Between June 18 and 24, 1888, the British colonial government of the Gold Coast killed an estimated eight hundred people on the small borderland town of Taviefe. This essay studies the massacre at Taviefe as a central event in the colonization of the Gold Coast. Although Taviefe existed on the margins of the colony—and in fact, it would soon be consigned to German rule—the massacre shocked Gold Coast communities everywhere, signaling that European rule had fundamentally changed. The concept of interregnum is studied as an analytical framework for colonization. This essay argues that the Taviefe Massacre initiated a period of interregnum on the Gold Coast, plunging communities into a state of morbid suspense, the old political order having clearly been abandoned but the new regime not yet established. Furthermore, the essay suggests that the reason the Taviefe Massacre has remained absent from histories of the Gold Coast and Ghana is because it occurred during this liminal period of transition, belonging neither fully to the precolonial nor colonial eras.
The Taviefe Massacre, 1888: Violence and Colonial Rule in British Ghana
Sarah Balakrishnan is assistant professor of history at Duke University. She received a PhD in history from Harvard University in 2020 and a bachelor's in history from McGill University in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2024 article prize in gender and history from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Sarah's writing has featured in prestigious venues such as the Journal of African History, Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. In her spare time, Sarah is an award-winning fiction writer.
Sarah Balakrishnan; The Taviefe Massacre, 1888: Violence and Colonial Rule in British Ghana. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2025; 124 (1): 127–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557857
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