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.

Sometimes I have an uneasy feeling after attending meetings or conferences connected with well-meaning, but not always wisely directed, efforts to better the lot of the African child. We good-intentioned folk would be well advised to find out something more about the system and ideas which African parents themselves practise or hold regarding this subject before we rush in to criticize, interfere with, or offer advice to those who in the long run are mainly responsible—namely, the childrens’ own parents. Too often, I fear, our attitude is to treat these parents as being themselves but poor, benighted, heathen children.