16
City of Youth and Mellow Elusiveness
Accra’s Cosmopolitan Constellations
ATO QUAYSON
The evidence of material on African cities does not inspire confidence. They are increasingly overcrowded with no clear plan for matching population growth to available facilities. Sewage and garbage disposal are perennial problems. Laboring street children are everywhere. The hope some five decades ago when many countries gained freedom from their former colonial masters was that these cities would act as engines of growth and development. It was also hoped that they would act as the crucibles within which heterogeneous identities could be merged into a national template. Now the progressive politicization of ethnic and religious identities in places such as Nairobi and Kano has quickly disabused observers of that hope.
And yet it appears also that the dominant crisis-management discourse, heavily enamored of international financial agencies, is actually helping to obscure more pressing questions. I have often wondered to myself, for instance, what it would really take to engage with the mundane and apparently ephemeral details of the African city. I think here of the spontaneity of street life, the slogans, mottoes, and inscriptions on lorries and passenger vehicles, the appropriation of official spaces for nonofficial uses, and all in all, the blatant insertion of local social imaginaries into the public discourses that attempt to define the city. But it would not be adequate either to settle for a simple inventory of subaltern urban forms. That can only lead to a brute numerology; there are countless statistics already that tell us everything we need to know about the crisis confronting the African city.
Issues of method arise. How does one keep focused on the mundane and the apparently ephemeral and from this construct a viable understanding of the African city? More pressingly, how does one tie cosmopolitan impulses to the constellations in which they arise? For in Accra, as in many other African cities, the constellations must be taken to include ethnicity, as well as the long history of how groups of strangers contribute to cosmopolitan impulses within the ethno-temporalities of such cities. Whether we are looking at Accra, or Jos, or Nairobi, or Luanda, or Johannesburg, the structure of multiethnic societies raises issues that cannot be easily passed over in discussions of cosmopolitanism.
Part I: Cosmopolitanisms Now
In January 2013 the New York Times listed Accra as the fourth most desirable destination in the world out of forty-six places surveyed. Accra came hard on the heels of Rio de Janeiro, Marseilles, and Nicaragua, respectively. What this confirms is something long known to casual observers: it has been a hub for West African businessmen for well over two decades, at least since the inception of the successful and continuing democratic experiment of 1992. And at least in the past decade-and-a-half almost every major American university has sent their students on various programs to Ghana and routed them through Accra. These include Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Rutgers, and Colorado, to name just a few of the better known ones. The nine-campus University of California system has been running year-abroad programs in Ghana since the early 1990s while NYU has gone beyond all the others by buying a large property in Accra that plays host to regular cohorts of students and professors from their campus in New York. This is not counting the many students who come to Accra from Europe, including the United Kingdom, Holland, Sweden, Italy, and several others. There are literally hundreds of North American and European students in Accra at any given time during the course of the year studying, doing research, or just helping out on various projects.
Now, if some North American youths were to visit Accra today for research, activism, or pleasure, what kind of things would they be likely to experience? They might be invited to a Facebook beach party. A Facebook beach party is basically an event put together by anyone on Facebook to get all their FB friends to come together and have fun, whether these are real friends or just of the FB variety. If they are in town in August, these lucky students might be invited to go to the Chale Wote Festival at Jamestown, the long-standing neighborhood near the old and disused harbor and now a magnet for heritage tourism. The Festival has been running since 2012 as a way of bringing together a variety of artists, musicians, and other street entertainers in celebration of street life. It is a heady mix of the local and the foreign, with a large dollop of eccentricity for good measure. If feeling so inclined, our visiting youths might instead join a roller skating team that meets at Jamestown on Saturdays and Sundays for roller skating competitions. If our students were in Accra between 2006 and 2013, they might have found themselves at the Coconut Grove Hotel dancing alongside the two thousand others around the hotel’s grand swimming pool. The highly popular salsa night was held every Wednesday from 7 to 10 p.m. and also simultaneously beamed live on CitiFm in their Salsa Mania program. Free classes were offered to beginners, but in reality the distinction between beginners and aficionados was thoroughly and systematically obscured because, as is commonly asserted, asa bone nkum asaase (i.e., bad dancing never killed the earth). At Oxford Street, roller skaters double as drug couriers, readily distributing marijuana, cocaine, and other hard drugs to willing buyers in the evening.
Or our young visiting folk might be confidently informed by their local friends over copious amounts of beer about various mayoral races in Toronto, London, or Sydney, New York, with full-scale analyses of the merits or demerits of different arguments about forms of public transport, or water conservation, or cycle routes, or whatever might be most prominent in these elections elsewhere. This is not entirely surprising, for since the expansion of the Ghanaian diaspora beginning in the 1980s people in the country have taken to making sure that they know as much as possible about happenings anywhere that Ghanaians are to be found. If our visiting youth were especially interested in soccer (locally called by its proper name, football) they might enter into a heated argument with Manchester United, or Chelsea, or Barcelona fans who would be able to give them detailed team sheets of their favorite teams in European Champions League games since the early 2000s.
If our visitors are in any way observant about their environment, they would also quickly notice the Ghanaian penchant for slogans on vehicles and indeed on other surfaces as well: “One Man No Chop”; “Shoes are Repairing Here”; “May Allah Rain His Blessings Upon Me”; “Ashawo.” A bit of investigation would reveal that these slogans have diverse sources of inspiration and cover everything from sexual innuendoes, religious sentiments, and translations from local-language wisdom traditions, to the candidly fabricated from a personal context. “Observers are Worried. Why?” inscribed on a house or lorry is a nose-thumbing gesture at people who might be questioning the source of the wealth used to build the said house or purchase the said lorry. Other slogans of variant vintage solemnly declare: “I No Be Like You”; “Mama Chocolate”; “A Short Man Is Not a Boy” (which has subtle sexual innuendoes), “Belly Never Know Vacation”, “You Too Can Try” (a subtle challenge/insult translated from local languages); “Envy Never Lights a Fire”, “Still, It Makes Me Laugh”; “And Jesus Wept”; “Enye Easy” (“It Is Not Easy”); “Insha’Allahu”; “Gold Never Rust”; “Mammy Watta”, “Fear Man and Take Snake”; and “Kwaku Ananse” (the last three inspired by folktales); and, simply “Auntie Akos,” as tribute to the person who helped procure the vehicle.
The slogans and inscriptions are also often translations of globalized signifiers onto the local cultural scene. “Nike,” with a barely recognizable “swoosh” beside it on the back of a passenger vehicle signals the global reach of the sportswear company. A barbershop display depicting haircuts of Barack Obama alongside Mike Tyson suggests that they both pack a mean punch while also enticing customers in for a similarly “powerful” haircut. Images of Kofi Annan, erstwhile President Rawlings, and Princess Diana may also be placed together on the same sign-art poster to suggest that they were all three “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” problematic as this might seem to ignorant skeptics. Fascinatingly, both sets of images might also double as artwork on passenger lorries, with appropriate inscriptions “for the road,” as it were. Read correctly, then, each signifying surface defines a dramatic scene, where the writing plus any added images are the nodal points of much wider discursive propositions. In their own distinctive ways they all invite viewer participation in the improvised scene laid out, whether the scene be exclusively textual or a combination of writing and images. The participation indexed by these slogans, sayings, and mottoes differs markedly from that implied in the inscriptions and images to be found on the advertising billboards of multinational corporations.
This is just a modest sampling of how well Accra might tickle the fancy of young visitors in alliance with their local friends, but it is by no means all that it has to offer. Such mobile slogans are a distinctive feature of Accra and of many African urban environments. The central feature of these mottoes and slogans is an elusively inventive and improvisational character that installs writing ambiguously between literacy and orality. Thus the urban scriptural economy is often shaped around items that draw simultaneously from repertoires of both orality and literacy. This is evident in areas as diverse as funerary and obituary notices, popular performances and literary texts that draw on oral discursive traditions, concert party and film posters, and the sayings, slogans, and inscriptions on walls, print cloths, canoes, lorries, cars, and various other surfaces across the urban landscape. Each of these items extends from a domain of oral performativity and reaches into the domain of writing, such that the process of reading them requires an innovative understanding of their mixed genres and the orality/literacy spectrum from which they draw their meaning(s).
There are two quick points to be extracted from what has been laid out about Accra so far, the first fairly obvious and even banal and the second more significant and profound. The first is that given the vast interconnectedness of today’s world, the heart of darkness has ceased to exist. This is despite all the evidence to the contrary that we get in the media. And this interconnectedness has been going on for a very long time. Whether with the arrival of the Afro-Brazilians (the Tabon) of Otublohum in the nineteenth century or the return of the demobilized soldiers from World War II who played such a signal role in the decolonization movement, Ghana and Accra, its capital, have been socially integrated into the global world. The world of Facebook, Twitter, and Gollywood is but one installment of this continuing transnationalism. The second point I want to make is that despite all the negative news that comes from the continent, the imagination of Ghanaians and indeed Africans is not limited by circumstance. Despite wars and rumors of war, famines, poor water and sanitation, political corruption, and fragile states, people in Africa have the same capacity for reimagining the world as do people born in Mississauga, or New Jersey, or Bromley, or Leiden. The challenge is not just how to acknowledge this fact, but how to identify and nourish the sources of the African imagination. And what we might term the African imagination is more complex than might first appear.
Part II: Hybridity and the Process of Becoming Ethnic
Given the many tastes and satisfactions that can be had in today’s Accra, it is easy to succumb to the temptation of seeing it in ahistorical terms, as though it were merely the iteration of cosmopolitanism everywhere else in the world. Two reminders from Accra’s variegated history are important for curbing such enthusiasm. These pertain to the city’s absorption of stranger groups—the manner by which they have been required to be incorporated into the ethnohistory of the indigenous Gas—and the implications that this raises for contrasting multiethnicity and multiculturalism.
When Saidiya Hartman went to spend two years in Ghana as a Fulbright Fellow in the late 1990s, she was astounded to be called obroni, a term which roughly translates as “white person.” Her astonishment arose from the fact that the claims on her identity as an African American woman made her a consciously black person. What she appears not to have realized in her riveting account of doing research on the trajectories of slave identities in Ghana was the fact that she had been inserted into a completely different racial economy in which to be fair-skinned was to automatically have a form of privilege. Indeed, the word obroni is also a term of endearment applied, say, between lovers to suggest something precious and ineffable. While in such instances completely detached from race, it is still possible to discern in it the liminal valence of the racial economy. What we might then describe as a pigmentocracy has not got the same social effects as in the Caribbean, in India, or in the United States, and yet still carries a social valence. The source of this social valence may be traced to the period of transatlantic slavery, where, as I have noted elsewhere, the increasing numbers of mixed-race children whose fathers were officers in the European trade forts and castles ensured that skin hue went through various gradations of insurance against being enslaved. Typically, being mulatto (as the term was then) signified an automatic connection to the white European world exemplified in the European trading outposts.
But it is the fate of another set of slaves, this time the returnee Afro-Brazilians (Tabon) from Bahia in the mid-nineteenth century, that most readily reveals the dynamics of social hierarchy tied to race. Crucially, the Afro-Brazilians were in the space of two generations to be completely assimilated to Ga social and political culture, despite maintaining their Brazilian names and a number of cultural traits brought over from Portuguese Brazil.
As Lorand Matory has pointed out, as many as eight thousand manumitted slaves from Bahia returned to West Africa from 1822 to 1899, with many of these settling in colonial Lagos. Among the reasons for the resettlement of returnee Afro-Brazilians in Lagos was the active British interest in freeing slaves who had been ensnared in the residual slave trade after its abolition in 1807.1 Since British West Africa in the nineteenth century included several other territories in the region, Lagos must not be taken as an isolated focus of British antislavery or indeed of resettlement efforts.2 The administrative connections between Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Lagos were to prove highly significant for the dynamic settlement patterns in the period of returnee stranger groups from the New World to West Africa, raising significant implications about hybridity and intercultural exchange beyond the Bahia-Lagos nexus Matory traces in his excellent study. Indeed, as we shall see presently, the returnee Afro-Brazilians to Accra in the nineteenth century did know of their fellow Afro-Brazilians in Lagos and Porto Novo and actively sought to establish commercial and cultural networks with them.
Strictly speaking, however, the Tabon arrived in Accra in three different stages between 1829 and 1836, with the arrivals of 1836 comprising the largest group and the ones that were to have the greatest impact among their hosts.3 The name Tabon derives from the form of greeting they exchanged amongst themselves and with their hosts (“como esta?”; “esta bom”). The numbers attributed to the 1836 group vary, but scholars generally agree that they were in the region of two hundred persons and represented at least seven separate family groups. Given that the Malê (Muslim) slave rebellion had taken place in Bahia in 1835, and that the returnees constituted distinct family groups, it has been surmised that at least some if not all the Tabon of 1836 may have been deportees from that rebellion.4 Scholars of the Tabon have also noted that it is they who introduced Islam to the Accra coast, originally at Otublohum, where they had initially settled. The group arriving in 1836 were led by Nii Azumah Nelson I and included the Vialla (Viera), Manuel, Gomez, Peregrino, Mahama Nassu (or Nassau), and Zuzer families.5 Other Tabon names common in today’s Accra and traceable to later arrivals are Ribiero, Morton, Olympio, Nelson, Da Costa, Da Rocha, Fiscian, Maslieno, and Da Silva.
The warm reception extended to the Afro-Brazilians by the Dutch makelaar (trading agent) Kwaku Ankra ensured that the Tabon were quickly extended special Dutch protection on their arrival. Not long after their arrival they were given large tracts of land in present-day Asylum Down, Adabraka/Kokomlemle, and North Ridge, on which they cultivated vegetable crops including tomatoes, potatoes, and okra, along with the staple cassava. This continued until the early part of the twentieth century, when intense urban pressures forced the conversion of these lands from agrarian to urban uses.6 The conversion of lands generated a number of significant tensions within the Tabon community and between them and their Ga hosts.
In 1860 the Basel Missionary Trading Company opened a shop for blacksmiths at Christiansborg, where students were taught to make wheels and produce barrels and carts for exporters of palm oil, palm kernels, coffee, and later cocoa.7 It would not be hyperbolic to assert, however, that it was the Tabon who first introduced such skills with a specifically urban inflection into the general local economy. When they first arrived the Tabon were already very skilled at shoemaking, carpentry, metal forging, architecture, and tailoring; they were also highly experienced farmers, skilled in irrigation techniques, and in the location and digging of wells.8 This confirms Reis’s observation about the sophisticated occupational characteristics of the African slaves who filled the streets of Salvador in Bahia. As he notes, they “worked in the open air as artisans, washerwomen, tailors, street vendors, water bearers, barbers, musicians, artists, masons, carpenters, stevedores, and sedan chair porters.”9 The digging of wells and the availability of good drinking water was especially useful to their Ga hosts, as potable water was not to be generally available until the 1920s with the opening of the Weija Waterworks, and even then after serious disagreements about water rates between the Ga chiefs and the colonial administration.10
If the Ga of nineteenth-century Accra were focused predominantly on the occupational specializations of fishing, fish processing, salt making, and trade, the Tabon came to contribute early forms of urban livelihood diversification that were later to strongly resonate with the large numbers of migrants arriving from other parts of the Colony and West Africa. Unlike company artisanal slaves (cooks, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc.) who worked in the European forts and castles from the seventeenth century and whose allegiance was primarily to their masters, or the converts to early Christianity who fell under the aegis of the Basel Missionaries, the Tabon gave their allegiance to no one, regarding themselves as a distinct sociocultural group forging a place within a new urban environment.11 Their urban skill set must then be interpreted as a crucial element of urban exchange value, tied neither to the residual slave economy of the European forts and castles nor to the normative religious implications of the Christian missions. Their early access to tracts of land both close to the Jamestown harbor and further inland also meant that they were quickly able to occupy the upper entrepreneurial echelons of society, since they not only owned significant means of agricultural production but also had the requisite skills to establish highly valued craft industries such as tailoring and blacksmithing.
The Tabon possessed skills that became increasingly significant for negotiating urban life and, given the circumstances under which they first arrived, implied a significant resource for their integration into Ga society. By the 1930s the burgeoning town came to be defined very much along the lines of the urban skills represented by the Tabon, with the opportunities for working in the expanding colonial civil service, in the labor and building industries, and in commerce fully altering the nature of the urban assimilation of variant migrants to the town. Gradually, success in the town ceased to be linked to the goodwill of either the European trading enterprises or to the indigenous Gas as collective owners of the lands where migrants sojourned. Furthermore, with greater urbanization Accra became more and more dependent on agricultural produce from outlying areas, which also shifted the nature of the networks that fed the town. While early Tabon agricultural enterprise played a central part in the feeding of Accra, later migrant groups also came to make a decisive contribution. At Tudu the community of Muslim merchants drawn from Yoruba, Hausa, and the Northern Territories contributed cattle, milk products, shea butter, kola, and other important items to the diversification of Accra’s diet.12 But even in the diversification of urban diets the Tabon seem to have led the way.
At the same time, the Tabon were undergoing a slow but steady process of becoming Ga. With this in mind, we are able to conclude that the Tabon were not only assimilated to the Ga, but that their assimilation proceeded through their conversion into an ethnicity, the terms of which were partly shaped by their adoption of Ga ways and partly by the processes enjoined by colonial rule. What we described as the Tabon’s heritage from Bahia must also be understood as having been formed recursively by the African retentions in the New World that were constantly augmented by cultural flows from Africa itself and then subsequently returned to Africa.
As Price and Mintz and Matory have instructed us, the New World was a crucible for the formation of creolized cultures that were at various times augmented by freshly arriving Africans, and, perhaps more importantly, returned back to Africa in a lively transnational cultural exchange that made Africa coeval with the New World and not an ahistorical motherland.13 Whether with the much celebrated religions of santeria and candomblé, or with the cuisines, hair styles, and dress codes that are commonly shared between West Africa and the New World, cultural interchange must be understood as having been standardized by the nineteenth century. While the first cohort of Afro-Brazilian returnees to West Africa in the nineteenth century included people of first-generation slave descent, the point is not so much to establish that they had returned “home” to their original cultures. Rather, “home” and its cultures were coconstituted by the recursive relays of cultural details that played out between the West African subregion and Bahia, such that it was very difficult by the mid-nineteenth century to speak of any straightforward origins of, for example, the culinary habits they brought back with them. More important than any notion of return was the process of progressive ethnicization into which the Tabon were inserted and which converted them into Gas.
The process of becoming ethnic involved in the first instance adapting to aspects of Ga political and ritual practice. While the Ga Mantse (king) is normally selected from two of the oldest quarters, the choice of the Tabon Mantse involved the nomination of a leader by the heads of all the original seven Tabon families. The Tabon have followed this more democratic principle to this day, and yet have also absorbed large portions of Ga chiefly ritual attributes, including their chiefly regalia and installation rites. The Tabon also actively participate in the Homowo festival and also practice male circumcision, two key signifiers of being a Ga. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Tabon Mantse had succeeded in being elevated to the seat of benkumhene of the Ga Mantse, in other words, the wise counselor who sits to the left of the principal chiefly overlord.14 The designations of nifa (right) and benkum (left) are also military designations, and imply that in times of war the relevant chief will provide soldiers for the right or left flank. The ascension of the Tabon Mantse to the position of benkumhene was no ordinary feat of assimilation into the Ga political order. The early twentieth century saw the eruption of internecine conflicts within the Tabon community with respect to whether the Tabon Mantse was comparable to an indigenous Ga chief and thus had the same right to dispense lands as the Ga hosts.15
At the same time the process of becoming Ga did not completely obliterate certain features brought from Bahia that have been incorporated into Ga ritual, thus making the Tabon variants essentially hybrids of memorialization. With respect to the Homowo festival, the ritual celebrations see the Ga Mantse sprinkling kpoikpoi (ground and slightly fermented maize mixed with palm oil) for the benefit of the ancestors, while the Tabon for their part sprinkle akara/koose, waakye, massa, pinkaso, and a variety of special Tabon foods. Yet each of the foods just mentioned has a mixed West African and New World provenance, with a suggestive Muslim marking for akara/koose (black-eyed beans ground, seasoned with chilli, then fried; this food being common to Muslim communities in both Nigeria and Ghana); and waakye (rice and beans, varieties of which are found both in Brazil and the Caribbean, as well as among Ghanaian Muslim communities). Also significant for ritual hybridities are Tabon outdooring (child naming) and marriage ceremonies, where despite close similarity between theirs and those of their host community, the copious chewing of kola nut suggests a clear reference to Muslim heritage, even if this is now expressed in an exclusively ritual form.16
Perhaps the one element that ensured their ultimate ethnicization is that the Tabon never managed to retain a grasp of the Portuguese language. Their small overall numbers, the pressure of conversion of a large part of their number to the dominant religion of Christianity, and the fact that they were among the first to take to Western-style education meant that within two short generations they had all but lost their mastery of the Portuguese language. The loss of Portuguese did not, however, prevent them from retaining their Afro-Brazilian names, something they use to this day as a means of signaling their special genealogy and of retaining a continuing sense of viability as a community. If we learn anything from the Tabon for our understanding of Accra it is that they represent a mode of cultural hybridity that is easy to by-pass due to their degree of apparent assimilation into Ga culture. But the example of the Tabon also teaches us that despite being no more than a group of returnee Africans from the faraway lands of enslavement, the process of settling into their new “homeland” was far from straightforward. It involved a long process of ethnicization that helps to distinguish them from other stranger groups that came to settle in West Africa. Strictly as part of a future research agenda, it would be instructive to compare the Afro-Brazilians of West Africa to the African American returnees to Liberia in the nineteenth century, for example, or the Black Nova Scotians of Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all of whom seem to have been assimilated to their local African backgrounds and yet have retained significant signifiers of their diasporic provenance. Each instance raises significant questions about ethnicity, multiculturalism, and hybridity and the processes by which a group becomes African.
The case of the Tabon, along with many other stranger groups that came to settle across Africa (the Syro-Lebanese of West Africa and the Indians of East and South Africa come readily to mind) help to raise the fraught question of ethnicity and how this relates to cosmopolitanism. For it might be argued, somewhat polemically, that much of Africa is multiethnic and not multicultural, and that cosmopolitanism depends fundamentally on an explicit embrace of multiculturalism rather than multiethnicity. For even the horrible pogroms against black Africans that took place in South Africa early in 2015 were a sign of the problem that country has with ethnicity. Much of the violence started in the predominantly male urban hostels, which in the apartheid era were segregated according to different ethnicities and by the early 1990s were deployed as devices for ethnic mobilization. Like many such pogroms all over the world, the victims were people who were not of the correct ethnicity, in this case other foreign Africans. I would even like to suggest that in Africa xenophobia is shorthand for ethnic resentment rather than the hatred of foreigners.
So what does this imply for cosmopolitanism today? Perhaps the truth of the matter is that in multiethnic cities like Accra and others like it, cosmopolitanism is an experience of elusive potential enjoined for the middle-class elites and their transnational cohorts and that this experience must be understood alongside other identity formations, some deeply ethnic, that completely contradict the cosmopolitan impulse. It is the precise constellation within which a local cosmopolitan impulse takes shape that we are challenged to understand. If cosmopolitanism is not to be taken as a mere typology of tastes and fashions, but as a choice of identity among others, then the constellation within which this choice is exercised is as important as the choice itself.
NOTES
1 J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 53.
2 When the Gold Coast was fully taken over by the British government in 1821 it was first placed under the control of the government of Sierra Leone. After a hiatus from 1828 to 1843, when a committee of London merchants ran the administration of the two colonies, Sierra Leone resumed control again until 1850. The two colonies were then separated until 1866 when they were again put under the control of Sierra Leone. However, in 1874 the Gold Coast and Lagos were joined together to become the Gold Coast Colony, with Lagos gaining full autonomy some twenty years later.
3 For a fuller account of the Tabon of Accra, see Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), chapter 2, “Ga Akutso Formation and the Question of Hybridity: The Afro-Brazilians (Tabon) of Accra.”
4 Marco Aurelio Schaumloeffel, Tabom: The Afro-Brazilian Community in Ghana (Bridgetown: Schaumloeffel, 2009); Alcione M. Amos and Ebenezer Ayesu, “ ‘I Am Brazilian’: History of the Tabon, Afro-Brazilians in Accra, Ghana,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, ns. (2003): 35–58.
5 Schaumloeffel, Tabom, 26.
6 Hermann von Hesse points out that the acquisition of lands for agricultural cultivation by the Tabon was really a measure to solve a looming crisis that threatened the early returnees. While some such as Aruna Nelson were content to stay at Otublohum, others such as Mama Nassu had originally been farmers in Bahia and were keen to enter into agricultural production. While the acquisition of lands was performed on behalf of all the Tabon as a collective, only a section of them ended up cultivating the lands. By the beginning of the twentieth century and with the increasing urbanization of Accra lands, the outlying areas of Asylum Down, Kokomlemle, and Adabraka, where they had procured their lands, began to generate strong interest from non-Tabon. This in its turn led to disagreements amongst the Tabon community itself about who could properly be allowed to sell them. Several cases were brought by Gas against the Tabon and amongst the Tabon themselves. See Hermann von Hesse, “A Brief History of the Afro-Brazilian Community of Accra.” B.A. thesis, University of Ghana (2010); also Marco Aurelio Schaumloeffel, Tabom: The Afro-Brazilian Community in Ghana (Bridgetown: Schaumloeffel, 2009); and Samuel S. Quarcopoome, “The Impact of Urbanization on the Socio-Political History of the Ga Mashie People of Accra: 1877–1957.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Ghana (1993).
7 Peter A. Schweizer, Survivors on the Gold Coast: The Basel Missionaries in Colonial Ghana (Accra: Smartline Publishers, 2000), 85.
8 Schaumloeffel, Tabom: The Afro-Brazilian Community in Ghana (Bridgetown: Schaumloeffel, 2009), 28–29.
9 João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, translated by Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 160.
10 The Accra Water Rate Bill of 1925, revised several times subsequently, draws some very strong criticism from residents of Accra, including the chiefs. Some of the lively arguments are captured on the pages of the Gold Coast Spectator, November 29, 1930.
11 On the mentality and peculiar cosmology of company slaves brought on by their circumstances, see Ray Kea, “ ‘But I Know What I Shall Do’: Agency, Belief & the Social Imaginary in Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast Towns,” Africa’s Urban Past, eds. David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 163–188.
12 Samuel Ntewusu provides an exhaustive and fascinating account of the contribution of the Yoruba and northern merchant communities of Tudu to Accra’s urban formation. See his “Settling In and Holding On: A Socio-Economic History of Northern Traders and Transporters in Accra’s Tudu: 1908-2008,” Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden, University of Leiden (2011). The argument about shifts in food dependency for Accra and other urban centers in the Gold Coast in the long durée is put forward persuasively by Ray A. Kea in his Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore; John Hopkins University Press, 1982). There is also speculation that the name Tudu may itself have been of Brazilian origin. The Tabon had opened shops around the area, and on being asked what they had on offer often replied “tudoo,” meaning everything; this word was later used by the locals to designate the entire area. No other explanation has thus far been provided for this unusual place name, which does not seem to derive from Ga or any other local language. Thus its Brazilian provenance seems as likely as any.
13 Richard Price and Sidney Mintz. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (New York: Beacon Press, 1992).
14 Schaumloeffel, Tabom, 81.
15 An example of such a land dispute, which almost caused irreparable damage to the Tabon community, was that brought in 1938 by J. E. Maslieno against J. A. Nelson, representing two established Tabon families. See Schaumloeffel, Tabom, 35–36; and also Quarcopoome, “Urbanization, Land Alienation and Politics in Accra.” IAS Research Review, New Series, 8.1&2, (1992), 40–54.
16 See von Hesse, “A Brief History of the Afro-Brazilian Community of Accra,” 12, 14, 32–34.