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Wednesday 23 April 2014 16.30 - 18.30
D-4 AFR01 Children and Migration in Africa
Marietta-Blau-Saal raised g.f.
Networks: Africa , Ethnicity and Migration Chair: Elodie Razy
Organizer: Elodie Razy Discussant: Elodie Razy
Jessica Cammaert : “I Want to Follow Kwaku”: Colonial Courts and the Feminization of Child Pawning along the North-eastern Borderlands of Ghana, 1941
By the1940s, capitalist influences and a burgeoning cash economy worked to transform the institution of child pawning in West Africa by increasing the prevalence of pawned young girls from impoverished areas of the interior. This paper addresses these important changes through an analysis of a case from August of 1941 ... (Show more)
By the1940s, capitalist influences and a burgeoning cash economy worked to transform the institution of child pawning in West Africa by increasing the prevalence of pawned young girls from impoverished areas of the interior. This paper addresses these important changes through an analysis of a case from August of 1941 in which three girls characterized as ‘Busanga’ ages eleven, fourteen and ten appeared before the British colonial administrator in the northeastern border town of Bawku, Ghana. The three girls were providing testimony as to their status as slaves or ‘pawns’ and the testimonies intended to establish whether they were indeed victims of a persistent trade in northern children to the Gold Coast.
Although much has been written about slavery in West Africa, especially the fitful decline of male slavery following the introduction of wage-labor, few historical studies have focused on pawning, the increase of pawning female children, or the messy business of dis-entangling pawning from other transactions (such as slavery and marriage) in the colonial courts. As early as 1927, British officials declared that slavery, in a European sense, did not exist in the Gold Coast. While acknowledging that pawning was “still practiced to some extent” officials were quick to distinguish pawning from slavery in the courts stating, “there is no criminal intention behind it and will diminish in time”. This paper situates these questions of slavery, gender, and pawning in the context of testimonies given by the three young girls – Atawa, Abnofo, and Kibadu - and their own interpretations of servitude and migration amidst these economic transformations in West Africa. (Show less)

Lacy Ferrell : Educational Migration and the Northern Territories of Colonial Ghana, c. 1900-1950
This paper will examine the experiences of Northern Ghanaian children who migrated south for schooling during the colonial era and their influence on Northern politics and society. Administratively neglected for much of the colonial era, the Northern Territories did not see its first Government school until 1908. Christian mission societies, ... (Show more)
This paper will examine the experiences of Northern Ghanaian children who migrated south for schooling during the colonial era and their influence on Northern politics and society. Administratively neglected for much of the colonial era, the Northern Territories did not see its first Government school until 1908. Christian mission societies, the primary providers of education in the rest of the colony, never established a significant presence. Yet though the colonial administration relied on the North primarily as a labor reserve for farm and mining labor in Asante and the coastal regions, it required a minimal number of educated men to work within the administration. As a result, an initially small number of children traveled south for school, through colonial recruitment drives or personal or familial ambition. Existing scholarship on Northern migration focuses on labor migrants, and educational histories of the North emphasize the small number of schools and their limited impact. Few scholars have acknowledged educational migrants, and in this paper I address this gap. I will argue that children who traveled south for school had a profound influence on the colonial state and their home societies, as they returned home with new skills and demands that pressured existing hierarchies as well as colonial policies. The British response was to label these young men “detribalized” and limit migration south, a strategy that ultimately failed to slow either children’s developing ambitions for literacy or the growing nationalist resentment of underdeveloped education in the North. Drawing on interviews as well as colonial correspondence and memoranda, this paper will demonstrate that though fewer in number than labor migrants, educational migrants subverted administrative boundaries between regions and shaped social and political change in the North. (Show less)

Sacha Hepburn : Child Migration, Gender and Domestic Labour in Post-colonial Zambia: Oral Histories of Female Domestic Workers
Zambia is a classic site for the study of labour and labour migration in Africa. In an established historiographical and ethnographic literature the worker and labour migrant has largely been constructed as masculine, strong, and engaged in formal, highly visible employment practices such as mining and agricultural labour. Though recent ... (Show more)
Zambia is a classic site for the study of labour and labour migration in Africa. In an established historiographical and ethnographic literature the worker and labour migrant has largely been constructed as masculine, strong, and engaged in formal, highly visible employment practices such as mining and agricultural labour. Though recent critiques of the Zambian male migratory model have been made and gender has increasingly been employed as a category of analysis in research on labour in Zambia, much remains to be done to highlight the multiplicity of labour and migration practices that individual workers have engaged in historically. The intersection of gender and generation in shaping experiences of labour and migration has been particularly overlooked. This paper will explore histories of young female labour migrants in postcolonial Lusaka. Drawing on oral histories and ethnographic work with current and former domestic workers, the paper will examine experiences of child and youth migration and domestic labour. The paper will explore the urban living arrangements women engaged in as young migrants including Zambian formulations of fostering practices. Such arrangements have involved complex intersections of kinship and labour relations, with young people exchanging domestic work for their membership within the urban household. This paper will consider these migratory and labour practices as family and individual survival strategies in relation to broader processes of post-colonial class consolidation and economic decline. (Show less)



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