Disease and mortality among gold miners of Ghana: Colonial government and mining company attitudes and policies, 1900-1938

This article traces the causes of high mortality rates among African gold miners in the former British colonial territories of the Gold Coast and Ashanti, 1900-1938. No previous studies exist for the early decades owing to the neglect by both mining companies and government officials to keep adequate statistics on African miner death rates, a flaw which reinforced the lackadaisical response of the government to problems of prevention and treatment. A milestone report issued in 1924, demonstrating that sanitary precautions, housing conditions and medical treatment for most African miners were wretched, forced the colonial state to gather regular data on Africans and make long overdue improvements, so that mortality rates for underground miners slowly declined by the time of the Second World War. But the published statistics concealed from view the far greater incidence of general deaths from pulmonary and respiratory tract disease among short-term migrant labourers, who lived in the mining towns, but returned to die in their home villages.