, no. 1 (1957): 30–46.
- 37.
Kea, ‘Plantations and Labour’, 137; Henrik Jeppesen, Danske plantageanlæg på Guldkystem, 1788–1850 (Place of publication and publisher not identified, 1966), 57–59.
- 38.
John Duncan, Travels in Western Africa, in 1845 & 1846 (London: R. Bentley, 1847), 104. Although this account is from coastal present-day Benin, the kingdom of Whydah in the seventeenth century was conquered by the Akwamu, one of the Akan people. It stands to reason that attitudes along the coast toward cassava and its uses would have travelled and been widely known from Accra to Whydah, a distance of less than 200 miles.
- 39.
Reindorf, History, 278; La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 142–44.
- 40.
Reindorf, History, 279.
- 41.
Kea, ‘Plantations and Labour’, 125.
- 42.
Isert, Letters, 168.
- 43.
Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 5.
- 44.
Isert, Letters, 246.
- 45.
Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Background to Rebellion: The Origins of Muslim Slaves in Bahia’, Slavery & Abolition 15, no. 2 (1 August 1994): 151–80; Lisa A. Lindsay, ‘“To Return to the Bosom of Their Fatherland”: Brazilian Immigrants in Nineteenth-century Lagos’, Slavery & Abolition 15, no. 1 (April 1994): 22–50.
- 46.
Fran Osseo-Asare and Barbara Baëta, The Ghana Cookbook (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2015), 152.
- 47.
Akyeampong, Between the Sea and the Lagoon, 28.
- 48.
Ibid., 31.
- 49.
E. V. Doku, Cassava in Ghana (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1969), 33; La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 167.
- 50.
Monrad, Two Views, 140.
- 51.
Monrad, 139–40, 160.
- 52.
La Fleur, Fusion Foodways, 179.
- 53.
Reindorf, History, 279.
- 54.
Earl of Kimberley to Colonel Harley,11 July 1873, CO 879/4/493, TNA.
- 55.
Acquah, The Fantse of Ghana, 54.
- 56.
Earl of Kimberley to Colonel Harley, 11 July 1873, CO 879/4/493, TNA.
- 57.
A. B. Ellis, West African Sketches (London: Tinsley, 1881), 56.
- 58.
Richard Francis Burton, Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1863), 146.
- 59.
F.M. Hodgson, Gold Coast Annual Report for 1895 (London: Parliament, February 1897).
- 60.
Reindorf, History, 280.
- 61.
Governor Rodger to Earl of Crewe, Memorandum on Sierra Leone Rice, 16 December 1909, ADM 11/1/89, PRAAD Accra.
- 62.
Jonathan E. Robins, ‘“Food Comes First”: The Development of Colonial Nutritional Policy in Ghana, 1900–1950’, Global Food History 4, no. 2 (July 3, 2018): 168–88.
- 63.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 274.
- 64.
Meredith, Account, 30; Hutton, Voyage, 325.
- 65.
Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.
- 66.
Ibid., 13, 17.
- 67.
Monrad, Two Views, 56.
- 68.
Margaret J Field, Social Organization of the Gã People (Accra: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1940), 179.
- 69.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 188–89.
- 70.
Wirzba, Food and Faith, 190.
- 71.
Johannes Rask, Two Views from Christiansborg Castle, trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (Legon: African Books Collective, 2009), 56.
- 72.
Osseo-Asare and Baëta, Ghana Cookbook, 108.
- 73.
Meredith, Account, 111.
- 74.
Osseo-Asare and Baëta, Ghana Cookbook, 236.
- 75.
Monrad, Two Views, 158.
- 76.
Ibid., 175; Meredith, Account, 88; Hutton, Voyage, 92; Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 275.
- 77.
Meredith, Account, 221n.
- 78.
Lynn, ‘West African Palm Oil Trade’, 60–61.
- 79.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 59.
- 80.
Parker, Making the Town, 57–62.
- 81.
Louis E. Wilson, ‘The “Bloodless Conquest” in Southeastern Ghana: The Huza and Territorial Expansion of the Krobo in the 19th Century’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (1990): 97.
- 82.
Major J. J. Crooks, Records Relating to the Gold Coast Settlements from 1750 to 1874 (Milton Park: Routledge, 2013), 230–50.
- 83.
Wilson, ‘Bloodless Conquest’, 269–97.
- 84.
Hugo Huber, The Krobo: Traditional Social and Religious Life of a West African People (St. Augustin: Anthropos Institute, 1963), 61.
- 85.
Maier, ‘Precolonial Palm Oil Production’, 32.
- 86.
Wilson, ‘Bloodless Conquest’, 293.
- 87.
Raymond E. Dumett, ‘African Merchants of the Gold Coast, 1860–1905: Dynamics of Indigenous Entrepreneurship’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 4 (1983): 668.
- 88.
Isert, Letters, 168.
- 89.
Reindorf, History, 131.
- 90.
Monrad, Two Views, 112.
- 91.
Hutton, Voyage, 92.
- 92.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 275.
- 93.
Koley Ambah and Ga Manste Tackie Obiri, Fish Ovens—Destruction of by Accra Town Council, February 1909, ADM 11/1/78, PRAAD Accra.
- 94.
Ambah and Obiri, ADM 11/1/78.
- 95.
Diaries of Sir John Maxwell, 9 July 1909, MSS.Afr.s.2133, Box 1, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, United Kingdom.; Fish Ovens, ADM 11/1/78.
- 96.
Parker, Making the Town, 21.
- 97.
Monrad, Two Views, 241; Hutton, Voyage, 55.
- 98.
Ibid., 91.
- 99.
C. H. Hart Davies, Kormantine Fishermen Attack Made on by Anomabo Fishermen for Using Ali Nets in Their Waters, 16 February 1909, ADM 11/1/80, PRAAD Accra.
- 100.
‘Supreme Court Fishing Nets Decision Riots’, 1916, ADM 11/1/628, PRAAD Accra.
- 101.
Field, Social Organization, 134, 156.
- 102.
Frederick Robert Irvine, The Fishes and Fisheries of the Gold Coast (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1947), 29.
- 103.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 102–06.
- 104.
Reindorf, History, 225–27.
- 105.
McCarthy, Social Change, 14.
- 106.
Cruickshank, Eighteen Years, 334.
- 107.
Sill, Encounters, 296.
- 108.
Ibid., 287–309.
- 109.
Johann Dieterle, Basel Mission Report Aburi, ABM, D-1,9, PRAAD Koforidua.
- 110.
Rich, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat, 90.
- 111.
Counihan, C. M., Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence (New York: Routledge, 2004), 119.
- 112.
Helena Tuomainen, ‘Eating Alone or Together?’, 7.
- 113.
Diner, H. R. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2001), 73.
- 114.
Psyche Williams-Forson, ‘I Haven’t Eaten’, 74.
- 115.
E.N. Anderson, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture (New York, New York University Press, 2005).
- 116.
Wirzba, Food and Faith, 40.
- 117.
Jean Zizioulas and John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T & T Clark, 2006), 39.
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Simpson Miller, B. (2021). Gold Coast Foodways in the Nineteenth Century. In: Food and Identity in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ghana. Food and Identity in a Globalising World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88403-1_5
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