A TRADING FAMILY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY GOLD COAST
1956; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0855-3246
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture studies
Resumomagic, and its symbol, the unicorn, which is the family crest, is still used in ways that make it more than a simple trade mark - on a block of offices, on a beach hut, crusted in silver-gilt on the top of an ebony palaver-stick. There are men still living who owe their education to Swanzy's, or the beginning of their careers to Swanzy's. A mammy lorry in Oda bears the slogan Swanzy Brothers on its front, and the slogan Travel to See at the back. As with the names of many early traders, the name is preserved in families in Cape Coast, in Christiansborg, Sekondi and Tarkwa. I had been told by one acquaintance that his car was damaged by a Swanzy in Sefwi Wiawso, by another that the electoral rolls of Christiansborg are largely made up of Swanzys. At Dixcove, there is a ruined villa among the trees of Swanzy Point. There is a Swanzy house on King Street in Cape Coast, a large baroque structure several stories high, backing onto the picturesque confusion of Dawson Hill, in the quarter known as Nkotomase (you cannot say it). Another Swanzy house stands in Tarkwa, while the name was to be seen in plaster until 1955 at least on the U.A.C, premises in Lome. At Suhum, a stream, the Swanse water, has been named to distinguish it from another watering point on the south of the town. A Swanzy rum, complete with the unicorn, is still retailed in places as far apart as Ashanti Mampong and Keta, while the cloth Swanzy ayeyi , praise of Swanzy, is still to be seen on some ladies of the older generation, in brown, with alternating stripes of moire and paisley. In short the name has accumulated a personality which is still redolent and alive, 25 years since the firm as such ceased to exist, 50 years since it existed in its own right, and 100 years since European traders bearing the name were personally active in the Gold Coast. That this is scarcely surprising, I will hope to show in the following account of the Swanzy connection in the tangled story of the emergence of the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century.
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