Stephen's Blog Nr.2

Ghana has well documented issues with contemporary slavery, particularly in terms of people trafficking and forced labour, for which it is noted as a ‘source, transit and destination country for men, women and children’ (TIP, 2017; 2018). Indeed, in 2017 the Western Regional Minister, Gifty Kusi, stated that ‘as many as 1.86 million Ghanaian children were ‘victims of forced labour’ (Wamakor, 2017). The annual Trafficking in Persons report (TIP), 2017, produced by the U.S. Government, downgraded Ghana to the lowest Tier 3 level for consistently failing to address contemporary slavery in the country. The failure to tackle issues of modern slavery and people trafficking has real economic impact. Potential restrictions to US Aid and funding from the Millennium Challenge Corporation can amount to millions of dollars of development money being withheld from the country (TIP, 2018). Thus there is a real imperative to understand and address the issues of contemporary slavery.

The 2018 TIP report upgraded Ghana to a Tier 2 country, after Ghana committed GHC 1.5 million to addressing the issue. As the TIP report notes, in the last year the Ghanaian government has increased the number of investigations into people trafficking and forced labour, inaugurated a specialist board and begun the dissemination of awareness-raising materials. However, there are other issues, historical and cultural, that are not, as yet, being addressed, and that this project will explore.

For example, it has been the policy of successive governments in Ghana to see historic slavery as belonging to national heritage and tourism, with little attempt to draw links between historic slavery and contemporary slavery (Pierre, 2009). As Pierre notes, slavery has been explicitly linked to heritage and tourism as part of what she describes as ‘the state’s concrete production of social meanings around history’ (2009, 31). This state level shaping of national identity has its roots in Nkrumah’s cultural policies at independence (Nketia and Wiggins, 2005) where national identity was promoted over community or tribal identity as part of the nation building process. Crucially, these factors taken together mean that the relationship between historic slavery and contemporary slavery that take

into account community identity in Ghana, are yet to be investigated. As the final colonial settlement built by the British in Ghana, James Town offers a unique cultural and historical context in which to undertake this investigation.

For more on James Town, see this excellent blog by Nat Nuno-Amarteifio, former Mayor of Accra: https://adesawyerr.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/the-definitive-story-of-james-town-british-accra-by-nat-nuno-amarteifio