The Gold Coast Survey Department / Survey of Ghana (c. 1901 - 1957) was the cartographic wing of the British colonial administration of the Gold Coast, now Ghana. The Survey's origins can be traced back to one remarkable man, George Ekem Ferguson (July 14, 1864 - April 7, 1897), who had mixed Scottish, Dutch, and African (Fante) ancestry. He received an education typical of British colonials residing in the Gold Coast, attending Wesleyan schools, before joining the colonial civil service at age seventeen and quickly showed a special aptitude for mapmaking. Beginning in 1884, he was tasked with creating maps for a variety of purposes relating to public works, mining, and boundary demarcation. He did so by working with existing maps held by the British bureaucracy, but also by talking to local people to supplement the (often quite limited) British knowledge of certain areas, especially on the frontiers of their colony. Recognizing his unique abilities (he spoke several languages common in the Gold Coast colony), the colonial government sent Ferguson in 1889 to London to be formally trained in surveying at the Royal School of Mines and the Royal Geographic Society. Unfortunately, in 1897, Ferguson was killed in the borderlands of the Gold Coast colony by soldiers of Samori Touré (c. 1828 - 1900), an aspiring leader of an anti-colonial alliance in West Africa. After Ferguson's death, the colony's need for skilled surveyors only increased and in 1901 the Gold Coast Mines Survey Department was founded, and was quickly overwhelmed with work demarcating plots for the colony's lucrative mining and timber concessions. Much of the staff of the department was African, including some of the trained surveyors (though some directors were more reluctant than others in hiring 'native' surveyors), but in any event the survey relied on locals for all manner of logistics and communication. After the First World War, the Survey changed its name to the Gold Coast Survey Department and the number of 'native' surveyors increased, aided by the establishment of a surveying school in the colony in 1921 (one had already existed for some time in southern Nigeria, but heads of the Survey had preferred locals without training to trained outsiders given the importance of interacting with the local population when surveying). With more employees, especially natives and Brits born and raised in the colony, and better training, the quantity and quality of the Survey's work increased considerably. The Great Depression and the Second World War were setbacks to the Survey's work, but it rebounded in the postwar period, when 'Africanization' policies were also adopted to promote Africans to senior leadership roles, which eased the transition to the survey operating under an independent Ghanian government (from 1957 it was officially called the 'Survey of Ghana' though this had already been an alternate name for the Gold Coast Survey Department for some time). (For more information, see McGowan, J., ' Uncovering the Roles of African Surveyors and Draftsmen in Mapping the Gold Coast, 1874–1957' in Ackerman (ed.) Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
