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  • People Have Succeeded in Overcoming Tremendous Space, But Not the Distance between One Person and Another
  • Nwando Achebe

Welcome to the first issue of volume 6 of the Journal of West African History. I borrow the title of this introduction from an adage from the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria. Indeed, the people featured in the articles that make up this issue have in varying ways succeeded in "overcoming" the spaces that they have been forced, thrust into, or simply found themselves in. In particular, the articles focus on different kinds of space—both physical and metaphorical—that connect people to one another, whether it be in a physical sense, as in the built spaces of the Liberian Nella Yella prisons, or the workers' camps and company towns of Cameroon; in a geographic sense, as in the Basel Mission "constructed and imagined" space of the Abokobi Salems, Gold Coast; or in the sense of metaphorical spaces, engendered on the one hand by petitions brought by the Beninese people during the early years of the Kerekou regime; or by the production of rubber in colonial Gold Coast.

The Salems of Abokobi were spaces of reinvention by enslaved persons and ex-slaves; Nella Yella was a space of forced, and often unjustified, retribution of criminals and political prisoners alike; the Cameroonian workers' camps and company towns were spaces of colonial spatial injustice and discrimination; the Beninese petitions were spaces of redress, political agitation, and interrogation; and the difficult landscapes of the rubber plantations and markets in Gold Coast straddled a space that was both metaphorical and physical as evidenced in the workings of the rubber plantations of colonial wartime Gold Coast, and the actual cash crop it produced. Taken together, these physical and metaphorical spaces represented political, economic, and social-built space or landscapes of existence and survival, ranging in time from early to mid-colonial Gold Coast, to late colonial to independent Cameroon, Liberia, and Benin Republic. [End Page v]

In "The Humble Petition of Johana Nyewuame Bekrah: Straddling 'Spaces,' Identities, and Negotiating Boundaries in The Gold Coast Christian 'Model Town' (Abokobi), ca. 1860–1980," Ernest Sasu Kwame Sewordor situates the sociospatial landscape of Abokobi, a Salem established by the Basel Mission as a site for the resettlement of freed slaves or strangers (zongo). He investigates the social and spatial strategies that the Gã, the original inhabitants of Abokobi, employed to maintain their status above that of the resettled freed slaves. By focusing on the actions of one woman ex-slave, Awo Naa, who in 1977 brought a petition to the Basel Mission in Switzerland, the author is able to not only speak to the gendered legacies of slavery in the Gold Coast, but also discuss issues of identity and belonging, as well as space, boundaries, and power. The article is also about Gã hierarchies and the process by which "outsiders" tried to "become Gã." In particular, Sewordor extends the argument that in sharp contrast to the Christian notion of a single community without social divisions, the Gã people of Abokobi strategized to create separate neighborhoods for the resettled strangers. They did this through their control and ownership of land, which allowed them to maintain their status relative to that of the freed slaves and their descendants. Sewordor further posits that the zongo sought to achieve social ascendancy by entering into patron–client relationships with members of the Basel Mission.

Timothy D. L. Nevin's "Liberia's Belle Yella Prison Camp (1910–1990): Repression, Stigma, and Forced Labor in the Heart of the Rainforest," investigates Belle Yella prison in the apparatus of repression in Liberia under different regimes: from 1910, when the prison was first built, until 1990, when it was closed down. He does this through the use of oral histories from formerly incarcerated political prisoners who were imprisoned during the mid-1980s. Nevin's account is about punishment and repression in one of colonial West Africa's fiercest prisons. He places Belle Yella Prison Camp as a troubling site of state tyranny engendered by the manipulation of a barred and controlled built space in twentieth-century Liberia. The author presents an "open and honest" chronological overview of the prison...

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