Love, race and history in Ghana
Historian Carina Ray on her guide that explores the history of interracial intimacy in the Gold Coast and Ghana.
Image from the guide’s address.
Two months ago I happened to be lucky to see Carina Ray’s exemplary book that is new along with Line: Race Intercourse additionally the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana from the history on interracial closeness from the Gold Coast. I made the decision to interview her and whenever our conversation relocated from governmental economy and racism to political economy, racism and love, we figured – Valentine’s Day! Therefore here it’s: an AIAC take on love, critical politics included.
How come you imagine that the past reputation for interracial closeness when you look at the Gold Coast / Ghana essential? Exactly exactly What received one to learn it also to these tales in specific?
I want to respond to the question that is second. Whenever I started the archival work that culminated in Crossing along with Line , my intention would be to compose a book that is altogether different multiracial individuals in colonial and post-independence Ghana. Much was written about them within the context regarding the precolonial duration as social, social, governmental, and linguistic intermediaries—the ubiquitous “middle(wo)men” associated with trans-Atlantic trade, particularly since it became nearly solely dedicated to the servant trade. Almost nothing, nonetheless, was written about it team through the period of formal colonial rule in British West Africa. And so I put down to accomplish exactly that, but quickly unearthed that whilst the archive had much to say about interracial intimate relations when you look at the Gold Coast, there is silence that is relative their progeny.
This hit me personally as a departure that is intriguing many early-twentieth century colonial contexts for which anxieties about multiracial individuals spurred increasing condemnation and legislation of interracial intercourse. Within the introduction and very first chapter We invest some time handling why a guide about intercourse over the color line has comparatively small to express about multiracial individuals. This was mostly because multiracial Gold Coasters through the formal period that is colonial identified on their own, and had been identified by Africans and Europeans alike, as Africans. To my head it can have already been ahistorical to publish about them as a definite social team. This permitted me to activate issue of interracial intimate relations in a deep and way that is substantive its very own right, rather than as a precursor to progeny.
To resolve your very first concern about why this history is essential, i must get back once again to your nature of my archives. Exactly What jumped down at me personally straight away once I began using the sources ended up being the degree to that they revealed not just the profoundly peoples and social proportions of the relationships, but additionally the wider grid of Afro-European social relations which they had been embedded in. The colonial government’s obsessive concentrate on interracial intercourse ended up being methodologically generative as it produced a multidimensional archive that offered interestingly detail by detail records for the disputes and connections that characterized the everyday lives of and interactions between Africans and Europeans. exactly What at first might appear such as for instance a focus that is narrow interracial intimate relationships really starts up an unprecedented view into colonial competition relations into the Gold Coast. Element of the thing that makes these relationships therefore important and compelling, then, is the prospective to recalibrate our considering colonial economies of racism in many ways that enable us to see greater parity between settler and administered colonialism without suggesting an equivalence.
But these relationships may also be essential in their very own right, not minimum because countless of 
them force us to reckon with all the unsettling grey area where racism and impact could and frequently did coexist. Exactly just How else are you able to give an explanation for doctor that is british risked their distinguished profession being a colonial medical officer to marry throughout the color line, after which proceeded to steadfastly keep up their account in a Europeans-only club that barred their African spouse? In this as well as in many other circumstances where I became confronted by relationships that resisted categorization that is neat i discovered myself recalling Frantz Fanon, whom written down about interracial intimacies in Ebony Skin, White Masks, claims “Today we have confidence in the likelihood of love, and that’s the key reason why we have been endeavoring to locate its flaws and perversions.” We can’t think about a far more profound or accurate approach that is theoretical the dilemma of love, as a whole, as well as the dilemma of love throughout the color line, in specific. This is simply not to claim that all the relationships I document in Crossing along with Line had been loving, but instead to say that loving relationships weren’t resistant into the racism of their hours.
Why and exactly how did interracial intercourse get from being a well known fact to being a challenge?
Although both Africans and Europeans many forcefully articulated interracial sex as an issue through the colonial duration, i do believe its essential to indicate that throughout the precolonial period Africans tightly regulated these relationships in ways that suggest that they recognized their possible advantages and dangers. Likewise, the different European powers that held sway across the Gold Coast handled their varying anxieties over these relationships with techniques that recognized their indispensability towards the European existence on the coastline. That’s an important back ground towards the concern making sure that readers aren’t mislead into convinced that the Gold Coast ended up being an interracial intimate utopia ahead of the start of formal rule that is british.
The thing that was various concerning the first decade associated with 20th century had been that the hyper-racialization of formal colonial rule implied that ab muscles items that had when made interracial intimate relationships indispensable—namely their capability to acculturate and incorporate European guys into regional communities with techniques that permitted them to build up useful reciprocal networks—were now “undesirable.” Indeed that has been the term that is very John Rodger utilized to explain relationships between African females and European officers as he formally banned them in 1907. Coming in the heels of “a century-long change from a Britain that asked to at least one that demanded and a final commanded,” to borrow from Tom McCaskie, the ban on concubinage not merely signaled a brand new governmental modus operando, it heralded a brand new period of colonial racial insularity, albeit the one that ended up being never ever completely achieved.
Readers won’t be astonished that interracial intimate relationships emerged as a “problem” under formal rule that is colonial exactly what i really hope to exhibit is the fact that making concubinage a punishable offense did more to undermine Uk authority than it did to protect it. This might be especially obvious not just in the in-patient disciplinary instances brought against offending Uk officers, but additionally into the wider present of anticolonial agitation that swelled around the increasingly illicit nature of interracial intimate relations. These relationships could not any longer be publicly recognized and so they really appeared much more unseemly to Gold Coasters, whom used them to phone into concern the ethical credibility of Uk colonial rule. In a nutshell it had been the way the British decided to handle concubinage, as problem, that truly became the larger issue in the long run.