Child Labor in the Gold Coast

The Economics of Work, Education, and the Family in Late-Colonial African Childhoods, c. 1940-57

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9384232
AutoresJack Lord (0000-0002-6227-4977, autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen4
Número1
Páginas88-115
Fecha de publicación2011-02-27
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of the history of childhood and youth/ The journal of the history of childhood and youth (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1939-6724 • E-ISSN: 1941-3599
EditorialJohns Hopkins University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/hcy.2011.0005
OpenAlexW1985036953
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas27

Historical knowledge of childhood in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) is sparse and too often disconnected from a global historiography that has convincingly demonstrated the "child" to be a social construct. In contemporary discourse the "African child" is most commonly portrayed as either aspiring scholar or helpless victim—images that are echoed in the fleeting appearances of children in Africanist historiography. This essay, by contrast, explores the economic aspects of childhood in the colonial periphery and paints a more complex picture of the "African child." Children in the twentieth-century Gold Coast were vital economic actors and agents: at once producers, consumers, and accumulators of wealth. They remained so despite the political and commercial upheavals of the colonial period. Exploring the economic use and the social purpose of child labor illuminates both the material experience of children and their place in the household and wider society—and it sheds light, too, on the question of why both illiteracy and child labor are stubbornly persistent in modern Ghana

Archaeology · Colonialism · Gold coast · Sociology · Work (physics · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Engineering · Gender Studies · History · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare