The Dutch settle on the Gold Coast of both Fort São Jorge at Elmina and Fort Nassau at Moree The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in contemporary
Ghana. By 1471, they had reached the area that was to become known as the
Gold Coast because it was an important source of gold. The Portuguese trading interests in
gold,
ivory and
pepper so increased that in 1482 the Portuguese built their first permanent trading post on the western coast of present-day Ghana. This fortress, a trade castle called
São Jorge da Mina, was constructed to protect Portuguese trade from European competitors. The Portuguese position on the Gold Coast, known as
Portuguese Gold Coast, remained secure for over a century. During that time,
Lisbon sought to monopolize all trade in the region in royal hands, though appointed officials at São Jorge, and used force to prevent English, French and Dutch efforts to trade on the coast. After
Barent Eriksz successfully sailed to the Gold Coast in 1591, Dutch merchants began trading in the area.
Pieter de Marees's publications greatly increased the interest of merchants in the region. -Van der Hem Atlas The
Twelve Years' Truce between Portugal-Spain and the Dutch Republic, which lasted from 1609 to 1621, disrupted Dutch trade on the Gold Coast, as the Portuguese now had sufficient resources to protect their trade monopoly. Dutch traders then petitioned the States-General of the Dutch Republic to build a fort on the coast. The States-General were receptive of their demands, and sent
Jacob Clantius, who was to become the first General on the Coast, to the Gold Coast in 1611. In 1612, after gaining permission of the local rulers through the
Treaty of Asebu, he built
Fort Nassau near
Moree, on the site of an original Dutch trading post that had been burned down by the Portuguese. After the Twelve Years's Truce ended in 1621, the
Dutch West India Company was established, which tried to seize the Portuguese colonies in Africa and America as part of the
Groot Desseyn plan. After
failing in 1625, the company managed to
capture Elmina Castle from the Portuguese in 1637.
Fort San Sebastian at
Shama and
Fort Santo Antonio at
Axim followed in 1640 and 1642 respectively.
Competition with other European powers in 1666, during the
Second Anglo-Dutch War The
Dutch West India Company was given the monopoly on trade in the West Indies, including the Gold Coast, in 1621. Mismanagement meant that several disillusioned employees of the Dutch West India Company left the company to work for another European power.
Hendrik Carloff, for example, was a former high-ranking officer in the company, who joined the
Swedish Africa Company, founded in 1649 by the Walloon-Dutch industrialist
Louis De Geer. In the end, Carloff also left the Swedish company, this time for the
Danish Africa Company, which he founded himself with Isaac Coymans and Nicolaes Pancras, also former Dutch West India Company employees. Whereas
Swedish presence on the Gold Coast turned out to be only temporary,
British and
Danish settlement in the area proved to be permanent. From 1694 until 1700, the Dutch West India Company fought the
Komenda Wars with the British over trade rights with the Eguafo Kingdom. In addition,
Brandenburgers also had forts in the area from 1682 onwards, until they were bought out by the Dutch in 1717. The Portuguese had completely left the area, but still the Gold Coast had the highest concentration of European military architecture outside of Europe.
Relationship with local peoples The European powers were sometimes drawn into conflicts with local inhabitants as Europeans developed commercial alliances with local political authorities. These alliances, often complicated, involved both Europeans attempting to enlist or persuade their closest allies to attack rival European ports and their African allies, or conversely, various African powers seeking to recruit Europeans as mercenaries in their inter-state wars, or as diplomats to resolve conflicts. Another way conflicts with the local inhabitants were avoided was through marriage. European men often created alliances with the local African people through a practice known as
cassare or
calisare derived from the Portuguese
casar meaning "to marry." Dutch men and other Europeans would marry African women whose families had ties to the Atlantic slave trade. In this way, Europeans benefited from those marriages by corrupting African individuals in order to maintain the alliances responsible for massive, racial-based enslavement, which fabricated European wealth as much as fabricated African systemic impoverishment. In essence, African individuals profited at the expense of enslavement and impoverishment of African peoples, while European individuals profited as means of consolidating wealth for European peoples. African wives could receive money and schooling for the children they bore by European men. Wives could also inherit slaves and property from their husbands when they returned to Europe or died. Many coastal ethnic groups in Africa, such as the Ga and Fante, used this system to gain economic and political advantages. These African ethnic groups had been using this practice before the arrival of the Europeans with strangers of a different ethnicity, and extended the same privilege to European men by the late 1400s.
Cassare enabled Africans to trust strangers, like the Europeans, when dealing within their trade networks. It made the transition between stranger and trade partner a lot smoother. At Elmina, the Dutch had inherited from the Portuguese a system in which tribute was paid to the
Denkyira, who were the dominant power in the region. After the
Battle of Feyiase (1701), the
Ashanti Empire replaced the Denkyira as the dominant power, and the Dutch began paying tribute to the Ashanti instead. Although the existence of the so-called "Elmina Note" is often questioned, the Dutch generally paid two ounces of
gold per month to the Ashanti as tribute. This bond between the Dutch and the Ashanti, who through the port of Elmina had access to trade with the Dutch and the rest of the world, deeply affected the relations between the Dutch, the other local peoples and the British. The latter were increasingly tight with the
Fante, to which the Denkyira and thus also Elmina were culturally and linguistically close. Several
Ashanti-Fante wars followed and the rivalry between the two peoples were key in the events surrounding the transfer of the Dutch Gold Coast to Britain in 1872. After the Dutch managed to dislodge the Swedes from Butre and began building
Fort Batenstein at that site, the leaders of the Dutch West India Company thought it beneficial to negotiate a treaty with the local political leadership in order to establish a peaceful long-term relationship in the area. The local
Ahanta leaders found it equally beneficial to enter into such an agreement, and thus on 27 August 1656, the
Treaty of Butre was signed. This treaty established a Dutch protectorate in the area, and established diplomatic ties between the Dutch Republic and the Ahanta. The treaty's arrangements proved very stable and regulated Dutch-Ahanta diplomatic affairs for more than 213 years. Only after the Gold Coast was sold to Britain in 1872 were the provisions of the treaty abrogated. On 18 February 1782, as part of the
Fourth Anglo-Dutch War,
the British attacked Elmina. Although this attack failed, Britain seized Fort Nassau, Fort Amsterdam, Fort Lijdzaamheid, Fort Goede Hoop and Fort Crêvecoeur from the Dutch. The Dutch Republic only managed to seize Fort Sekondi from the British. In the
Treaty of Paris of 1784, all forts returned to their pre-war owners.
Disestablishment of the DWIC and the abolition of slave trade In 1791, the Dutch West India Company was disestablished, and on 1 January 1792, all territories held by the company reverted to the rule of the
States-General of the
Dutch Republic. During the French occupation of the Netherlands between 1810 and 1814, the Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast held the rather unusual position—together with the island of
Deshima in
Japan—of being the only Dutch territories not occupied by either France or Great Britain. The British
Slave Trade Act 1807 effectively ended all slave trade from the Gold Coast.
William I of the Netherlands took over this abolition when he issued a royal decree to that effect in June 1814 and signed the
Anglo-Dutch Slave Trade Treaty in May 1818. The abolition of slave trade was coupled with the arrival of
Herman Willem Daendels as Governor-General. Daendels was a
Patriot who played a major role in the
Batavian Revolution, and subsequently became
Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies for the
Batavian Republic in 1807. This republican and revolutionist background made him controversial in the
Kingdom of the Netherlands established in 1815, which effectively banned him from the country by assigning to him the rather obscure governorship of the Gold Coast in 1815. Daendels tried to redevelop the rather dilapidated Dutch possessions as an African
plantation colony driven by legitimate trade. Drawing on his experience in building the
Great Post Road on the island of
Java in the
Dutch East Indies, he came up with some very ambitious infrastructural projects, including a comprehensive road system, with a main road connecting Elmina and
Kumasi in
Ashanti. The Dutch government gave him a free hand and a substantial budget to implement his plans. At the same time, however, Daendels regarded his governorship as an opportunity to establish a private business monopoly in the Dutch Gold Coast. Eventually none of the plans came to fruition, as Daendels died of
malaria in the castle of
St. George d'Elmina, the Dutch seat of government, on 8 May 1818. His body was interred in the central tomb at the Dutch cemetery in
Elmina town. He had been in the country less than for two years.
Recruitment of soldiers for the Dutch East Indies Army and Kwame Poku, who were sent to the Netherlands to receive education In the remainder of the 19th century, the Dutch Gold Coast slowly fell into disarray. The only substantial development during this period was the recruitment of soldiers for the
Dutch East Indies Army. This recruitment of the so-called
Belanda Hitam (Indonesian for "Black Dutchmen") started in 1831 as an emergency measure as the Dutch army lost thousands of European soldiers and a much larger number of "native" soldiers in the
Java War (1825–1830), and at the same time saw its own population base diminished by the independence of
Belgium (1830). As the Dutch wanted the number of natives in the Dutch East Indies Army to be limited to roughly half the total strength to maintain the loyalty of native forces, the addition of forces from the Gold Coast seemed an ideal opportunity to keep the army at strength and loyal at the same time. It was also hoped that the African soldiers would be more resistant to the tropical climate and tropical diseases of the Dutch East Indies than European soldiers. In 1836, the Dutch government had decided to recruit soldiers via the King of Ashanti. Major General
Jan Verveer arrived for this purpose in Elmina on 1 November 1836, and went to the Ashanti capital of
Kumasi with a delegation of about 900 people. After long negotiations, an agreement with King
Kwaku Dua I was reached. A recruitment depot was established in Kumasi, and furthermore the king sent the young Ashanti princes
Kwasi Boachi and Kwame Poku with General Verveer to take with him to the Netherlands, so that they could receive a good education. Kwasi Boachi later received education at the forerunner of
Delft University and became the first black Dutch
mining engineer in the Dutch East Indies. Dutch author
Arthur Japin wrote a novel about the life of the two princes with
The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi (1997).
Trade of forts with Britain and subsequent cession Whereas the Dutch forts were a colonial backwater in the 19th century, the British forts were slowly developed into a full colony, especially after Britain took over the
Danish Gold Coast in 1850. The presence of Dutch forts in an area that became increasingly influenced by the United Kingdom was deemed undesirable, and in the late 1850s British began pressing for either a buyout of the Dutch forts, or a trade of forts so as to produce more coherent areas of influence. In the Dutch political landscape of the time, a buyout was not a possibility, so a trade of forts was negotiated. In 1867, the
Convention between Great Britain and the Netherlands for an Interchange of Territory on the Gold Coast of Africa was signed, in which all Dutch forts to the east of Elmina were handed over to Britain, while the British forts west of Elmina were handed over to the Netherlands. The trade proved a disaster for the Dutch, as their long-standing alliance with the mighty inland
Ashanti Empire did not fare well with the coastal
Fante population around the new forts assigned to them, who were allied with the British. To subject the local people around Fort Komenda, the Dutch had to
send an expeditionary force to the local capital of Kwassie-Krom. Meanwhile, a
Fante Confederacy was founded to drive the Dutch and their Ashanti allies out of Elmina. The confederacy founded an army, which marched to Elmina in March 1868. Although the army was deemed strong enough in April to begin the siege of the town, struggle between the various tribes united in the confederacy meant that the siege was lifted in May. In June, a peace treaty between the confederacy and Elmina was signed, in which Elmina pledged to be neutral if war was to break out between the Ashanti and Fante. The blockade of the town by the confederacy was not lifted, however, and trade between Elmina and the Ashanti dropped to an absolute minimum. Attempts were made to persuade Elmina to join the confederacy, to no avail. Elmina and the Dutch sent a request for help to the king of Ashanti, whose army, under the leadership of Atjempon, arrived in Elmina on 27 December 1869. Unsurprisingly, the Ashanti army had an uncompromising attitude to their Fante rivals, making the prospect of a compromise between the Ashanti-backed Elminese and the new Fante-dominated forts transferred to the Dutch ever more difficult. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the ongoing conflicts made the call for the transfer of the entire colony to Britain to become ever louder. The Dutch governor of Elmina,
Cornelis Nagtglas, tried to persuade the Elminese to relinquish their city to the British. This was of course complicated by the presence of an Ashanti army in the town, which even arrested Nagtglas for a short while in April 1871. In February of that year, a
treaty had been signed with the United Kingdom, under which terms the whole colony was to be ceded for a sum of 46,939.62
Dutch guilders. On 6 April 1872, after ratification of the treaty by parliament, Elmina was formally handed over to Britain.
Destruction of Elmina As was to be expected, the Ashanti were less pleased by the handover of Elmina to the Fante-allied British. Ashanti king
Kofi Karikari posited that the "Elmina Note", which governed the tribute paid by the Dutch to the Ashanti, asserted Ashanti sovereignty over the town. In June 1873, the situation escalated when an Ashanti army marched to Elmina to "win back" the town from Britain. The
Third Anglo-Ashanti War had started, and Britain began bombing Elmina on 13 June 1873. The old town of Elmina was completely destroyed and leveled to make room for a parade ground. ==Administration==