See 1941 footage of Gold Coast soldiers being trained to fight in the British Army
An internet video from 1941 shows Ghanaian troops receiving training from the British Army. Men in their middle and older years are shown in the film going through combat training with the military in order to get ready for World War II. They were apprehended maintaining their various positions at the facility and transporting the…
An internet video from 1941 shows Ghanaian troops receiving training from the British Army. Men in their middle and older years are shown in the film going through combat training with the military in order to get ready for World War II.
They were apprehended maintaining their various positions at the facility and transporting the munitions that the British Army had provided them.
JSTOR.org states the British colonies in West Africa were enlisted in the second World War in order to provide labor and raw supplies for the conflict.
There were around 70,000 men in the Gold Coast, or what is now Ghana, including the service and technical corps. The majority of troops were recruited from the Northern Territories’ purportedly martial peoples, but in the middle of 1940, Asante and the south were also included in the recruitment process.
A system of official quotas placed on districts and through chiefs at the period forced a huge number of recruits into the army, despite the fact that legal recruiting was limited to drivers and craftsmen.
The webpage further stated that although there was a lot of resistance to recruiting Ghanaians, the British Army needed the labor for its military endeavors. It even went so far as to shut down a few Gold Coast gold miners.
Discontent in the Gold Coast resulted from wartime shortages, skyrocketing prices, and a lack of jobs after the close of World War II.
Watch the video below:
