By Lynn McDonald, May 23, 2024
Mayor Olivia Chow and Toronto City Council went even more over-the-top in their choice of “Sankofa Square” for Yonge-Dundas Square. Other renamings in the city have either substituted a banal name, like substituting Toronto Metropolitan University for Ryerson University, or, more frequently, selected an Indigenous name as a substitute for “colonizer” monikers. The Ghanaian word “Sankofa,” however, was selected for its meaning: “learning from the past.” But what can we learn about slavery in Ghana?
Slavery was rife both throughout Africa and much of the world in centuries past. Under its previous name, the Gold Coast, Ghana was a prime place for the sale of slaves to European slave traders. As well, its version of slavery included the horrible practice of executing the slaves of a chieftain who died, so that they could serve him in the afterlife.
In 1847, a Methodist missionary, the Rev. George Chapman, sent an account of this practice from his mission post in Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana. In an article in the Toronto Christian Guardian titled “Horrid Treatment of Infants in Ashanti,” Chapman explained that both men and women slaves, of all ages, were executed. When a woman slave with a nursing infant was beheaded, her baby fell to the ground “with her headless body.” Such an infant was regarded as an “abomination.” It gets worse:
“The body of the mother may remain in the street all day exposed to the gaze of every passer-by, and by her side may remain her helpless, living infant exposed to, not only the heedless foot of the multitude, but suffering intensely from the direct rays of a tropical sun. Seldom does any eye pity; no one would ever think of taking away that child and thus saving its life—it remains in the street until evening, and then, as the individual whose business is to drag away the bodies of these victims, takes away the mother; he may at the same time take away the child, not to pity and save it, but to cast both mother and child into the cell where these wretched victims are thrown, and they both remain to putrify [sic] or to be devoured by swine or carnivorous birds.”
In the same article, Chapman described being alerted to the beheading of a female slave in a nearby village. The dead mother’s baby, still alive, was left by her side. Starving, it had crawled up to his mother’s body to lick the blood from her bleeding neck. The missionary hastened to the execution site to try to save it, but he was too late: a bystander saw Chapman coming and prevented rescue by standing on the infant’s neck to kill it.
Ghana abolished slavery only in 1874, roughly 100 years after it was abolished, through court cases, in 1772 in England, and in 1778 in Scotland. For Scotland, it was Henry Dundas, as a lawyer, who won over the Scottish law lords on the appeal case he headed of an escaped enslaved man, Joseph Knight. They not only freed him, by a solid 8-4 majority, but ruled that there could be no slavery in Scotland, and thus freed all other slaves in the country.
This was Henry Dundas’s first achievement as an abolitionist.
Ontario, thanks to John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor, has the merit of being the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to abolish slavery, albeit gradually, in 1793, about 80 years before Ghana got around to it. Simcoe, it should be noted, was an appointee of Henry Dundas, a fellow abolitionist.
Yet Mayor Chow called the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square “beautiful,” and even claimed that she could not “think of a better a name for a gathering place at the heart of our city” than Sankofa Square. To Chow, Henry Dundas’s actions were no less than “horrific.”
Dundas and Ryerson: the Christian Guardian connection
Rev. Chapman sent his story to the Christian Guardian, a weekly Methodist magazine based in Toronto, for which Egerton Ryerson was the founding editor. He was no longer the editor when this story appeared, but he had himself written on abolition in the British Empire and the United States. Ryerson, notably, was a visitor in the British House of Commons on May 14, 1833, for the last debate and adoption of the law to abolish slavery in the British Empire. He gave a superb report on it in the Christian Guardian titled “House of Commons: Colonial Slavery.”
Ryerson also happened to be in Boston, en route to England in 1850, when the United States Congress passed the draconian Fugitive Slave Act. This required the return of slaves caught in free states, where they previously would have been safe. That law meant that escaped slaves from the American South would have to make it to Ontario to be safe, which sparked the development of the “Underground Railroad.” In a report written for the Christian Guardian, Ryerson condemned the law as an attempt to “trample under foot” the “rights of man,” adding that it was “incredible to me” that slavery was being championed in Boston, “the cradle of liberty.”
The abolition of slavery in Africa
The British law of 1833 that abolished slavery in the “British colonies” effectively meant in the West Indies; it also included Canada, which by comparison, had very few slaves. It would take decades more for slavery in Africa itself to be abolished, as well as the slave trade on the continent’s east coast. Recall journalist Henry Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” on finding missionary doctor David Livingstone alive, but ill, on the coast of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Livingstone had himself witnessed the beheading of 400 local slaves by slave traders from Zanzibar.
Given Ghana’s significant role in the transatlantic slave trade, and Dundas’s clear opposition to slavery, it makes little sense to strike Dundas’s name off of Toronto’s most famous public square. But so far, Chow is sticking by her assertion that Dundas’s legacy with regards to slavery is “horrific.”
The inconvenient truths about slavery and its abolition
Canadians, and especially Torontonians, are keen to repent of the misdeeds of the past, both against Indigenous people and enslaved Africans. This new humility has its merits, but has also led to gross errors of judgment, especially false accusations against supposed “colonizers” or “colonialists.” Ryerson himself was accused of responsibility for the “colonialist” past, although he himself was born in Ontario, on a farm north of Lake Erie. Neglected is the documented fact that Indigenous societies themselves were slave societies. The losers of wars between Indigenous societies could be killed, mutilated, and/or enslaved, and even sold as slaves. Those more fortunate were adopted by the conquering group, in other words, assimilated – another no-no in today’s world.
No Indigenous society is known to have actually abolished slavery. Indeed, Indigenous slaves were among those freed by the abolition laws of Britain and Upper Canada.
Nor did any African state ever abolish slavery or the slave trade of its own accord. It took decades of pressure from Great Britain, and sometimes bribes from it, to achieve its abolition. Again, Dundas had some understanding of the key role of African leaders in slavery and the slave trade. As he stated in 1792 in the House of Commons when defending his amendment to William Wilberforce’s motion for abolition of the slave trade, to make it “gradual”:
“If once a Prince of an enlightened character should rise up in that hemisphere, his first act would be to make the means of carrying off all slaves from thence impracticable. What reason had they to suppose that the light of Heaven would never descend upon the continent of Africa? From that moment there must be an end of African trade. The first system of improvement, the first idea of happiness that would arise in that continent, would bring with it the downfall of the African trade, and that in a more effectual way than is done by regulations of this country.”
Dundas had a much better understanding of the complications of abolishing slavery and the slave trade than other abolitionists, certainly more than Wilberforce, the Parliamentary abolition leader. But even Dundas had no idea that it would take nearly a century to get rid of it everywhere, and that until it was abolished everywhere, with thorough enforcement measures as well as the adoption of laws, it would remain in force, and many would be its miserable victims.
A better name than “Sankofa Square”
There is good reason not to go back to “Yonge-Dundas” Square, for Sir George Yonge, when governor of Cape Colony, South Africa, made money on the slave trade. Yet neither Mayor Chow, nor Toronto’s previous mayor, John Tory, ever condemned him. This is not to suggest renaming Yonge Street, for too much Ontario history has passed along it. The Rebels of 1837 marched down Yonge Street from Eglinton Street, only to be stopped at Maitland Street. Egerton Ryerson, in his first post as a Methodist minister, had his start as an itinerant preacher riding the “Yonge Street Circuit.”
Reasonable titles would be “Dundas Square,” or, better, “Slavery Abolition Square.” “Ryerson Square” would suit, but only when the anti-Ryerson people come to realize that they fell for false accusations. The square is close to where he developed such great educational reforms as free schools for all, teacher training, and free public libraries, initially for Ontario, in time adopted throughout the country.
Lynn McDonald, CM, Ph.D., is a former Member of Parliament, a professor emerita of University of Guelph, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
