Kate Skinner. 2015. the Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014

Abstract

Kate Skinner. 2015. The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014. New York: Cambridge University Press. 298 pp. As Kate Skinner explains in The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland, few people have examined the ongoing consequences of the unification of British Togoland with Ghana. Although Skinner benefits from the work on Togolese integration that has developed since Dennis Austin's 1960s publications on the Ghana-Togo dispute, she disagrees with David Brown and Paul Nugent that the conflict surrounding Togoland's status died down in the 1970s (p. 169). This came as a revelation to Skinner following Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission in 2003-04 and Kosi Kedem's 2010 petition for Constitutional Review to redress the history of Togoland's integration. She argues that the way in which British Togoland was integrated into Ghana in 1957 had a long-term impact on the lives and careers of the men and women who campaigned against it. From interviews with former activists or their children, Skinner learned that the failure to achieve ablode, the Ewe term for "freedom," remained a source of resentment. During their campaign for freedom, British Togolese activists fought to maintain their status as a Trust Territory in order to address the United Nations directly to negotiate for joint independence with French Togoland. Skinner reveals that the struggle to reunite with the French territory had less to do with a shared ethno-linguistic Ewe identity, as the majority of Togoland did not identify with this language and ancestry. Instead, she considers how Togolese people imagined citizenship through their past, particularly experiences of infrastructural development and violence under German rule. Claiming this shared history with French Togoland, the British Togolese wanted to avoid becoming a small region in the larger independent Ghana. These first chapters also center on the pursuit of mass literacy in British Togoland during the 1930s and 1940s, decades after German colonization. Higher education was difficult to pursue in Togoland, as there were few schools outside of the major towns. Only the brightest students could find a place in a teaching college and continue their education. Skinner argues that teachers became political leaders in British Togoland because of their ability to translate and negotiate the demands of the British government and the Togolese people. Skinner shows in Chapter 4 how attention to the different layers of local, territorial, and international issues together led to a "political cosmopolitanism" among British Togolese teachers (p. …