History of the Gold Coast and Asante

"It’s also a classic, although it’s very little known outside of historians of Ghana. I chose it for three reasons. First, Carl Christian Reindorf was born on the Gold Coast and became part of the Basel Evangelical Mission Society, which established itself on the mid-19th century Gold Coast. He was converted and became a catechist for the Basel Mission, a German-speaking missionary organization that was based in Switzerland. Reindorf is one of those earlier converts, but what makes him so important is that he began to teach himself the craft of history, methodology, oral history, and how to work with written sources. In those days you could not travel to the archives in Europe, so he would actually correspond with individuals, with merchants, about copies of travel accounts, copies of official documents and correspondence. “The capital of Ghana, Accra, is located next to the prime meridian and the equator, making it, essentially, a center of the world” What I love about the book, secondly, is that he was very judicious about interviewing people who lived a century ago and more, who had recollections. He would interview people about their recollections of the patterns of trade and commerce and politics on the coastal region and in the interior, where Asante was located. He made sure that there was a judicious account of both male informants and female informants. To me, that’s really great and a lesson for current and future historians about the gendered nature of knowledge. Who are the ones chosen to be tapped for recollections and memory and the things that we historians love most, the data points that allow us to create our narratives? The third piece is that his book was self-published because the Basel Mission Society refused to fund or publish the book, even though they had agreed, in words, that they would. He published the book with his own resources. The combination of underground research, combining oral and written sources, using a gendered methodology long before this was in vogue, and using his own resources to publish this book and make it available for those along the Gold Coast, contributing to, essentially, an early Gold Coast historiography—that’s why I chose this classic book. My sense is that the Basel missionaries were on the Gold Coast for one purpose; they were there to win over souls for Christendom, and Reindorf’s history with its political overtones could not be endorsed, much less funded, by a missionary organization with clear proselytizing aims. Reindorf’s protracted struggle to publish this work on his own terms and at his own expense, however, testifies also to the colonial and even racist context of his times. The Basel Mission Society was not there for what they saw as the intellectual development of a Gold Coast intelligentsia. They were not there to support historiography that was both local and indigenous and not based on foreign funding and foreign censorship. Reindorf was very clear that this was his account, not their version of his account, so there’s an entanglement about ownership of knowledge and about the processes of knowledge production, and who controls the clearinghouses of knowledge. These things plague us today, in the shape of big academic and trade presses and powerful academic institutions. Reindorf actually gives us a preview of the fights over whose knowledge gets privileged and of how those battles would play out with regard to African history."