1 Introduction

The principal idea of forced labour underlying colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa’s rural regions is well-known, but its implementation and effects remain superficially analysed for large parts of the African continent. In several studies, the view prevails that coerced labour as it was organised by the colonial authorities from the late nineteenth century onwards, somehow reproduced forms of slavery. This opinion holds partly true for concession company rule in places such as the Congo Free State, French Gabon and Middle-Congo, or the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. The connection, which existed in higher or lower degrees of intensity for those Central and South East African cases, was especially important if the agents of such concession companies channelled unfree labour into production tasks that had formerly had a connection with slave labour.¹ Then, to quote Eric Allina’s ground-breaking work, it could indeed just resemble “slavery by any other name.”² Elsewhere, however, the overlap between slavery practices, especially where they were part of local community life – and not the source of labour for European plantation complexes, which were, after all, rare on the African continent – and colonial practices of forced labour was more complex. Andreas Eckert has rightly pointed out that individuals with servile status could be the first to be internally discriminated within village communities. Such discrimination could include their recruitment for forced labour tasks imposed by the colonial system, through a mechanism of picking the socially weakest individuals of the community through internal compulsory and negotiation processes.³ However, this connection has not found much further inquiry.

Even colonial forced labour as a more general practice and experience of colonial rule has only very recently received more systematic attention. This delay in research partly has to do with research methods and the difficulty of finding sources: oral informants tended to refer to forced labour tasks in a kind of streamlined horror narrative, which frequently did not allow scholars to reconstruct the concrete experience behind it and its actual effects on local life. Conversely, detailed discussions of forced labour and the reactions to its use are often difficult to uncover from archival evidence, as the comments of colonial officials and auxiliaries, and transcribed testimony of victims, are scattered through files.⁴ However, two aspects can be pointed out as essential common elements of colonial forced labour all over sub-Saharan Africa. First, a principal means of coercion were periods of mandatory service for the creation and maintenance of infrastructures – especially roads, which were often essential for the transport of agricultural products – but also sanitation in rural sectors. Forced agricultural production, mostly through cotton quotas and limited to particular regions, was also part of colonial forced labour systems, but less common.⁵ Second, while colonial forced labour was abolished in the various territories in sub-Saharan Africa between 1946 and 1961, colonial administrators of different regimes remained committed to the idea of labour coercion for the greater good of both the colonies’ economy and as means of teaching Africans “how to work.”⁶ Many of the postcolonial regimes on the African continent adopted some of the labour obligations that had been in place, framing them into new civic duties or youth services in contexts of road cleaning and maintenance.⁷

In the British colonies on the African continent, labour obligations and their coercive nature were quite differently defined. As a colonial power, the British government insisted internationally, through prompt ratification of the Forced Labour Convention C29 of the International Labour Organization in 1931, on the superior standards of British colonialism.⁸ Indeed, British politicians claimed that forced labour as colonial practice had long disappeared in the African territories – or, sometimes, not so long but definitely, as in the case of the Gold Coast’s Northern Province in 1927.⁹ This was taken up by some older literature, while later studies showed that corvée labour, organised by the chiefs, was used until at least 1935, as in the case of the Ashanti Province.¹⁰ After that, the principal and decisive claim was that rural populations in the various colonies voluntarily contributed to rural works, for the sake of “rural development.” This colonial trope transformed, as I will discuss, into an issue of alleged community development models under Ghana’s postcolonial regimes.¹¹ In other words, while the continuities of forced labour under later British colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, between 1927 and the 1950s, have mostly remained unstudied, post-independence communal labour, where the term and concept continued to exist, has been framed as a benign and fully voluntary communitarian practice.

The colonial version of framing practices as benign and voluntary communitarian labour has been challenged most recently, for Kenya, by Opolot Okia, who demonstrated how the practice continued to be controlled by the colonial state after 1930, in spite of British rhetoric at the ilo level.¹² In the case of the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, some older studies had already questioned the idea of the voluntary character of road work under British colonialism, but those studies remained isolated.¹³ The critical analysis of communal labour under colonial rule has recently found even clearer expressions with a focus on the colony’s Northern Province, which had been a bastion of corvée labour much commented on, and where the “traditional chiefs” continued to rely on imposing communal labour tasks after 1930.¹⁴ The principal reinterpretation discussing the changes of the 1930s, and linking international pressures (through the ilo) with the goals and hesitations of colonial agents and the objectives of chiefs, focusing on the north of Ghana, but also adopting a colony-wide perspective, was recently published by Sarah Kunkel: her work offers a new standard for our understanding of these social practices and their transformations and continuities.¹⁵

This chapter will go into another direction. It will, first, point to evidence showing that communal labour in the British territories in Africa under colonial rule was widely (if not everywhere) a smokescreen for rural forced labour. Given that secondary roads and their maintenance were essential for the rural production sector, these experiences of compulsory work nevertheless remain an important part of the agrarian world. However, the picture is complicated by the fact that communitarian practices also existed, as mutual help during harvests, for instance. Although I will refer to some new studies on that later issue, I hold it as difficult to generalise on the absence or presence of coercion in these practices. For rural infrastructure, its creation and maintenance, the case is clear; and my results will show that, despite certain changes and modalities and massive changes in the rhetoric used, these often remained unfree practices. In other words, “communal labour” remained “forced labour” in the sector of infrastructure maintenance; moreover, while this practice, with its compulsory nature and the fact that it especially targeted the weakest elements in communities, might have reached its peak in the early 1940s, it continued to exist beyond independence in 1957 and during the subsequent independent regimes.

Building on a number of interpretations for the late 1920s and the 1930s, I will then attempt to question the idea that “communal labour” was an ongoing forced labour practice for the Gold Coast/Ghana and see to which degree and under which forms it lived on into the various postcolonial regimes and even into the new millennium (while obviously admitting that the intensity of coercive elements is likely to have been milder from the 1940s onwards). Building mostly on archival evidence – because I hold that the same problems of interpreting labour coercion through oral interviews prevail in the Ghanaian case, and even more so for the decades after independence – I will follow the scattered indications for such labour in rural infrastructure-building and maintenance. The goal is to detect the dissonances in administrative observations, the expressions of refusal and resistance, and the voices of victims of communal labour but also of those detracting labour refusals that appear in letters and petitions. This approach is inspired by the strategies inherent in subaltern study methods.¹⁶ My perspective will mostly rely on evidence from various southern Ghanaian regions (including the Eastern Region and the Ashanti Region) and, especially, from the Central Region for which I will interpret new, ground-breaking archival evidence. I will attempt to bring those experiences in connection with broader developments.

2 Communal Labour: From an Allegedly Accepted Development Reality in the 2000s Back to “Natural Practices” in the 1920s

The discussion projected communal labour as a positive issue of the past, in which so-called “traditional chiefs” were sufficiently revered to enlist the constant voluntary support of their populations for communal labour projects. This vision corresponded to the ideas spread by British administrators during the colonial period, emphasising the democratic and voluntary nature of such work. The same idea was defended elsewhere in British colonial territories; it was thus by no means exclusive to the Gold Coast and to the Kenyan case interpreted by Okia. The fantasy of a communitarian development effort orchestrated by the chiefs found perhaps its clearest expression in a comment coming from the administration of the Tanganyika Mandate in 1929, a comment that already belonged to the upcoming discussion on international intervention in colonial forced labour: “The term ‘forced labour’ in this connection is a misnomer. There are many things which require to be done in a native village connected with its good order, sanitation, etc., where it is by far the simplest and least expensive way for the able-bodied male villagers to do them themselves.”¹⁹

Recent work on Ghana has highlighted the initiative of locals in the colonial period, thus providing a picture that goes beyond the notion that locals were solely motivated to act for the common good of community development because of their charismatic chiefs. Using a new, exciting approach to discussing local initiative in yam producing areas, María José Pont Cháfer shows, especially through oral evidence, that successful pioneers exploring new production opportunities for yams were quite proactive in mobilising communal labour as a communitarian exercise. Chiefs were much less important in those initiatives. Pont Cháfer’s discussion rightly insists on the capacity of locals to decide to join forces in communitarian work, although in her PhD thesis the range of examples clearly focuses on harvest labour.²⁰ In future research, such situations would need to be clearly distinguished from situations in which local hierarchies prompted the mobilisation of communal labour.

However, during the colonial period and beyond, the role of chiefs and the issue of organising construction and maintenance processes, in which the state does not provide wages, still dominate the debate.²¹ Another trope, appearing in scholarship on more recent periods, is that of the generally positive image of such obligations, even if they are initiated or imposed by a local hierarchy.²² For a number of cases from the 1970s onwards, Sara Berry has described communal labour as an essential first element of the strategy of village notables, who used their prerogative to call for it to create a fundament for mobilising resources provided by donors.²³ Moreover, in the field of development sociology, Lauren Morris even holds that there was a major difference in attitude towards communal labour between Ghanaian public opinion of the early 2000s, where its image is allegedly positive, and that in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire.²⁴ It is, therefore, crucial to take a closer look at how such practices presented themselves and were accepted by local Ghanaian populations, according to available evidence. I will examine locals’ opinions and reactions through the late 1920s and 1930s, for the years during and after the Second World War, and, finally, for postcolonial rural life under the Nkrumah, Busia, Acheampong and Rawlings regimes of the independent Ghanaian state.

3 The Cheap Alternative: Discussions, Experiences, and Euphemisms around Communal Labour from the 1920s to the 1950s

Colonial attitudes towards forced labour in the Gold Coast appear neatly in the service diary of the district commissioner of Bekwai, in the Ashanti Province. In early August 1927, officials Hunter and Maidment of the Agricultural Department of the colony explained to the commissioner their plans for holding an agricultural show in the district: “Force communal labour to clear a site & erect stalls. force the people to bring in exhibits & generally to do all the work.” The commissioner ironically commented on their plans, but his main complaint was the organisational effort for himself, and not the negative impact of forced work on local individuals.²⁵ However, with the implementation of the ilo Convention C29 suddenly becoming a threat on the horizon, colonial officials in the Gold Coast started to calculate the detrimental effects of renouncing labour coercion.²⁶

The Provincial Commissioner of the Central Province was plain about what he considered the dramatically negative effects of the abolition of communal labour practices. He commented on this “gloomy picture” by warning against “the effects of an enormous fall in Revenue, since communal labour could be computed in terms of cash and be considered an asset of the Colony,” as only “[i]f communal road maintenance and village services are to be excluded from the Convention, there is little to worry over.”²⁷ According to the (better-known) comment of his colleague in the Eastern Province, the whole plan was “eminently unsuitable for compulsorily abolishing a system by which the Colony obtains work for the common good of the people without undue hardship, the abolition of which the people have not asked for themselves.”²⁸

While hoping to see the colonial government step in to provide revenue for essential road services, the report from the Central Province nevertheless suggested to keep as many mandatory labour services as possible, including through strict sanitation rules compelling locals to guarantee village sanitation; however, the still-common recruitment of women and children for labour services was eventually to be excluded in the future.²⁹ To bolster the argument, the report quoted and cited extensively from the positions formulated four decades earlier by Gold Coast lawyer and Fante spokesman John Sarbah, who had insisted that “his people” would always favour labour obligations over hut taxes.³⁰ Here, the idea, so commonly used, that Africans in colonial contexts practically demanded labour services for themselves appears prominently for the first time.³¹

Moreover, the colonial administration was ever keener to shift the burden of internal negotiation, or compulsion, in view of local communities carrying out communal labour, to the chiefs.³² Warning against the apparently “common misinterpretation” that labour services no longer existed, in June 1930 the District Commissioner of Dunkwa in the Central Province informed leading chiefs that they simply had to obtain local consent for the tasks which still had to be a part of daily life. How this consent was to be obtained remained open, but the message clearly pointed to the possibility of imposing the tasks on those with less protection within a village community.³³ In the Eastern Province, administrators equally accused the locals of trying to escape from village labour obligations, and they held the chiefs responsible for “convincing” the community; but, once again, this rationale left considerable room for imposing these tasks on vulnerable individuals.³⁴ Such tasks could eventually be avoided by the weak by moving away into cocoa zones and taking over abusa sharecropping labour: a system that was also characterised by certain abuses, but which established itself as a viable alternative.³⁵

How powerful the coercive element within allegedly voluntary communal labour ultimately was can be demonstrated through an interpretation of the reactions that followed its disappearance in some parts of the Gold Coast in the 1940s. In Kwamang in the Ashanti Province, the “youngmen,” referring to younger inhabitants of the town who had regularly been targeted for labour services, were relieved about the institution of fees and the introduction of regular paid labour for road maintenance and sanitation. This was regarded as immense progress, although it coincided with a wide array of other local conflicts, linked to the debts of stools (local chieftaincies).³⁶ In the Juaben Division of the Ashanti Province, the increasing anger of those being compelled to perform communal labour had strong effects, which were noted by administrators complaining that it also made the recruitment of soldiers for the Second World War much more difficult, as the chiefs, who were responsible for the recruitment, were becoming increasingly unpopular.³⁷ In the following years, individuals called upon for communal labour (described as “normal minor voluntary communal services” by the district commissioner of Oka-Western Akim in 1944), frequently tended to refuse to give that labour if they had already paid an annual levy.³⁸ At Asikuma in the Central Province, the chief recruited an alternative group of “communal labourers”: he forced inmates from the Native Administration Prison to work for the Catholic mission and he (falsely) described that work as perfectly legal “maintenance of a ‘juju house or place of worship.’”³⁹

In the aftermath of the war, local resistance against communal labour became ever more entrenched. The region of Winneba in the Central Province offers an exemplary selection of incidents that shed light on the changing attitudes towards communal labour. In 1946, Kwesi Krampa, the Bamuhene of Agona State and three of his sub-chiefs complained that in the absence of a paramount chief of the state, the chieftaincy being vacant, “when such labour is called upon to be performed, the inhabitants and especially the youngsters comprising the section refused countenancing such ‘call’ on the grounds that there is no Head to impose penalty on them in their failure to attending same.” They asked for a policeman to compel the locals to work in communal service.⁴⁰ The District Commissioner of Winneba had to report on the mood in the area to his superiors; he insisted that the work of clearing roads and paths “generally represents the wish of the community as a whole – and cannot strictly be called forced labour.”⁴¹ However, resistance became ever more generalised. In Krodua, J.C. Lamptey, representing the odikro (chief), called a number of inhabitants of the town “insurgents,” as they were “refusing to obey orders given to them; this habit, discourage[s] the others to clear Roads of Krodua, and other Town improvement.” In view of “making them sober and submissive,” Lamptey also hoped to intimidate locals through the presence of police agents in the area.⁴²

By 1951, it became clear that even the late colonial state – now with Kwame Nkrumah integrated into state activities as the leader of government affairs and the future prime minister of an increasingly autonomous territory – was not particularly concerned with replacing communal labour by remunerated, skilled road labour. In Juaben, the district commissioner remarked that nothing could be finalised in terms of road networks without the locals offering their communal labour.⁴³ In the case of the Ashanti Province, the pressures remaining on the shoulders of the “youngmen” were a principal issue turning the youth movement of the region away from Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party and towards a regionalist opposition against Nkrumah’s march to power.⁴⁴ Elsewhere, locals expected Nkrumah’s government to abolish the communal labour practices when the country became independent.

4 From Key (Voluntary) Element of the New National Community Back to Pressures to Work: Communal Labour under Ghana’s First Independent Regimes (1957–1972)

The independence of Ghana in 1957 was inscribed in a regime propaganda that called for a clear break with the hardships of life under colonial rule. In principle, this position came in combination with a clear rebuttal of the role of the “traditional chiefs” – who had, as I have shown, been essential as organisers of communal labour. However, this position was ambivalent: the Nkrumah regime had a tendency to act against chiefs that had been opponents to its road to power, but it left much room for manoeuvre for “traditional rulers” who had at an early moment joined ranks with Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party.⁴⁵ Even so, “the people’s” support for the nation-state project, expressed through voluntary communal labour as a development effort, was restated as an important plebiscitarian element. Labour inspectors were thus happy to confirm whenever they met such apparent enthusiasm. When E.B.K. Ampah, Jr., checked on the conditions of road labour between Tuakwa Junction and Betsingua in the Mfantsiman area of the Central Province in October 1959, he reported his very positive impressions of villagers’ “willingness and readiness to provide communal labour to the maximum.” The interviews with those engaging in communal labour seemed to confirm the point.⁴⁶

It is difficult to verify up to which point the Nkrumah regime managed to maintain the relative enthusiasm of its early phase. Alice Wiemers holds that refusals against communal labour were rare in the Northern Province by 1960, as villagers sought cooperation with chiefs to create initiatives for local development.⁴⁷ However, Jeffrey Ahlman points to individual acts of resistance in the Western and Ashanti Provinces, where villagers refused to participate in communal labour, challenging the lack of the state’s engagement, which contrasted unfavourably with waged labour under colonial rule.⁴⁸ The lack of thorough examination of communal labour mechanisms under Nkrumah in the historical debate corresponds to the frequently vague discussion of youth services such as the Builders’ Brigade, for which the coercive elements of the institution of communal labour also still need to be further studied.⁴⁹

After the fall of the Nkrumah regime through the coup d’état of 24 February 1966, and the installation of a National Liberation Council, a vocal campaign took off to accuse members of the fallen regime of misdeeds, corruption and repression. It has yet to be established whether labour obligations and possible repressive mechanisms linked to those were an important part of this negative narrative.⁵⁰ The years between 1966 and 1972 are, therefore, a test case to understand how labour obligations were imagined on the level of the political elite – and what locals thought about the experience under Nkrumah and the new policies and rules that were instated. At the same time, communal labour came to be redefined as an issue of participating in the nation state, which gave local authorities a renewed claim to enforce the related practices on unwilling residents.

After the elections of 1969, which led to a new civilian government under Kofi Busia, this government pushed for the creation of a National Service Corps to include, notably, the unemployed and certain groups of school-leavers. Busia and his ministers insisted on the importance of such national service: “We haven’t got the funds,” he said, “to do the big things which Nkrumah did.”⁵¹

At the same time, the architects of the National Service Corps also flirted with the idea of coercing certain groups.⁵² Although the new ranks of the Busia government discussed the military-style organisation of the Nkrumahist Builders’ Brigade or of the Young Pioneers as highly unpopular and held that the new institution had to be clearly distinguished from such authoritarian forms of labour administration, the wider public was unconvinced. It was obvious from documents from the Volta Region, in particular, that locals feared that the Corps would be another authoritarian instrument under a different name, and that, like in Keta, volunteers were not forthcoming.⁵³

Part of the argument was thus that the National Service Corps would provide a better framework for communal efforts, and help those enrolled in communal labour to eventually obtain new skills through training measures provided by the corps. However, the few sources found so far question the success of that approach. According to reports from the Central Region, villagers in several areas, such as Dunkwa, remained reluctant to enrol in the National Service Corps because they interpreted it as a multiplication of communal labour obligations.⁵⁵

At the same time, through the impact of the Busia government, communal labour came to be framed differently in local power relations. The new government used a xenophobic and populist strategy in 1969/1970, leading to a general movement against immigrants and descendants of immigrants, who were redefined as “aliens” in the Ghanaian nation. Up to five hundred thousand were expelled from Ghanaian territory, although a number of these managed to clandestinely return.⁵⁶ The effects of anti-foreigner legislation and sentiments transformed communal labour into something that was locally expected and demanded from foreigners, especially in places in which they belonged to the weakest elements. An impressive number of partly anonymous, partly signed letters of denunciation illustrate this change in the appreciation of communal labour practices.

A few examples suffice to illustrate the point. In Tatali in the Northern Region, close to the Togo border, an anonymous writer targeted Nigerian resident Ali Dankali, accusing him (like others) of escaping from deportation and claiming citizenship on false grounds; in particular, the letter-writer reproached Dankali for not having encouraged the (Nigerian-descendant) youngmen to willingly accept communal labour.⁵⁷ In Ve-Agbome in the Volta Region the behaviour of Nigerian resident, Adzima Akindji, who had first evacuated his possessions from the town and left Ghana, but subsequently returned, was seen by local detractors as deplorable. In particular, his detractors, including part of the “traditional authorities,” accused Akindji of having refused to provide communal labour over the years.⁵⁸

In Asene in the Eastern Province, the Town Committee demanded the expulsion of the “aliens” and called for Northern Ghanaians living there to be relocated to a separate settlement, as the Committee believed that the two groups were conspiring to avoid communal labour.⁵⁹ Later enquiry by a government inspector met the vehement denials on the part of the Northern Ghanaian Dagomba population in Asene, whose spokesmen claimed that they had never tried to escape from any fair communal labour call.⁶⁰ Therefore, the argument did not always have its effects as a strategy, as many officials did not sympathise with rigid measures against non-citizens. One of the most interesting available sources, a petition by leaders of the “Muslim community” of Nsawam, in the Eastern Province, details the complaints of Northern Ghanaians and individuals who had acquired Ghanaian citizenship against a number of abuses experienced. The experience of being pressured into communal labour and threatened with repercussions in case of protest against its unfair distribution, was a key complaint: “Yet each time there was a communal labour exercise, none of them would turn up: not any one from the Akim Kotokus. Each time there was communal labour, they would be seen going round the town intimidating people with possible deportation.”⁶¹

The impact of a new, xenophobic nationalism thus allowed local authorities to reinforce the rules of the game, which were probably not new. Communal labour had tended to hit the weakest in communities, and this situation did not change altogether after the end of colonial rule. Between 1969 and 1972, the power relations linked to the practice became dominated by xenophobia, before a new military takeover changed the direction of labour obligations, without removing them at all.

5 Communal Labour and Local Resistance from the Experience of the Acheampong Regime into the Rawlings Period (1972–early 1990s)

The military regime of Ignatius Acheampong between 1972 and 1979 is difficult to study, due to a relative absence of sources beyond a possible analysis of the press, which was employed as propaganda tool of the regime’s strategy.⁶² Choosing a path of striving for rural self-sufficiency, this regime attempted to mobilise Ghanaian citizens to take part in rural work through a year-long production exercise called “Operation Feed Yourself,” in view of reaching these goals. For the first time after decolonisation, and, indeed, since the 1920s, mandatory labour tasks were employed directly in agricultural production and not only with regard to rural infrastructure. Here, rural mobilisation led to complaints against compulsory labour in state-driven agrarian services, although those expressions of resistance are as yet difficult to weigh.⁶³

As to the wider recourse to communal labour, and local reactions, historians nevertheless have access to an interesting sample of files for the Central Region, which shows the continuities and ruptures regarding such labour in the Acheampong period; observers have presented this dossier as significant at least for southern Ghana. Widespread resistance of “youngmen” appeared as frequently as a trope and as an observation, as had been the case in the 1940s. In May 1974, the Regional Commissioner received a complaint by K.K. Nyame, Lieutenant-Colonel in Tema, reporting on the behaviour of Kwame Amo, who was said to have incited locals in Gomoa Mankessim to refuse communal labour in village sanitation. The author of the letter called for severe punishment for Amo, as otherwise “the future of communal labour is doomed in my town”; he suggested sending soldiers and that Amo be “drilled openly for all to see.”⁶⁴ The subject of “strangers” refusing communal labour, and their necessary punishment, found its variant in 1974 through the example of “Ga man,” Acquaye Dodoo, in the village of Twifu Ntaferewaso; local chiefs massively complained to the authorities about “gross abuse” and the effects that his behaviour would have in the wider region.⁶⁵

In Asebu, the chief was faced with villagers who refused to offer communal labour on the Asebu – Apewosika feeder road, causing him to call for an army unit to intimidate the wrongdoers.⁶⁶ By contrast, in the Assin District, the members of the Assin Andoe Town Development Committee challenged the policy of the chief to artificially include certain locals in communal labour obligations; this was partly a struggle of rural leaders, but also had to do with particular individuals being repeatedly targeted.⁶⁷

Such situations found their ways into internal security reports, where district commissioners branded resistance against communal labour as typical for “subversion” and “hostility” against the authoritarian regime in Accra. For Assin, the commissioner held that “communal labour … is the main source of providing adequate amenities under the Seven Year Development Plan.” Local refusals were triggered by views of the unfair distribution of tasks, and some lawyers from Cape Coast (“human parasites,” as the commissioner called them) travelled through the Central Province districts to offer legal support to villagers threatened by court measures.⁶⁸ In some cases, like in Nsaba, the pro-regime Youth Association reported the unpatriotic behaviour of the town’s residents, and brought complaints about refusals to perform communal labour together with those concerning a lack of understanding of the agrarian goals of Operation Feed Yourself; in the case of Nsaba’s internal conflicts, the distribution of power thus appears as different from other cases, where the “youngmen” were, rather, the target of communal labour obligations and deserted or refused to give them.⁶⁹

Little is known about the experience under the late Acheampong regime between 1975 and 1979, and there are also no studies on the changes of communal labour practices under the Rawlings regime. Its importance appears to dwindle in some areas, perhaps partly due to massive state intervention in the economy that characterised the first (“Marxist”) phase of Rawlings’s government between 1981 and 1983.⁷⁰ However, structural adjustment and a pronounced lack of government funding thereafter could have reversed that trend. Evidence is scattered, but the interesting observations from a contemporary study by Joseph Ayee give some hints as to the local perception of communal labour in the late 1980s. As locals had no choice and were sanctioned in case of refusal, they tended to describe these experiences as repressive.⁷¹

For much of the postcolonial period, the question of compulsory labour needs additional study, beyond the simple acceptance of its allegedly benign nature. A glance at Ghana’s southern provinces, and especially the Central Province, for the years 1969 to 1975 (for which a comparably good base of new sources can be mobilised), shows that the coercive elements prevailed and invited resistance. These experiences of repression were unlikely to immediately go away after 1975.

6 Conclusion: From a Colonial to a Postcolonial Institution

Labour coercion under colonial rule and labour obligations after independence were not the same thing. Frequently, the use of practices connected to colonial forced labour, ending, in most cases, in the second half of the 1940s or shortly after, involved massive abuses, leading to individuals even dying from the hardships of the work. In comparison, labour services demanded from individuals after Ghana’s independence in 1957, and under subsequent regimes into the new millennium, appear relatively mild. A new national narrative wrote them into voluntary, communitarian development efforts from which the element of compulsion seemed to be lifted.

This vision is much too simple, as I have shown in this chapter. My analysis for the five decades between the 1920s and the 1970s, also considering some observations for the period after the re-creation of a functioning parliamentary democracy (in 2000), demonstrates the many continuities. Existing research does not make this analysis any easier: neither sociologists nor anthropologists interested in rural life in Ghana’s different regions have ever managed to study the relations of power within local communities. At the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century, potential informants still buy into the narrative of a fundamental change in labour obligations from colonial rule to independent regimes. Research into the nature and the effects of communal labour in Ghana, as a coercive mechanism, therefore depends on finding local reactions to the demands from authorities that have been documented and making plausible connections between them; often, this means working within the dissonances of archival accounts. In spite of these limits, this approach helps us to gain important insights.

First, while demands for coerced labour became less widespread and less blatant in the colony of the Gold Coast during the 1930s, as a response to external pressure and to correspond to the image of a good coloniser that the British government attempted to sell in the international context, the practice did not disappear at the local level before the 1950s. British officials clearly pointed to the economic importance of the practice, and claimed it was impossible to abandon it entirely without substantial economic setbacks for the colonial (and imperial) economy. Responding to internal and external pressures, the colonial administration started to use, in the Gold Coast, what Okia has deconstructed as a smokescreen of communitarian and traditionalist arguments for Kenya. However, the arguments employed remain very close to what became the post-independence rhetoric of communal labour in Ghana, in which it was depicted as an exercise in voluntary communitarian self-help.

Second, my discussion shows (at least for the Central Province/Region and adjacent provinces in Ghana’s southern half) that certain groups felt unjustly treated in the distribution of labour services, and that that was the case over the whole of the period studied here. Between 1930 and 1951, substantial groups of individuals in villages and smaller towns refused participation in communal labour, pointing to their being exploited by local hierarchies. These refusals can partly be understood as an expression of generation conflicts and as mobilisation against local chiefs who were accused to be too close to colonial rule. However, in many cases, the refusals to cooperate expressed resistance against power hierarchies that made certain groups of people the principal victims of calls for communal labour. It is possible (but this would need to be substantiated) that similar practices played a lesser role or that, if they continued to exist, they were even embraced in the enthusiasm under the early Nkrumah regime, which might have succeeded in presenting them as necessary element of nation-building. The negative vision of other labour instruments of the regime (such as the Young Pioneers or the Builders’ Brigade) casts doubt on such a positive image of communal labour for the whole period between 1957 and 1966. After 1969, in a context of xenophobic nation-building, “foreigners” in all senses of the word were intimidated to bear the principal burden of communal labour. From 1972, the Acheampong regime led the practice away from xenophobic interpretation, but the compulsory elements of communal labour prevailed. They motivated locals to resist, and, in many cases, the negative view of communal labour as coercive practice appears to have maintained itself into at least the early 1990s. In general, the acts of resistance that I drew on as main source, and which have not previously been studied, clearly show that those used in communal labour rejected the compulsory nature of the practice.

Third, one might wonder if the role of communal labour changed between 1990 and 2010 – and if “all is well” now, so to speak. In the absence of studies from the field that look at power relations in rural contexts (beyond Pont Cháfer’s pathbreaking study, but which, it needs to be repeated, focuses on regions that were successful in agrarian production, which eventually made communitarian efforts more logical than in many other cases), the continuity of coercive elements can only be guessed at. However, the press report on an incident from Dormaa-Ahenkro in the Brong-Ahafo Region – an incident that was not exceptional at all, apparently – where four individuals were punished with fines between ghs 96 and ghs 362 (New Ghana Cedis) and threatened with prison sentences for their refusal to take part in communal labour in 2010, shows that the logic of coercion did not totally disappear.⁷² A fine between eur 50 and eur 194 was substantial in a rural context. This invites interdisciplinary scholars and historians alike to pay more attention to the complex and contradictory history of the exercise of communitarian labour, which was rooted in a logic of compulsion.