Page 40 - Afrika Must Unite

COLONIAL PATTERN OF ECONOMICS 25
marks of the chiefs to legal documents which they could neither
read nor understand.
One of G hana’s best known chiefs, Nana Sir Ofori Atta I, told
the Legislative Council in 1939 how six of his brother chiefs had
been deceived when they signed away concessions to the largest
of the mining companies. One, he said, got £66, another £133, a
third and a fourth received £50 each, and the fifth and sixth
£200 and £100 respectively. ‘These rents,’ he added, ‘are pay­
able to chiefs in respect of the Ashanti Goldfields Limited, and
nothing goes to any of the chiefs on the profits that are earned.’1
The chiefs tried to get the then Governor, Sir Arnold Hodson, to
support a Bill which would require the company to pay the
Native Authorities a royalty on their profits. He refused, giving
the reason that it would be shortsighted and extremely harmful
to interfere because capital was very sensitive, and it might have
the effect of driving it away to other parts of the world.
At the end of the Ashanti wars, about 300 British concerns
secured mining and tim ber concessions which, according to
Lord Hailey,2 amounted to about a third of the total land area of
the Gold Coast Colony, and about one-eighth of Ashanti.
W ith all the wealth drawn from our mineral resources, it may
come as a shock to some to learn that, except for a small annual
tribute from the gold mines, no mining company in the Gold
Coast ever made any contribution by way of direct taxes to the
country’s revenue, until my government introduced its new
taxation measures in 1952, and these made no noticeable im ­
pression upon the distributed profits of these companies. I often
wonder just how much the Union M ini ere du H aut-K atanga
paid for its concessions in the Belgian Congo!
Commercial exploitation in our country has a long history, as
long, in fact, as European contact with the West African coast.
In keeping with the imperialist policy of fostering single crop
agriculture in the colonies, our farmers, having found that cocoa
did well in our soil and climate, were encouraged to concentrate
on its production to the neglect of local food crops and a diversity
of cash crops. The encouragement of mono-crop cultivation was
not, however, accompanied by stable prices. The price of our
1 Gold Coast Legislative Council Debates, 1939, No. 1.
2 Lord Hailey: African Survey, Oxford University Press, p. 778.