Yesterday’s Ghana-England match generated significant attention to colonial history. But, there’s been no discussion of Canada’s role in subjugating the “Gold Coast”.
“England vs Ghana revives colonial history ahead of crucial Group L showdown”, noted a Ghanaian sports site before the football game. After the Black Stars secured a point against a country FIFA ranks 69 spots higher, one social media account blared, “Ghana has just colonized England.” Al Jazeera reported, “Ghanaians took to the streets in celebration after the Black Stars held England to a 0-0 draw at the World Cup, a result many fans viewed as a symbolic victory against their former colonial ruler.”
If Ghana plays Canada in the knockout stage of the World Cup supporters of the Black Stars shouldn’t ignore this country’s imperialism.
At the turn of the 19th century Canadian soldiers and missionaries played a role in subjugating Ghana. Numerous Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) trained individuals fought the Ashanti in turn-of-the-19th-century wars. RMC graduate Captain Duncan Sayre MacInnes helped construct an important fort at the Ashanti capital of Kumasi and the son of a Canadian senator participated in several subsequent expeditions to occupy the hinterland of modern Ghana. Every year a selected fourth year RMC cadet continues to be awarded the Duncan Sayre MacInnes Memorial Scholarship.
Canadian missionaries participated in the colonial process as well. According to Global Affairs, “In 1906, Québec missionaries established a church in Navrongo in northern Ghana, thus marking the arrival of a Canadian presence in the country.” Oscar Morin and Leonide Barsalou set up the first White Fathers post in the Gold Coast where Canadians would dominate the church for half a century.
Numerous Canadians played a role in the British colonial service in Ghana, rising even to the position of governor. In 1921 former Canadian Lieutenant E.F.L. Penno was appointed assistant commander of the Gold Coast police and was later made overall commander. At the start of the 1900s Galt, Ontario, born Frederick Gordon Guggisberg helped mark over 300 mining and timber concessions in Ashanti and the Gold Coast, which aided Britain’s Ashanti Gold Corporation extract six million ounces of gold from the colony. After two decades moving up in the colonial service Guggisberg was governor of Ghana from 1919 to 1927.
During the colonial period Ottawa offered various forms of support to European rule in Ghana. Beginning in the early 1900s Canadian officials worked to develop commercial relations with the British colony and in 1938 Canada’s assistant trade commissioner in London, H. Leslie Brown, spent three weeks in the Gold Coast. In 1947 Montreal based Alcan commenced operations there through its purchase of West African Aluminum Limited.
As the first former British colony to gain independence, Ottawa began dispersing aid to Ghana in the hopes of dissuading it from following a wholly independent path or falling under the influence of the Communist bloc. A big part of Canada’s early assistance went to train the Ghanaian military that overthrew pan-Africanist independence leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. After Nkrumah’s removal Canadian High Commissioner C.E. McGaughey wrote External Affairs in Ottawa that “a wonderful thing has happened for the West in Ghana and Canada has played a worthy part.” McGaughey boasted about the effectiveness of Canada’s Junior Staff Officers training program noting that “all the chief participants of the coup were graduates of this course.” (Canadian major Bob Edwards, who was a training advisor to the commander of a Ghanaian infantry brigade, discovered preparations for the coup the day before its execution, but said nothing.)
In subsequent decades tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid money supported International Monetary Fund structural adjustment policies of privatization, liberalization and social spending cuts, which benefited Canada’s rapacious mining industry. After a high profile Canadian-financed structural adjustment program in the late 1980s NGO worker Ian Gary explained its impact: “Ghana’s traditional sources of income — gold, cocoa, and timber — have benefited from the program, but this has only exacerbated the colonial legacy of dependence. Nearly all of the $1.5 billion worth of private foreign investment has been in mining, with most of the profits being repatriated overseas. ‘User fees’ for health care services and education have been introduced. Disincentives to food producers, and the damage caused to local rice producers by cheap rice imports, led to increased malnutrition and lower food security. Rapid and indiscriminate liberalization of the trade regime hurt local industry, while cutbacks in the public sector shed 15 per cent of the waged work force.”
Over the past quarter century Canadian mining companies have been leading players in Ghana. Hundreds of millions of dollars in profits have been extracted by Canadian firms from that country’s natural resources.
Canada’s role in the impoverishment of Ghana and Africa in general deserves far greater attention.
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