SOAS University of London

Graduate Student, History

Other Affiliations: Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Junior Research Fellow

PhD Candidate

Thesis Title: The history of childhood in colonial Ghana, c.1900-1957

About

My research:

My current research is on the history of childhood in colonial Ghana c.1900-57. The overarching argument of my dissertation is that children in colonial Ghana lived through a unique kind of childhood, very different from anything observed in either pre-colonial Africa or the metropole. The historical forces shaping these new childhoods were firmly rooted in the adult world but, as far as possible, my research has focused on how these shifts were observed, experienced and shaped by children themselves.

The thesis is structured in three parts: first, the relationship of children to adult society; second, the intellectual history of children growing up in a twentieth-century African colony; and third, the economic conditions and expectations of childhood in the Gold Coast.

The first section opens with a chapter on the jural status of children. It sets out a pre-colonial baseline for local philosophies of childhood. I argue that, despite the importance for adults of fertility and child-bearing, children themselves were largely excluded from the social compact. They were often owned and transferred as commodities. They had few individual rights to balance their obligations to others. This was justified by the religious belief that children were not quite of the material plane and so their loyalty to adult society was thought to be equivocal and suspect.

The second chapter explores how many metropolitan ideas about childhood and child-rearing were imported to the Gold Coast during the colonial period. Most significant of these was the idea that children were valuable as individuals and that protecting and promoting an individual child's welfare was both necessary and desirable. From the 1940s onwards colonial officials increasingly believed that African children were threatened by delinquency and other social problems that could only be addressed by modern child-centred institutions, by state regulation of the domestic sphere and by weakening kinship power over children.

The second part of the thesis explores children’s lived experience of colonialism. The first chapter examines children’s fears and their sense of physical security. I argue that children experienced these emotions very differently from adults, primarily because of their existence on the social and physical edge of the adult realm. But in the twentieth century the very notions of fear and security were changing. Children began to fear recognisably colonial institutions and authority figures but, simultaneously, to associate comfort and security with metropolitan material culture.

The second chapter of this part of thesis is on children’s encounters with empire and authority. I argue that children had a sometimes acute awareness of imperial wealth and power. But, at the same time, children were largely apolitical, cut off from this adult realm by their lack of experience and by their intense focus on the present and the self.

The concluding section of the thesis examines the economic aspects of childhood. In particular I look at children as producers and accumulators of wealth. This research challenges existing Africanist interpretations of child labour as a narrowly exploitative institution. The first chapter does document the dangerous, poorly remunerated conditions in which many children worked. But it goes on to consider why the colonial economic infrastructure relied so heavily on the 'small jobs' done by children. And then how many working children found that their mobility and autonomy expanded as demand for their labour increased in both cash crop agriculture and the informal urban economy.

The final chapter analyses the social purpose of child labour. I argue that much of the work undertaken by children - whether on a farm or city street, in a classroom or an artisan's workshop - was 'accumulative' rather than exploitative. It was labour that bridged the gap between economic childhood and adulthood. From a young age children accumulated tangible capital in the form of money, land, livestock and goods; human capital in the form of skills, knowledge, literacy and numeracy; and social capital in the form of relationships, human networks and cultural belonging. The advent and expansion of formal schooling disrupted, but did not destroy, this pattern of accumulation.

My doctoral research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2008 to 2011 and in 2011-12 by the Royal Historical Society Marshall Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research.

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