The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: literacy, politics and nationalism, 1914–2014 by Kate Skinner (review)

One of the more intriguing by-products of the celebrations marking fifty years of independence has been the reappraisal of African nationalism(s). A number of historians have begun the process of reconstructing the range of political alternatives that were on offer in the 1950s and early 1960s, and restoring some of the lost causes to their rightful place in history. Although Kate Skinner does not explicitly engage with this emerging literature, she has written a book that is very much part of a new wave that is breathing new life into old debates.

There was a time when the historiography of trans-Volta was rather undeveloped, but there has been a steady stream of studies over the past two decades – and with much more in the pipeline – that have transformed the academic landscape. Now, the problem is almost one of finding something original to research. Kate Skinner tackles a topic on which a considerable amount has been written, but she has managed to produce a manuscript that really does present new material and set up a counterpoint to what has gone before. Her larger agenda is to make the case for Togoland unificationism as a movement that sank deep societal roots and had a longevity that much of the preceding literature – the work of this reviewer included – has tended to downplay. At the time of writing, the demand for recognition of the special case of former British Togoland is being revived in the Volta Region of Ghana. Clearly, Skinner is onto something important here. More specifically, she inserts herself between the historiographical cracks, offering a deeper explanation for much of what has been addressed tangentially by previous writers. Her originality resides in the deployment of a range of hitherto unused sources – pamphlets, songs, personal histories and the contents of people’s personal trunks – to recover the perspectives of those who have been marginalized in received accounts of Ghanaian and Togolese independence.

The book makes three especially important contributions. The first is to explain why and how schoolteachers provided the backbone of the unification leadership. Skinner reconstructs the history of teachers attached to the Christian (mainly Presbyterian) missions. She shows how a sense of personal frustration over career progression was coupled with a feeling that the Trust Territory had been disadvantaged in relation to the southern Gold Coast. In relating this sense of grievance to the trajectories of particular individuals who became prominent in the movement, Skinner joins a number of historical dots in a way that makes much better sense of the larger picture. Her reconstruction of the way in which the adult education movement – initially an importation of a British model – brought teachers and ordinary Togolanders together into a running dialogue is a major new contribution to knowledge. Secondly, Skinner provides a much more satisfactory account of how the unification movement went about its business. Historians have tended to rely heavily on the paper trail left by petitions to the United Nations, whereas Skinner alerts us to the role of song, pamphlets and cultural performance in political mobilization. The political discourse surrounding Ablode, or ‘freedom’, is rendered much more comprehensible within this particular framing. Thirdly, Skinner has performed an invaluable exercise in reconstructing the stories of those who went into exile in Togo after 1957. She takes issue with this reviewer’s assertion that exiles or refugees largely dropped out of active politics, and demonstrates that they maintained the dream of unification for a long time thereafter. The case she builds is convincing, albeit more so for the Olympio period than for the tenure of Gnassingbe Eyadéma.

In general, when previous authors have weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of the Togoland unification movement, they have seen the glass as being half empty. Skinner prefers to see it as being half full. Of course, this means that one’s vantage counts for everything. In writing...