Introduction

Many of the essays in this volume unequivocally show the manifold ways in which Africans were central to the evolution and outcome of World War II, despite Africa's marginality in the war's historiography. Equally important, contributors to this volume demonstrate how the profound social, political, and economic upheaval spawned by the war significantly shaped Africa's mid-twentieth century history in ways that we now understand more fully. This particular essay argues that World War II was a watershed in the social and legislative history of the sex trade in West Africa. The deployment of large numbers of European and American male military personnel to the Gold Coast during the war, along with the predeployment training of local African troops, swelled the number of single military men in the colony and the demand for commercial sex.

As sex work became an increasingly lucrative form of wartime employment, large numbers of African women, particularly from Nigeria, migrated to the Gold Coast. Others, including young girls, were trafficked into the colony, often under false pretences, and forced into sex work. Open prostitution in the streets of cities reconfigured by the war (e.g., Accra, Sekondi, and Takoradi) became a seemingly uncontrollable nuisance to the police and a public embarrassment. Rising rates of venereal disease among both European and African military personnel began to affect the war effort negatively. In the face of this, colonial administrators were pressured to adopt stricter antiprostitution laws, including legislation designed to curb the traffic in women and children from Nigeria into the Gold Coast for the purpose of prostitution. Although this legislative intervention was not without its opponents in the administration, its eventual success marked a departure from the longstanding refusal of Gold Coast colonial authorities to strengthen antiprostitution laws when safeguarding the health of Africans from venereal disease was a concern.