Is there a fundamental disparity between Africans and ourselves in modes of thought? Can they assimilate Western civilization, not merely accepting its scientific discoveries and inventions, but making its intellectual assumptions and methods really their own? There is obviously no question of greater theoretical and practical importance for the teacher.

This article examines the history of voluntary death on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. Its focus is the suicide of a young woman named Adwoa Amissa (or Adumissa), who took her own life in dramatic fashion in the town of Cape Coast in the early nineteenth century. Adumissa killed herself in response to the earlier suicide of a thwarted suitor, who declared his own self-destruction to be ‘on her head’, thereby transferring the responsibility to her. These events, which were recorded by Sarah Bowdich, an English resident of Cape Coast in 1816–18, made Adumissa a legendary figure in the Fante region of the Gold Coast and beyond. Despite the interpretive complexities of Bowdich's text, two aspects of the episode reveal themselves as central to an understanding of its cultural context: the impact of the spoken word and the practice of aggressive ‘revenge suicide’ among the Akan and their neighbours. It is within this culturally meaningful and contingent framework that questions about Adumissa's emotional impulses, motivations and agency must be situated.

Dans la société bushoong existent quatre institutions fondées sur la parenté: le clan matrilinéaire, la section de clan, la famille étendue mixte et la famille nucléaire. Cette dernière est la plus importante du point de vue des fonctions qu'elle remplit et de l'intensité des rôles sociaux qu'elle impose à ses membres. Nous décrivons ici ses caractéristiques, ses fonctions, le réseau des rôles sociaux qu'elle régit et enfin ses rapports avec les trois autres institutions citées.

This article is about two generations of women in south-western Chad – the baou déné and the mosso. It addresses the puzzle of how these groups of women are present in the everyday life of the region known as ‘useful’ Chad, while women as economic agents are absent from stories about the region and about successive schemes to make it profitable. The baou déné are wealthy farmers, but the last generation of these ‘women who have a lot of things’ is disappearing. Younger women are referred to as mosso, meaning ‘to fall down’. They are more likely to make a living from small trade than from farming and their lives are defined by precarity. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary sources, I show how the erasure of women happened in different ways over time. In the colonial era, administrators and travel writers were unable to imagine that women transformed forests into cotton fields. In this century, the idea that women farm just like men was disseminated by oil companies, facilitating land expropriation while drowning out stories of women's marginalization. The baou déné and the mosso are the products of specific historical processes and profit-making schemes, and the silences about women's places in them helped make profits, empire and ‘useful’ Chad possible.