Landlords-Strangers: A Process of Accommodation and Assimilation

Abstract

In his study of Upper Guinea from 1545 to 1800, Walter Rodney describes the evolution of a formal relationship between Europeans hoping to settle on the African coast and trade for African products, and the African traditional elite who regulated the activities of the foreigners and profited directly from their presence. While Rodney's is undoubtedly the fullest and perhaps the best treatment of this relationship to date, the very scope of his study has led him to think of the arrangement as unique, that once an agreement between parties had been reached, the only means to change or modify it were coups or the conscious subversion of traditional authority. 1 I want here not to undermine Rodney's basic thesis but to demonstrate that along the Nunez and Pongo rivers from the 1790s to 1860 the relationship between African elites, or landlords, and European or African foreign residents, the strangers, was neither static nor developed especially to accommodate European trade. Instead, the landlord-stranger relationship was a process through which African societies permitted foreign institutions to influence their social structures. Its primary function was not one of control but of accommodation and assimilation by stages and over