Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · British Crown Colony

Gold Coast - September 1, 1939

The Gold Coast in 1939 is the colony Britain likes to hold up as proof the imperial project works. It is orderly, solvent and productive - the single largest cocoa producer on earth, its revenue built on hundreds of thousands of African smallholders rather than European plantations, its administration a showcase of the indirect rule the Colonial Office is proud of. Governor Sir Arnold Hodson presides over a territory that runs from the Gulf of Guinea forts up through Ashanti to the Northern Territories, a patchwork of a directly-ruled colony, a conquered kingdom and a protectorate stitched under one Crown. Achimota College is turning out an African professional class; a small but articulate elite of lawyers and journalists in Accra and Cape Coast is already pressing, politely, for a larger say. The strategic identity is the model colony on the eve of change: prosperous, loyal on paper, and quietly incubating the educated nationalism that will one day make it the first colony in Africa to walk out of the empire it now anchors.

Starting position

The starting board is a rich, peaceful, well-run colony whose value to Britain is economic before it is military. Order rests on a thin colonial administration working through chiefs and native authorities, backed by the Gold Coast Regiment of the Royal West African Frontier Force - a professional African infantry that is the colony's real armed strength and, in war, an exportable one. The economy is cocoa above all: a crop grown by African farmers, bought through European and Levantine trading firms, and shipped through Takoradi and Accra, with gold from the Ashanti reefs, manganese, bauxite and timber behind it. The cocoa hold-ups of the late 1930s, when farmers withheld their crop against the buying combines, have already shown that this prosperity is political. Society is stratified between a coastal, mission-educated elite pressing for reform, the great chiefs of Ashanti and the north whose authority the British prop up, and the mass of farmers whose crop pays for everything. The pieces are the cocoa revenue, the Regiment, the railway to the mines and an elite that is starting to ask for the country back.

What turns the campaign

What Britain wants is the colony kept exactly as it is: cocoa flowing, revenue steady, the chiefs cooperative, the young nationalists managed with reforms slow enough to change nothing important, and the Gold Coast Regiment available for imperial service wherever the war demands. What the war forces is the mobilisation of a colony that is an asset rather than a battlefield. The Gold Coast is far from any front, but its soldiers are not: the Regiment will fight in the East African campaign against the Italians and later in Burma against the Japanese, carrying West African infantry across the empire. Its cocoa becomes a controlled war commodity, its ports and airfields become links in the trans-African supply and ferry routes, and its farmers absorb the price controls and shortages of a wartime economy they did not vote for. The campaign turns on whether the colony can be squeezed for men, money and material without cracking the consent it runs on, and on whether the educated elite reads its wartime contribution as loyalty rewarded or loyalty exploited. The Achimota graduates and returning soldiers of this war are the leadership of the independence movement of the next.

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