West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana

7. The Diary of Paul Sands: Preface and Text

7. The diary of Paul Sands: Preface and Text Paul Sands’s diary is a multivolume work that contains many details about the major and minor events affecting his own life and his home district of Anlo. Instead of reproducing the diary in its entirety, however, I have opted to present a number of extracts. The two sections presented here, the family histories and the dated entries, reflect the essential character of the diary, but they have also been edited with particular concerns in mind. The family histories, for example—written in nonstandard Ewe—were translated with great care and patience by Jasper Ackumey with minimal editing. But a number of the names have been changed to pseudonyms to respect the sensitivities of Paul Sands’s descendants about their origins. The other major segment of his diary presented here consists of dated entries. Sands listed many of these entries in chronological order, but not consistently so. On occasion, he inserted later dated material between earlier entries, as he used his text to document what he understood to be the relationship between earlier and later events. In reorganizing the diary to be more uniformly chronological, I have obviously obscured Sands’s own historical sensibilities. I do so, however, to better illustrate what events he found worth recording, when the events occurred, and how he used his diary to understand the historical trajectory of his own life and the history of the community in which he lived. In editing this section, I have also eliminated duplicate entries, of which there were many. In a few instances different dates were assigned to an event that had been recorded a number of times in different locations. Where this has occurred, I have included the event once and indicated in italics that two different dates were assigned to this same entry. In a number of other instances, Sands provided incorrect dates. When I can determine this, I have provided the correct date in brackets. I have also standardized the form in which the dates appear. Evident in the section of dated entries are Sands’s interests not only in slavery, the slave trade, and its interdiction (see entries for 1784, 1839–40, 1842, The diary of Paul Sands 159 and 1844 for example) but also in Anlo foreign relations. He listed the conflicts that erupted between Anlo and Ada in the eighteenth century, the very ones that led to his great-grandmother’s enslavement. He documented as well Anlo’s long association with European traders, whether Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, or British, and the role his maternal uncle, Yao Mensah, played in facilitating these trade ties (see entries for 1865 and 1866). He recorded the coming of British colonial rule (see the 1850 and 1852 entries) and the many conflicts that erupted after 1874 when Britain as the colonizing power used Hausa troops to interdict the smuggling of liquor, firearms, and ammunition into the Gold Coast (of which Anlo was a part) from the areas that were outside British control to the east (see entries for 1878, 1883, and 1885). He also described—as someone deeply interested in business—those events (man-made disasters, disputes, and wars) that disrupted trade relations. Sands was particularly meticulous in identifying by name the majority of the places and peoples that were significant to him. Many, as noted earlier, were Euro-Africans like himself, but another important group included the major local political, religious, and economic leaders of Anlo. These individuals have been identified below by name and position. Equally important to him were the social origins of particular individuals. In recognition of the sensitive nature of this topic in Ghana to this day, I have provided pseudonyms for a number of individuals whose identities, if revealed, could be used to identify Paul Sands and his descendants, themselves descendants of slaves and strangers. Many actual names, however, have been retained. To distinguish the actual names from pseudonyms, the latter appear in italics. Certain names of peoples and places are also repeated throughout the diary using different spellings. No effort has been made to standardize the spellings in the diary itself. Instead, I list here the names of the places with more recent and a generally accepted English-language orthography. Peoples/Polity Names Abolove = Abolave Addah Foah = Ada Foah Addahs = Addas Addafia = Adafianu Affiadenyigba = Afiadenyigba Akati = Akatsi Akim = Akyem Angulas = Anlos Awoonahgah = Anloga Atokor = Atorkor Awoonah = Anlos Paul Sands...