77.
The author has made extensive use of records in England and the Gold Coast. Her account of land ownership, mining, imports, exports, internal commercial contracts, and transportation are backed by useful tables. She traces the evolution of trading, shipping, commercial, and banking combines; and she shows the relation of these businesses to the British power structure. Final chapters deal with the social impact of cash-crop production, new class alignments, and the beginnings of a proletariat in the Gold Coast. The section on the 1937/38 Cocoa boycott is especially good.
Rhoda Howard, who teaches Sociology at McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario, argues that the only hope for Ghana today is a clean break with world capitalism. In her postscript she regrets Ghana's dependence upon the West, and she issues a call for Ghanaians to throw off their chains in "a massive mobilisation to make the effort of redirecting productive activities...." With the executions of Afrika, Acheampong, and Akuffo, and the rise of Jerry Rawlings and Hilla Limann, who offer new nostrums to their countrymen, one is tempted to munch on a kola nut and to speculate a bit. What if the Europeans had never come to Elmina or Cape Coast? What if the Asantehene had defeated William Maxwell in 1895? What if Samori had conquered Kumasi in 1897? What if Nkrumah had been Houphouet-Boigny? These are questions for a sociologist rather than a historian.
The Rulers of German Africa, 1884-1914. By L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977. Review by Arthur J. Knoll, University of the South.
A. P. Thornton of the University of Toronto aptly concluded that
"there will be no end to the books on imperialism, no last work concerning it, since there is no limit to the emotions it can arouse." Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan of the Hoover Institution in Stanford seem determined to validate Thornton's contention. In addition to this volume the authors later published companion volumes in the ruler series dealing with British Africa in 1978 and Belgian Africa in 1979. They have also done African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa, 1978.
In The Rulers of German Africa Gann and Duignan first proceed to demolish most of the assumptions usually associated with evaluations of German rule in the four African colonies of Togo, Cameroun, Southwest Africa, and East Africa: 1) the Germans were the most brutal and authoritarian of imperialists; the authors cite evidence and use reason to show that the Germans were no more addicted to the use of force or authoritarianism than their British or French counterparts. 2) German colonies were convenient receptacles for the mother country's surplus population and capital; the authors refute this Marxist contention by pointing out