Producing a Received View of Gold Coast Elite Society? C. F. Hutchison's Pen Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities

I

In the early 1920s British West Africa saw a flurry of colonial activity, in which the formation of the colonial state—originally started in this region in the 1870s—was brought to a higher plane. The introduction of Indirect Rule in the newly-amalgamated Nigeria by governor Frederick Lugard called for a rethinking of colonial political and administrative structures. Where before, the relatively small administrative units were dominated by Europeans and western-educated Africans, now the position and role of "traditional" leaders was enhanced on all levels of colonial government. Control over the economy came more and more into the hands of European businesses and business conglomerates, at the expense of African firms. As a result, relations between African elites, who had vested economic and political interests in the colonial states, and the growing European colonial establishment hardened.²

In the case of the Gold Coast, the African urban coastal elite of merchants, educators, missionaries, and others faced an overwhelming onslaught of change and modernization in all parts of society. In many cases these changes undermined the elites' social status, as well as their political and economic position. One of the weapons in the battle between British colonial authorities and African urban elite society was the written word. Within this context, expert knowledge about African achievements, molded in the form of biographies, was the two-edged sword of African cultural nationalists of diverse plumage.

Biographies belonged to a longstanding tradition of self-improvement literature. This allowed biographers to address their peer group, the school-attending youth, and the general reading public at the same time—informing, teaching, and admonishing them. Descriptions of (the deeds of) historical African figures showed that "development" was not just a European product, but had been part of African society for centuries. The successful lives of contemporaries provided evidence of the parity of African and European intellect, (business) acumen, and energy, in a society where ideas on European supremacy were deeply entrenched. Biographies, especially collective biographies, thus provided an intellectual shield against European prejudices.

The subject of this paper is one of these collective biographies, written by the Gold Coast businessman Charles Francis Hutchison, and titled The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities, which was published in the late 1920s. Pen-Pictures is a well-known source for the history of the Gold Coast, cited and quoted by both professional historians and interested lay-people. In effect, Pen-Pictures is an important social-historical document. The format, the style of presentation, the intimacy of many of the life histories, and the overview offered of non-European Gold Coast society in the 1920s, allow for multiple analyses by historians, sociologists, social anthropologists, and scholars of language and literature.

Here we will concern ourselves with the question what view of 1920s Gold Coast society Hutchison is actually presenting us with, what its origins were, and how his observations relate to other biographical studies. What role did Hutchison play as a mediator in the acquisition, production, and formulation of knowledge? How did he deal with the different interpretative frameworks in which colonially contextualized knowledge was negotiated? And perhaps most importantly, how was this view of Gold Coast Society received, or better: did Hutchison produce a received view?

II

In the late 1920s Hutchison published the first volume of his work entitled The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities.³ The book is 207 pages long and contains 162 biographical sketches of important Gold Coast men (and three women) of color in blank verse and prose, accompanied by portrait photographs of almost all the individuals described, as well as additional photos of residential houses and businesses, to which was added biographical information in the form of lists of famous deceased people and others.

The publication was based on extensive research, often fieldwork, as can be gauged from the highly-detailed and personal information Hutchison gives in many of the descriptions. He also provides numerous snippets of information that are the product of intimate...