From Gold Coast to Ghana: The Big Six and the Architects of Independence

The struggle for Gold Coast independence had roots stretching back to the nineteenth century, when African intellectuals first challenged colonial authority through legal and constitutional means. The Aborigines Rights Protection Society (ARPS), founded in 1897 by John Mensah Sarbah, a barrister trained at Lincoln's Inn, and J.E. Casely Hayford, successfully blocked the Crown Lands Bill that would have transferred all "unoccupied" land to the British Crown — a landmark victory that proved African legal resistance could succeed. Casely Hayford went further, founding the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) in 1920 at a conference in Accra attended by delegates from the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, petitioning King George V for elected representation. The Congress achieved modest constitutional reforms but ultimately withered by the 1930s under the weight of chiefly opposition and colonial divide-and-rule.

The Burns Constitution of 1946, named after Governor Sir Alan Burns (the first colonial governor to include Africans in the Legislative Council), created an unofficial African majority for the first time — 18 elected members versus 15 official and nominated members. Yet this concession came too late. The 65,000 Gold Coast soldiers who had served in the Royal West African Frontier Force during World War II in Burma, East Africa and the Middle East returned home with broadened horizons, organisational discipline and a keen sense of the hypocrisy of fighting for European freedom while remaining colonial subjects. They found an economy ravaged by post-war inflation, with the Association of West African Merchants (AWAM) — a cartel of 13 European trading firms including the United Africa Company (a Unilever subsidiary), Cadbury Brothers and the Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale — controlling 94% of cocoa purchases and fixing import prices at exploitative levels. The stage was set for confrontation.