As a community, however, Tema’s residents understood the town as having a deep and important history, one that dated back to the sixteenth century. As with the communities that came to comprise Accra and other nearby towns like Teshie and Nungua, Tema represented one of the original seven Ga coastal communities, which oral tradition held were established after a Ga migration from the east.61 In the centuries that followed, Tema and its fellow Ga towns periodically served as coastal trading ports for nearby Akwamu before their nineteenth-century integration into the British colonial state.62 By the twentieth century, most of Tema’s residents were engaged in the fishing industry in some fashion. In most cases, men took their chances in the canoes, while women generally smoked the fish and sold it in the markets or inland.63 Small-scale farming supplemented the livelihoods of many of the town’s residents. However, in contrast to those working the agriculturally richer land further inland, the Tema Ga never directly reaped the benefits of the Gold Coast cocoa revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, the area became known foremost for the production of local crops, initially calabash. By the early 1950s, tomatoes would bring the greatest profits into the area aside from fishing.64 Meanwhile, in terms of population, the interwar and postwar years proved to be periods of growth in the town, with the population nearly doubling between 1937 and 1948 and doubling again over the next four years. As a result, by 1952 the town had grown to nearly four thousand residents.65
As the CPP proceeded with the planned Tema project in the early 1950s, the government entered into a complicated political and cultural environment, particularly as it related to questions of land and land ownership. Not unlike elsewhere in the Gold Coast, individuals rarely had direct rights of ownership over Ga lands. Instead, they usually only possessed a range of usufructuary rights over the lands to which they gained access. Even then, the types of social and productive activities in which they could engage on the land were also often circumscribed.66 However, what tended to distinguish Ga notions of land ownership from those of many of their Akan neighbors inland were the limitations placed upon even a chieftaincy’s, or stool’s, authority over the land. In contrast with many Akan, Tema stool holders’ authority over the land was largely indirect, with much of it being filtered through the broader local Ga power structure. Most importantly, this included the town’s priests, who in many ways served as custodians of the land for the gods.67 As a result, at least at the abstract level, it was the community’s gods who maintained direct ownership rights over the land. As delineated by colonial anthropologist Margaret Field, these gods foundationally inhabited the land and the various topographical features that dotted it. The gods in turn could not be dislocated or alienated from the land, therefore making it impossible to permanently and irrevocably transfer ownership to another entity, as would be required by the Tema project. As such, the use and maintenance of the land carried with it a meaning that transcended the economic or even the social. Instead, it reflected a necessary negotiation, the purposes of which included the preservation of an equilibrium in the community’s relationships with both the physical and spiritual worlds.68
Thus, Tema itself was traditionally defined through its connection to the spiritual beings inhabiting the land in and around the town. Moreover, as with the region’s other Ga communities, the lagoons surrounding the area further provided the town its cultural and spiritual meaning.69 Two lagoons—Sakumo to the west and Chemu to the east—bookended the town. As outlined by Field, it was in Sakumo Lagoon that the town’s most influential god (Sakum⊃) resided. As Tema’s “senior god,” Sakum⊃ presided over the village’s annual feast (Kpledzo) in which the community celebrated that it had “lived through another year.”70 Through Kpledzo, the intimacy of the bond between the spiritual world and the land further comes to the fore. At its most foundational level, Sakum⊃’s ushering in of Kpledzo marked the arrival of the April and May rains and the beginning of the agricultural season. Just as importantly, though, it also initiated the first of a series of festivities, continuing through August, that would pay tribute to the coming “transfig[uration],” as Field has it, of the earth brought by the rains. This included the new fertility bestowed upon the land by the rains as well as the new resources provided by rising water levels in the lagoons.71 As a result, for the community’s Ga residents, to be Tema-born meant to be from this specific place between these two lagoons and to be in observance of this cyclical process connecting the land to the town’s spiritual roots and fortunes going forward. As such, the community’s relationship to this particular place was said to be so powerful, one of the government’s social surveyors noted, that Tema-born Ga faced an interdiction against residing outside of the town’s traditional and spiritual lands between the lagoons.72
At its foundation, therefore, the CPP’s planned development of the area surrounding Tema threatened the Tema Ga’s connection to their historical and spiritual roots. In order to make room for the planned harbor and particularly the new industrial city, the government announced a resettlement scheme that would move the town approximately two miles to the east, just beyond the confines of Chemu Lagoon. In Tema, debates immediately began over whether it was even possible for the community to move, as certain residents argued that many deities—especially those tied to specific sites, like Sakum⊃ to his lagoon—could not be dislocated from their homes.73 Others, as detailed by government welfare officer G. W. Amarteifio and anthropologist David Butcher, argued that, even if it were possible to move the gods (those Field calls “place-god[s]”), no one had the ritual knowledge necessary for doing so.74 The sheer number of gods in the area further complicated the discussions, with Amarteifio and Butcher estimating that as many as 220 gods were recognized in Tema at the time. Furthermore, the social surveyors reported that, in the eyes of many in the community, all of these deities would have to be relocated from the land as part of the town’s proposed resettlement.75
Regardless, the CPP quickly moved to acquire the land. For the government, the project required its full ownership of the Tema land as well as significant parts of the surrounding area. As one February 1952 cabinet memorandum explained, the government sought to obtain “not only the area of the port and the site of the actual township [i.e., the industrial city], but also a surrounding agricultural belt or open space which would be used for market gardening, firewood plantations and the like.” From the perspective of the government, such a move—indicative of the search for order and clearly demarcated spaces pursued in other midcentury planned cities—was central to its vision of an emerging postcolonial society, as the CPP aimed to thwart later, likely inevitable attempts at “uncoordinated development [i.e., slums] immediately adjoining the town.”76 As a result, by the middle of the year the CPP would bring before the Legislative Assembly a bill allowing the government to take possession of approximately sixty-three square miles of land in and around Tema, while proposing compensation of £10,000 or 3 percent of the land’s value for the people of Tema.77 On 1 July, the bill passed the Legislative Assembly.78 Shortly thereafter, the government undertook the first of what would be several social surveys of Tema and the surrounding area, the result of which was a proposed resettlement scheme in which the government would provide twenty new housing units of ninety-five rooms each at the relocation site.79 After this scheme proved unworkable, the government altered its plan, proposing instead a new resettlement community (Tema Manhean, or Tema New Town) comprised of large circular and semicircular compounds, with individual housing units. As detailed by architect David Whitham, each compound was to “contain a total of forty to fifty rooms.”80
Despite the series of concessions that the Gold Coast government attempted to make in the relocation scheme, persistent protests would plague the government’s actions in Tema. Even as early