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84 4 THE EMPLOYMENT OF MEN: CLERKS, POLICE, SOLDIERS, AND TEACHERS, 1930–1951 In colonial Ghana of the 1930s and 1940s male students who had passed the Standard VII examination were called in Twi krakye (pl. akrakyefoɔ). The word is derived from the English word “clerk” and is often translated as “scholars.” Akrakyefoɔ were mainly trained in mission schools to work as clerks, cocoa brokers, storekeepers, pupil teachers, and, if they pursued their education, as certified teachers and pastors. They had “a high prestige in the community due to their wealth, occupation, or literacy” and exercised “an effective influence in the political and social life of the community corresponding to their enhanced status.”1 The subjective meaning of belonging to the akrakyefoɔ affected these men’s selection of employment and selfpresentation . Akrakyefoɔ’s habitus, their “systems of dispositions” rooted in individual and collective experiences of hometown mmusua (matrilineages) and education, not only structured their work but shaped their notions of masculinity and its enactment.2 As pivotal middle figures in colonial encounters , akrakyefoɔ maintained a balance between home and host communities , between employers, government officials, church leaders, and salaried colleagues and friends. These men shared the following characteristics: literacy , a community of peers, ambivalence about politics, and consumption of certain goods. Different forms of employment, such as clerks, soldiers, policemen, and teachers, placed them into intermediary positions, which affected their social, economic, and political standing, as well as their individual experience. As members of intermediary classes, akrakyefoɔ experienced a double social exclusion. Most of them were neither part of the older and established chiefly elites who as “traditional rulers” were in charge of local administration under indirect rule, nor did they belong to the highly educated and financially secure intelligentsia. This was the lawyer-merchant class, who controlled an increasing number of African-owned newspapers and gathered in exclusive 85 The Employment of Men social clubs in cities, while waiting to inherit the colonial state. Still, akrakyefoɔ had political, social, economic, and cultural aspirations. Many hoped for a share of power and sought to be part of a modern and increasingly urban world.3 They were not unique to Ghana. In colonial Tanzania they were “true medial figures” who stood educationally, economically, and culturally betwixt-and-between modern European and traditional native culture .”4 Or, as Nancy Hunt’s sophisticated analysis of the Congo shows, they were “hybrid middle figures,” crucial players in the intricacies and translations of colonial encounters.5 Yet, in Ghana as in other locations along the West African littoral like Freetown or Lagos, they had a longer history reaching back to the nineteenth century.6 Prior to World War I akrakyefoɔ were in a privileged position. Gold Coast historian C. C. Reindorf, himself a product of Basel Mission schools, reported in 1895 that middle school leavers had “no difficulty in obtaining an apprenticeship in a mercantile business or in the Government office.” Reindorf commented that these young men reflected the “honour of our schools, but not so much on our congregations.”7 He was concerned about akrakyefoɔ who did not live up to missionary expectations about masculinity. Missionary reports increasingly criticized “fallen” akrakyefoɔ for their extramarital affairs, for excess in dressing habits, and for religious shortcomings, like seeking advice at an aberewa shrine, a common anti-witchcraft cult. Although enrollment in boarding schools grew, most graduates looked for well-paid employment in government offices and European trading houses, and not for work as teachers and catechists. The economic opportunities created by the cocoa industry had led to their secularization.8 In 1917 Emil Nothwang gave an overview of the professional career of akrakyefoɔ trained at the Akropong Boarding School over the last fifty years. He calculated that, of fifteen hundred graduates, “hundreds found employment with the colonial government or with trading companies, and about five hundred entered into the seminary preparing them as teachers out of which 28 were ordained as pastors.”9 Some graduates were also hired as clerks in such distant places as the Congo and Sierra Leone. Akrakyefoɔ’s favorable economic position changed during the crisis of World War I and worsened in the 1920s, despite the postwar economic recovery. In 1925 Governor Guggisberg deplored that the Gold Coast produced annually four thousand Standard VII leavers, most of them “only suitable for clerical work,” while merely five hundred clerks were required “to replace the normal wastage.”10 Educators proposed policies to redirect the curriculum, widening...

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