Cosmopolitanism: Why Nineteenth Century Gold Coast Thinkers Matter in the Twenty-First Century

In his 1903 Gold Coast Native Institutions, the renowned Gold Coast lawyer and journalist Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford wrote:

In the present work I have indicated, or attempted to indicate, the true nature of the problem which Great Britain has to face in her administration of the Gold Coast and her hinterland.

To find out what the problem is, and the way successfully to deal with it, it has been necessary, on the one hand to examine to aboriginal state system, holding, as I do, that apart from the Natives of the soil any attempt at statesmanlike administration is doomed to failure. On the other hand, I have collected and preserved the most important of the evidence available as to the political relations, past and present, of Great Britain and the Gold Coast. I consider that there can be no greater safeguard to British administration on the Gold Coast than in the free dissemination of the historical facts embodied in this book. Further, I have ventured to suggest a key to the solution of the problem. It is none other than the imperialisation of the Gold Coast and Ashanti on purely aboriginal lines, leading ultimately to the imperialisation of West Africa.¹

Clearly directed to what he saw as the negligent and ignorant policies adopted by the British colonial administration, his words have earned Casely-Hayford a reputation as one of the most articulate representatives of cultural nationalism in the Gold Coast. They, however, also capture what modern observers could see as a central contradiction in the thought of cultural nationalist writers who did not outright oppose British rule, but looked at the way in which it could be reformed and adapted to better serve the interests of both Crown and people.

This contradiction, however, only becomes so if we try to understand the intellectual production of men like Casely-Hayford solely under the prism of a nationalist narrative. This paper will explain that the literature on nineteenth-century Gold Coast writers reveals an alternative narrative, one that is more firmly rooted in an understanding of the historical conditions that elicited and encouraged the ideas and works of these men. Ultimately, I argue that the Gold Coast writers’ written work offers examples of what I call a tradition of cosmopolitan thinking. I suggest that the questions that these authors addressed, as well as their strategies, illustrate a long tradition of cosmopolitan thinking that speaks to the challenges facing modern Ghana, and Africa more generally.

Cosmopolitanism is not, by any means, an unequivocal concept. For the purposes of this paper, I have adopted a notion of cosmopolitanism that, in my view, best exemplifies the work of nineteenth-century African intellectuals. This was articulated by the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah whose views on cosmopolitanism are informed by his appreciation of how African societies have had a long history of having to negotiate diverse cultural, social and political experiences. According to Appiah:

There are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance… As we’ll see, there will be times when these two ideals -universal concern and respect for legitimate difference -clash. There is a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.²

Most importantly, Appiah argues that emphasis on a literal conception of a citizen of the world is in many respects problematic and unworkable. In his view, the only kind of cosmopolitanism that may result in a meaningful examination of what is that we owe our fellow man must be rooted in an intimate understanding and appreciation of where one stands in the human community. To this respect, Appiah explains:

And the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other. Fortunately, we need take sides neither with the nationalist who abandons all foreigners nor with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow citizens with icy impartiality. The position worth defending might be called (in both senses) a partial cosmopolitanism… Loyalties and local allegiances determine more than what we want; they determine who we are. And Eliot’s talk of the ‘closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical’ echoes Cicero’s claims that ‘society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.’ A creed that disdains the partialities of kinfolk and community may have a past but has no future.³

Historians who have examined the works of Gold Coast intellectuals outside the narrow confines of a nationalist narrative have told a story of attitudes and concerns that are cosmopolitan, according to Appiah’s definition. Therefore, Gold Coast intellectuals did indeed question the rights and responsibilities that they had towards the British colonial administration as well as a clear sense of what the British owed to them. But they did so from an exercise of reflection and examination of their own communities. The ideas of these intellectuals were not just the result of their personal encounters with Europeans, although reflections about Europe were certainly a core part of their preoccupations. Their writing was profoundly rooted in another conversation, one that examined the historical, cultural and political relationships among diverse African communities and even within different social groups within particular societies.

For the purposes of this paper, I will draw examples from the work historians have done on three major figures of cultural nationalism in the Gold Coast, Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford, John Mensah Sarbah and Carl Christian Reindorf. Casely-Hayford was born into a prominent Gold Coast family in 1866 and educated in the best available institutions of West Africa. He worked as a teacher and law clerk before he pursued legal studies more formally. He travelled to Cambridge and London where he completed his education and was back in the Gold Coast by 1896. He soon became actively involved in a movement to confront the British administration over a proposed legislation to regulate the distribution and use of land in the Gold Coast. As part of this political and economic movement, Casely-Hayford was asked to prepare a brief in response to the proposed bill; his brief came to be published as Gold Coast Native Institutions, in which he presented copious historical material to indict the British administration for remaining ignorant of the native laws and institutions, and for the inherent hypocrisy in Britain’s imposition of colonial rule in the Gold Coast. Later in his life he wrote what came to be his best-known work, Ethiopia Unbound, which was published in 1911. However, he loosely constructed Ethiopia Unbound as a mixture of autobiography and novel, unlike the more carefully argued and researched Gold Coast Native Institutions.

John Mensah Sarbah was born in 1864 in Cape Coast, son of a wealthy merchant. He received his early education locally and later went to England where he completed his training as a barrister in 1887. From the start of his professional career, Mensah Sarbah was active in Gold Coast political affairs. By 1874 the growing encroachment of the British in the region culminated in the European power establishing a formal protectorate over Fantiland. Subsequently, the British made multiple attempts to undermine the authority of local chiefs and exclude Africans from representation in the legislative bodies of the government. It was in this context that Mensah Sarbah became a staunch defender of African interests. In his constant quest to aid the cause of Africans, he wrote two major works: Fanti Customary Laws published in 1897, and Fanti National Constitution in 1906.

Finally, Carl Christian Reindorf (1834-1917) was born in Prampram, a trading town and British coastal enclave. He was a mulatto, son of a Dane resident of Accra and a Ga woman. He was baptized in 1844 and was then trained by the Basel Mission, and, for some time, practiced as a catechist and a teacher. Reindorf also served as an assistant surgeon during the wars that broke out in the coastal areas in 1866 and 1869. He was ordained as a minister in 1872 and helped complete the translation of the Ga Bible, which was published in 1912. He completed his History of the Gold Coast and Asante in 1889, but it was not published until 1895, which is generally accepted as the first western-style history of an African region written by an African. The work produced by these writers has been considered of great importance. Of Mensah Sarbah it has been said that “he initiated a radical tradition of Gold Coast historical writing which still exerts seminal influence in modern Ghanaian socio-historical and political studies…”⁴ On the other hand, the contributions of Carl Reindorf to the systematic study of Gold Coast history, particularly through the use and compilation of oral traditions is unrivaled.⁵

By all measures, these men led complex lives that, in many ways, epitomized the diverse cultural world they inhabited. Karin Barber and P.F. de Moraes Farias contend that there are three general characteristics of the works produced by cultural nationalists. First, they asserted the worth of African culture and institutions while, at the same time, arguing for the adoption of certain features of Western civilization. Second, authors of these works were Christians, and some became involved in the political movements of the late colonial period. Third, these works were founded on an action of synthesis between selected African materials and European elements.⁶ Although largely reflective of the Gold Coast intellectual environment, these characteristics only begin to capture the multifaceted quality of the intellectual production of these men. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom about intellectuals like Casely-Hayford, Reindorf and Mensah Sarbah tends to oversimplify the nature of their contributions. Although they are acknowledged as important figures in the intellectual history of the Gold Coast, they are primarily seen as pioneers of a nationalist ideology that stood up against the imposition of colonial rule by asserting the value of African cultures. However, as Phillip Zachernuck has argued with regard to Nigerian intellectuals of this period, the work of synthesis they endeavored did not involve a facile understanding of European and/or African ways, but rather an interpretation of them.⁷

In spite of this, scholarship on the lives and works of Gold Coast intellectuals has been largely dominated by the paradigm of cultural nationalism that was first established in David Kimble’s seminal work, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism 1850-1928, published in 1963. Kimble speaks of the “essential continuity of the nationalist tradition” that had been developing in the Gold Coast since the nineteenth century.⁸ Most importantly, he links this tradition to the role of emergence and evolution of educated elites in the Gold Coast.

It was the educated elite who had to act as mediators and interpreters of Western culture and ideas, and who had the uncomfortable task of working out in everyday life some compromise between- for example- the obligations due to their extended family and the individual responsibility demanded by European employers, between traditional living arrangements and foreign notions of sanitation, between customary observances and the religious requirements of Christianity. Later, with the awakening of what has here been called cultural nationalism, it was still they who set the fashion in an attempt to revive respect for the old civilization, while retaining the conveniences of the new. But why was it that their undoubted influence and prestige were exerted so notably in the political field? What brought them to the forefront of the nationalist movement? … Thus it was the educated elite who took the lead not only in forming public opinion but also in formulating political objectives; in books, pamphlets, newspapers, and petitions, from the platform and even the pulpit–an almost exclusively in English, the language in which they were administered and in which they had been made aware of other possible forms of government. They were able to recognize the existence of common interests and aspirations over a wider area than that covered by the archaic State system; and this lead to the deliberate cultivation of a sense of national consciousness. They had first to create the nation, in a sense, before they could demand political autonomy.⁹

Kimble’s interpretation clearly acknowledges the complexity inherent to the efforts of educated Africans. However, his notion of a single nationalist tradition added a teleological element to the history and, therefore, obscured the diverse and multifaceted interests that informed the work of African writers. After all, the educated elites were a diverse group. Across the board, they might have shared what one might interpret as class interests, and they were evidently conscious of a collective need to transcend local and ethnic differences as they faced the challenges of colonial rule. Yet more often than not, that was where their agreements ended. Thus, the narrative of cultural nationalism introduced by Kimble highlights the points of commonality among these authors, particularly those who one might describe as building blocks of an emerging nationalist ideology. Still, such an analysis glosses over their significant differences and the ways in which they tried to address them as much as they tried to address the colonial question.

In the collection edited by Karin Barber and Moraes Farias, cited above, the authors assert that the motivations and objectives of cultural nationalists cannot be clearly discerned and that a deeper understanding of their actions requires a more comprehendsive study of their social and intellectual environments. Furthermore, the authors agree on the fact that there “was no necessary connection between cultural and political nationalism…”¹⁰

Nonetheless, the narrative of cultural nationalism has largely dominated our understanding of the intellectual history of the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth century. For instance, Toyin Falola’s Nationalism and African Intellectuals presents the wide range of ideas espoused by nineteenth-century intellectuals, yet it upholds the contention that “the twentieth-century intellectual tradition in Africa began with the widespread appeal of cultural nationalism, later to blossom into political and radical nationalism and Panafricanism.”¹¹

Thus, the teleology of nationalism has obscured a broader understanding of the work of African writers. However, some of the most astute observers of the phenomenon that came to be termed cultural nationalism have remarked on its complexity. In his work on Christianity in Yorubaland, John Peel concluded that the “main problem with ‘cultural nationalism’ [had] less to do with its national than with its cultural component. If the teleology of the concept was initially disquieting, hardly less so must be the anachronism of the implicit notion of culture.”¹² Similarly, within the existing historiography of the Gold Coast one can find narratives that address questions of the cultural components that informed the work of African writers and in which ways they sought to make sense of them. One of the first and most important studies devoted to the study of nineteenth century African intellectuals was the pioneering work of Robert July. His thorough investigations into the lives and work of West African thinkers led him to state that African intellectual activities were not “merely an expression of nationalistic thinking, but a more thoroughgoing examination of man and society in West Africa…”¹³

July’s biographical chapters examine the dual perspectives of African writers in their work. He does place them within the broader history of nationalistic thought, but he does not allow his analysis to be constrained by it. For instance, when speaking for John Mensah Sarbah he says:

The philosophy and career of John Mensah Sarbah were devoted to bringing together the best of sometimes conflicting worlds of Africa and Europe on behalf of an evolving African society. He recognized clearly that the traditional way of life would have to change, but he was a moderate and an evolutionist and stressed the continuity of institutions, not just for their own sake, not even as a necessary manifestation of cultural integrity, but because he knew things would work better if these institutions were properly utilized… The best of both worlds was Mensah Sarbah’s objective—not the dead hand of traditionalism but the strength of the ancient community virtues; not the mischievous influence of unchecked individualism but the valuable thrust of constructive activity.¹⁴

Ultimately, July understood the multidimensional nature of these authors, not just in their approach to nationalistic thinking, but also in terms of how they saw themselves within their own communities and as part of an evolving social class. They were not just nationalist and patriots, but men that had addressed their own provincial identities as well as their economic and social interests. This is clear in his final assessment of Casley-Hayford:

One further observation needs to be made concerning Casely-Hayford and the educated African class from which he came. Their essential patriotism need not to be questioned when it is remarked that they were a distinct social and economic group which tended to equate progress with the requirements of their class and leadership with the views they expressed. This was apparent in several respects. In the first place, many of their political demands were most likely to benefit the educated members of the community…Beyond this, the educated community showed little fundamental belief in democratic institutions or willingness to recognize any leadership but its own. Despite the endless talk about traditional democracy, the elites were not prepared to co-operate with the chiefs except on terms which gave them undisputed leadership. Moreover, whenever they proposed schemes of representative government these invariably contained property and other qualifications on the franchise which would have placed the power squarely in the hands of the educated leaders themselves… Such views where not uncommon at the time. European ideas continued to impress themselves on the educated Africans who quite naturally took on some of the middle-class mercantile thinking which their colonial masters exhibited during the post-war years… To a considerable extent, Casely Hayford reflected the thinking of his times.¹⁵

July’s interpretations are expanded and largely supported by the work of Raymond Jenkins. His unpublished thesis, “Gold Coast Historians and Their Pursuit of the Gold Coast Pasts: 1882-1917,”¹⁶ remains the most thorough and insightful analysis of the work of African writers of this period. In an attempt to answer the fundamental question of why African historians chose to write, Jenkins acknowledged that one could simply argue that Gold Coast writers were merely interested in challenging the legality of British rule as well as the increasingly racist views that prevented them from taking full advantage of their social and economic positions.¹⁷ However, Jenkins argues, the issue is more complex, since “the notions of a homogenous, undifferentiated ‘nationalism’ and ‘elitism’ are not always effective analytical aids to furthering our understanding of early Gold Coast historiography.¹⁸ Thus he suggests that:

The history of the development of early Gold Coast historiography is intimately connected to the history of the small, cosmopolitan Euro-African communities, which had emerged to form a distinctive, but internally diverse and differentiated society, or "ethno-cultural constellation" in the southern Gold Coast, in and after the middle decades of the nineteenth century.¹⁹

Jenkins’ choice to describe Euro-African communities as “cosmopolitan” is telling. He understood, apparently, that these men operated on shifting cultural ground. They were certainly concerned with articulating a response to British political encroachment, but they were even more concerned with ensuring that the British recognized the interests of their communities, whether cultural or economic, throughout the process of constructing colonial rule. As Jenkins explains, Gold Coast intellectuals were not writing primarily from the perspective of a unified and well-defined African identity, even though some might have argued that they did. Instead, they wrote as representatives of distinct sectors of what was at the time a diverse intelligentsia, where ethnic, social and economic differences played an important part in informing intellectual production.

In this respect, Jenkins’ analysis of the works of writers such as Reindorf, Mensah Sarbah and Casely-Hayford has remained unsurpassed. Few works have managed to examine, with the same level of detail, the complex web of interests to which these men responded in their writing. Most significantly, Jenkins’ argument emphasized the broad cultural and political constellation that framed the work of these writers. Writing about Reindorf, Jenkins remarked that he:

Belonged to several ethno-cultural and occupational worlds, whose continuity appeared to be threatened by British rule and by the assertiveness of local Anglophone (mainly Cape Coast-Fante-Wesleyan) interests, which British success had encouraged. As a Christiansborg mulatto, a Basel Mission pastor, an ex-trader and a farmer, he attempted to restore or reaffirm the places of the Danes, the Basel Mission and the Euro-Africans of the Accra townships, in the Gold Coast past and present. “By reshaping myth” and by “historisation”, he also created “a new image” of the Ga past, in late nineteenth century, Gold Coast historiography… Reindorf’s apparent concern, in the 1880’s, with local Ga ‘past-relationships’ did not represent a desire to reaffirm or rediscover his local African roots. His Ga patriotism had its origins in the 1860’s. Twenty years later, this patriotism appears to have been merged into (rather than submerged by) a broader Gold Coast patriotism, which incorporated Baltic European as well as local African ideological forces. The strength of the latter were such that Reindorf showed little awareness of, or need for, pan-African ideological perspectives.²⁰

Jenkins’ interpretation of the ways in which Reindorf’s complex identity informed his writings is largely supported by other studies. For instance, John Parker, in his examination of the role of Reindorf in the local politics of Accra, suggested that:

None of the range of identities discussed here - Ga, Osubi, mulatofo, tsuru, ‘scholar’, owula, Christian -were immune to negotiation and change. Mulatto identity in Accra, I would argue, was one of a range of interconnected cultural attributes forged by historical processes suggesting innovation and the acquisition of status, the incorporation of strangers, the accumulation of mercantile wealth and alliance with European power… . Carl Reindorf’s History of the Gold Coast and Asante—the culmination of thirty years of historical research—was in part an attempt to reconcile the most fundamental cleavages in Ga political culture.²¹

Therefore, authors like Parker and Jenkins reveal an alternative narrative that complements that of cultural nationalism and forces us to understand the challenges that men like Reindorf faced from within their own African communities. Furthermore, it also highlights the fact that the Gold Coast was a mosaic of societies that had a long history of cooperation and conflict, and that African intellectuals were not only cognizant of the dynamic social, cultural, and political milieu in which they operated, but actively engaged in examining and redefining the relationships within it.

Jenkins explains that John Mensah Sarbah’s work is often placed within the tradition of Fekuw (Mfantsi Amanbuhu Fekuw, literally Fanti Political Society), formed in 1887. This organization represented a movement of cultural revivalism with the stated mission of maintaining what was best of Fante culture and tradition to combine it with what was best from European culture. However, this relatively straightforward framing of Mensah Sarbah’s work hides some important nuances. Primarily, Jenkins argued, it “oversimplifies the real complexities of the history of the Cape Coast intelligentsia, its members and the links between their contrasting ideas and the particular interest groups to which they belonged.”²² His analysis demonstrates that the work of Mensah Sarbah’s interpretation of Fante culture and history was aimed as much at British officials as it was at other members of the educated community of the Gold Coast, particularly other members of the Fante community. For Jenkins, it is clear that Mensah Sarbah was largely preoccupied with “the promotion of a Fante-Akan focus” and this could be largely attributed to the fact that “Sarbah belonged to several worlds: the Fante-Wesleyan, Euro-African, ethno-cultural milieu of Cape Coast”²³ Ultimately, Jenkins concludes that both Mensah Sarbah and his contemporary, Jacob Benjamin Anaman, were:

[I]ntellectuals from Anomabu, ‘the leading Fanti state’, who maintained strong local affiliations… They also represented, as young men, the reformist, conservative wing of the Euro-African business community in the Cape Coast locality, whose power-base was rooted in the ‘core’ Borbor Fante states of Abura, Nkusukum and Anomabu… Their history also secured a prominence for the Borbor Fante in the past of the Cape Coast locality, at the expense of pre-existing communities such as Fetu or Asebu. More particularly, Anaman and Sarbah subscribed to the view, pioneered twenty years earlier by the Akonomusu, that true progress rested upon the development of a synthesis between indigenous Fante culture and imported British civilising agencies, associated with the chapel, the school, the market-place and the court room.²⁴

Jenkins had greater difficulty finding biographical information on Casely-Hayford than he did for Reindorf and Menah Sarbah. Nonetheless, he still manages to complicate the prevailing take on Casely-Hayford’s work. More than any of the other authors examined here, Casely-Hayford was influenced and motivated by a “traditional,” diasporic-generated Pan-Africanism, best represented by figures such as Edward Blyden and James Africanus Horton, exemplified in Casely-Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound. However, this is only part of the story. The autobiographical format chosen by Casely-Hayford in this work was, in Jenkins’ view, not a random choice:

[B]iography-history may be perceived as the complex Euro-African response to the cultural, economic and political dilemmas imposed by the subtleties of the ‘settled view’, which undermined the raison d’etre of Euro-African communities in the Gold Coast. Euro-Africans were forced to re-affirm (or invent) their African genealogical "past-relationships", while at the same time, they found it necessary to assert that they had both the intellectual abilities and qualities of character, to compete with the invasion of a minority of Europeans, who, in the context of the Gold Coast colonial experience, all too often possessed neither.²⁵

According to Jenkins, Casely-Hayford found it particularly difficult to reconcile the very particular concerns of the Euro-African community he represented with the more universal Pan-African values that influenced him. He concluded that:

On the basis of our, albeit limited, knowledge of the biography of Casely Hayford, it may be said that his identification with ‘lateral’, West African cultural orientations, from c.1912, was a reflection of his failure (rather than his success) in resolving the cultural ambiguities, which were implicit in his ‘Euro-African-ness.²⁶

One final study that is worth mentioning is the book by Kwaku Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana Imagining Africa, where the author proposes another alternative to the nationalist teleology. Korang argues that pre-independence intellectuals were not merely part of the pre-history of intellectual history. He proposes a new way of periodizing African intellectual production:

[T]his book establishes radically that African intellectual history is ultimately intelligible only within the unbroken continuum of one post-encounter epoch, the continuity of this epoch identified in a native intelligentsia’s successively straddling and navigating a frontline within it. The theory of periodization that informs its historiography, therefore, is that insofar as there is historical succession this succession has moved the frontline forward but this forward movement has not caused it to be transcended. Thus the chronologies and the writer-intellectuals this book looks at–from the mid- and late nineteenth century to the recent past, the period labeled “preindependence”–are all contemporary.²⁷

Korang’s interpretation does not draw an evolutionary connection between the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals, since he considers them part of the same historical moment. This interpretation certainly challenges the precolonial/colonial/postcolonial periodization, but it does not encourage a detailed understanding of the specific historical circumstances in which particular intellectuals operated. From the point of view of a collective history of ideas, this may be a valuable strategy, but if one is trying to understand the genesis and development of ideas, it is important to examine specific historical conditions. Korang’s suggested periodization has important implications for the development of a narrative that complements and expands the paradigm of cultural nationalism, particularly since it suggests that the challenges faced by intellectuals in the “post-encounter period” continue to be very much present.

The philosopher Larry Laudan, in a brief essay about intellectual history, reminds us that any attempt to write a history of ideas should first establish the problem or set of problems that particular thinkers were trying to address.²⁸ With that in mind, the question remains, what were the problems that motivated Gold Coast writers? The narrative of cultural nationalism that has dominated our understanding of their works would lead us to believe that the main problem they faced was colonialism. However, it is evident, by looking at more detailed analyses of their production, that European intervention was one among many issues that African writers sought to address. Gold Coast society was diverse, dynamic, and complex. African writers understood that they must not simply rethink the ways in which African communities related to Europeans. What was most important was how they related to one another. In that regard, their writings were deeply cosmopolitan. They tried to devise strategies of engagement with communities other than their own (both African and European) while, at the same time re-examining their own identities and redefining their obligations.

One might take this history of self-exploration and engagement as less compelling than triumphant nationalism, particularly since it might seem to undermine the view that these writers were somehow trying to transcend local and ethnic differences to face the challenges of colonial intervention. Yet their history remains compelling for the simple fact that, even after colonialism had been defeated, local and ethnic differences have continued to be significant obstacles in the process of nation building. This remains a primary reason for the continued relevance of Gold Coast writers. Their attempts to create a sense of universality were deeply informed by their particular perspectives, deeply grounded, as they were, in interpretations of history that enabled them to recognize limited opportunities. They may be called cosmopolitan because they recognized and addressed the contradictions of their time and they did so from their very partial and human perspectives.