"Racial Attitudes Among Australian Miners on the Gold Coast: The Bottoms Brothers at Tarkwa and Abosso"

by Associate Professor David Dorward,

Director, African Research institute,

LaTrobe University

The voice of white working class in colonial West Africa is rarely heard. While access to commercial archives, such as those of Ashanti Goldfields, holds promise for historians, their focus is on higher level decision-making and commercial activities. To the extent that company records are available, analysis of the ledgers and commercial correspondence rarely reveal the attitudes and actions of those Jeff Crisp referred to as the 'subordinate order-givers', white mine managers and foreman.. . On the odd occasion when they appear in missionary correspondence, the white working class are generally portrayed as a disreputable blot on Christian civilisation. As for the official colonial archives, 'commercials' are conspicuously absent, despite the fact that colonialism was built upon imperial commerce. Only when labour relations threaten the socio-economic order, at times of strikes or when the excessive violence of white mine managers led to criminal inquiries, do they appear in the official records. Few white miners published their memoirs. Moreover, miners were fairly transitory, employed on short-term contracts, and lacked any institutional affiliation. They weren't 'great men' and their private correspondence rarely found its way into archival collections.

The literature on mine labour in the Gold Coast tends to focus on African mineworkers.. With the exception of South Africa, the voice of the European miners is rarely heard. Yet white miners had more direct day-to-day contact with ordinary Africans, than all but missionaries. To many Ghanaians forced or drawn into mine labour, they were the face of colonial capitalism. Their hopes, fears and attitudes helped to shape African understandings and experience of Europeans and colonial capitalism on the Gold Coast.

This brief sketch is drawn from a collection of letters home to Australia from two Cornish-Australian miners in the Gold Coast between 1905 and 1911. They were working men, imbued with the racist culture of settler Australia. Unlike the modulated tones of social Darwinism that permeated official and missionary sources, theirs was an often bluntly forthright racism in which violence was rarely far from the surface. To the African that had to work under them, such attitudes were powerful forces within which to negotiate.