B. After prohibition: cocoa and the uneven decline of slavery, 1908-c1950

Even after slavery had been made effectively illegal many former slaves and descendants of slaves continued to work for their ‘masters’. Those belonging to the gyaasefoo were perhaps particularly prone to continue their old tasks. Consider the property bestowed upon the abdicating Esumejahene in 1924: ‘A farm has been given to the Chief & also a house & the people to [sic] the farm’.⁹² In colonial law the farm-workers were free, but they themselves may well have understood their ‘employment’ in terms of status rather than contract. According to former Bekwaihene Yaw Buachie III, stool servants went on working on stool farms.⁹³

There was a gradual decline in the willingness even of chiefs’ slaves to perform their ‘customary’ duties.⁹⁴ When it came to cocoa labour, former owners of slaves found that even when ex-slaves had remained in the same community, they were not necessarily prepared to accept the continuation of any claim on their labour by their old masters. Osei Kwame of Huntado was unable to get any more work out of the slaves he had brought from Denkyira because ‘the air of freedom was blowing everywhere’, as his nephew put it.⁹⁵ The same point was made more generally by an informant in Bekwai quoted above.⁹⁶

Thus former slaveowners found themselves obliged to look to other institutions for labour. Osei Kwame put his farm into hired hands well before his death in 1934.⁹⁷ Even on stool farms wage labour ceased to be unknown.⁹⁸ In general, the maturation of cocoa farms - many of them at least partly established and/or worked by slaves and pawns - made an alternative form of labour financially possible for ‘masters’ and available for ‘servants’. Not that the former could necessarily rely on the latter to be their hired labourers. The provincial commissioner of eastern Ashanti observed that the children of first-generation slaves ‘own their own farms, and in these days plant their own cocoa’.⁹⁹

The main limitation of the Nieboer hypothesis is its political indeterminacy. On this the argument here began from the empirical assumption that Asante was rather unusual in its region, even in that now notorious period, in the scale of its slave imports. What made this possible was that the kingdom secured, not a proportionate share of a common property resource, but rather a local monopoly over especially valuable natural resources. The economic rent from these may be seen as making a decisive contribution to the financing of the persistent and socially-widespread importation of slaves. Thus the Nieboer hypothesis is inadequate once the analysis is extended beyond the borders of the slave-importing economy to include the areas from which the captives came. It is argued here that an emphasis on the supply inelasticity of natural resources, partly as a result of military and political intervention, is important if we are to develop a more nuanced understanding of the political economy of slavery in different areas and sub-periods of precolonial West African history. This perspective may also contribute to the general task of making the political determinants of the existence and scale of slavery in history genuinely endogenous.

From the discussion in Section 3 of the process by which, and the context in which, the colonial administration made its decision effectively to prohibit slavery in Asante, we may conclude that this case exposes the limitations of the hypothesis that changes in property rights are pareto responses to changes in relative factor prices. Contrary to the hypothesis, the decision was economically exogenous and involved loss to certain parties. Indeed, it is hard to see how a labour market could have been reproduced in Asante had it not been for the advent of cocoa, which greatly increased the economic rent on forest-zone land. For the first time free labour contracts were now in the mutual interests of Asante users of labour and savanna-dwellers. This is not to say that the coercion, where it was politically and practically feasible, would not still pay: as the persistence of government and chiefs with corvée illustrates. But while the Nieboer situation thus still applied, it was now in Hopkins’s sense rather than Domar’s: without coercion to reduce its reservation price, extra-familial labour remained relatively costly, but it was no longer so costly that coercion was necessary for the labour market to exist.

Though shifts in relative factor scarcity do not explain the colonial government’s decision to ban Asante slavery, they help to explain the nature and inequalities of the subsequent slow decline. That is, with respect to the decline of slavery on the ground, as opposed to the political decision to ban it, the notion of induced innovation does have explanatory power. As McPhee implied, cocoa accelerated individuals’ transitions from slave to free labour.

This in turn smoothed the local political repercussions for the colonial administrators in Asante, despite the fact that the political decision had been taken very much ‘from above’. They had feared major opposition from chiefs and others for whom it entailed a loss of property. Regarding this issue as well as other aspects of early colonial rule it is not surprising that Chief Commissioner Harper, in 1921, proclaimed that ‘Cocoa is the foundation of the peace and prosperity of Ashanti’.¹⁰⁰

Beyond this general impact on the decline of slavery, the pattern of economic opportunities created by cocoa helped some slaves or former slaves much more than others. The result was to differentiate the process by which coercion declined on both gender and ethnic-cum-ecological lines. Most of the opportunities for regular wage employment were for able-bodied adult males. Men were more in demand for cocoa carrying and labouring, especially as at this early stage in the development of Asante cocoa culture much of the work was forest-clearance. For this reason it seems likely that, as with pawns,¹⁰¹ female and child slavery tended to outlast adult male slavery, strongly so into the 1940s. Again, it was indicated earlier that a higher proportion of Akan ex-slaves than of northern ones seem to have returned to their to their native or ancestral homes. Besides physical distance, a reason for this may be the fact that an Akan adult could look forward to establishing cocoa farms of his, or even of her, own: whereas this would be much harder for people who had no land rights in the forest zone, and thus no direct access to the ‘forest rent’. The Ewe war captives also had forest homes to go to, with land suitable for planting cocoa. It is hoped that fuller data in the future will permit us to establish whether, as the analysis here predicts, a higher proportion of Ewe than of northern ex-slaves left Asante. But it can be said that economic circumstances made it easier for Asantes rather than northerners, and for men rather than women, to achieve effective emancipation quickly.

The ‘pessimistic’ proposition put forward in some of the literature influenced by dependency theory is vindicated in the Asante case to the extent that coerced labour seems to have made an important contribution - along with self, family and other non-market forms of labour - to the cash-crop ‘take-off’. Without the contributions of coerced labour the expansion of cocoa production would surely have been much more gradual, given the pressure on labour supplies.

Recent students of West Africa have highlighted one in particular of the theoretical disadvantages of slave labour compared to free labour: its immobility, which, it has been implied, would have hindered the economy’s adjustment to the opportunities to grow crops for export. The logic of this is that the spatial distribution of slaves at the beginning of colonial rule did not coincide with the pattern of demand for labour in the emerging, geographically rather narrow, cash crop sectors. The replacement of slavery by free migrant labour is held, therefore, to have assisted the mobilization of labour for the new cash-crop economies.¹⁰² But in Asante the mobility of free labourers was redundant to the extent that the great majority of slaves in Asante had been imported from the same region from whence now came most of the annual labourers and sharecroppers.

Considering the relatively late ending of slavery (and pawnship - let alone corvée) and the contributions of all these forms of coercion to the labour that, directly and indirectly, created the agricultural export economy of Asante, there is some validity in this West African context for the Genoveses’ generalisation about the ‘anomaly’ that ‘capitalism, which rested on free labour and had no meaning apart from it . . . conquered, absorbed, and reinforced servile labour systems throughout the world’.¹⁰³

But the contribution of coercion to the expansion of production for the market is not the full story. For the ‘optimistic’ liberal or market perspective is justified here to the extent that the spread of cash cropping itself contributed, directly and indirectly, to the eventual ending of slavery and the emergence of alternative institutions in the supply of labour. The benefits of cash cropping in this, as in other respects, were unevenly distributed. It was those who could participate, as owners of cocoa trees or as labourers on cocoa farms, who had the best opportunities to escape slavery, on the master’s side and on the servant’s side respectively.