ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on media accounts and archival records of Dr Benjamin Knowles' initial trial and appeal before the Privy Council and explores the colonial and imperial dimensions of the criminal case. It establishes the bifurcated criminal justice system in the Gold Coast, before analysing the legal and political debates that formed around the case. The chapter explores the essential pragmatism and contingency of colonial criminal law in British Africa, and highlights the tensions between its principles of legal equality and the practice of racialized, administrative justice. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council sat as the highest court of appeal for the British Empire across all branches of law. Race, gender and class were central to the construction of difference and power in European colonies, but these were contingent categories that shifted in their manifestations across various social, political and legal arenas.
