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Rounding up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Jean Allman
Jean Allman
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Between 1929 and 1932 in a number of villages and towns throughout rural Asante, chiefs were ordering the arrest of all women who were over the age of fifteen and not married. A woman was detained until she spoke the name of a man whom she would agree to marry and the man in question paid a release fee. If the man refused, he too was imprisoned or fined up to £5. If he agreed, he paid a small marriage fee to the woman's parents and one bottle of gin. Based on the correspondence of colonial officials, customary court records and the life histories and reminiscences of women who were among the spinsters caught, this article explores gender and social change in colonial Asante by dissecting and contextualizing the round-up of unmarried women. It seeks to understand this unusual episode in direct state intervention into the negotiating of marriage and non-marriage as part of the general chaos in gender relations that shook Asante in the years between the two World Wars. This chaos, often articulated in the language of moral crisis was, more than anything, about shifting power relationships. It was chaos engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transformation. From 1921 to 1935, with cocoa well-established in many parts of Asante, women's roles in the cash economy were changing and diversifying. Many wives were making the move from being the most common form of exploitable labour during the initial introduction of cocoa to themselves exploiting new openings for economic autonomy. That women were beginning to negotiate their own spaces within the colonial economy precipitated a profound crisis in conjugal obligations in Asante - a crisis requiring drastic measures. The rounding up of unmarried women was one of several weapons used by Asante's chiefs in the struggle to reassert control over women's productive and reproductive labour.

Type
Challenges to Authority in the Gold Coast
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , July 1996 , pp. 195 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 National Archives of Ghana, Kumasi [NAGK], Ashanti Regional Administration Files [ARA]/1286: Report on Native Affairs: Mampong District for Two Quarters Ending the 31 Mar. 1933. It is worth underscoring here the wide-ranging autonomy enjoyed by native authorities in Asante and other parts of the Gold Coast, particularly as it compared to the limited powers allotted to chiefs by colonial authorities in areas with a substantial white settler population and/or a large African migrant labour force. See, for example, R. Rathbone's discussion of the ‘remarkably indirect Indirect Rule’ which characterized the State Council in colonial Abuakwa, Akyem in Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana (New Haven, 1993), 54–67Google Scholar and Allman, J., ‘Of “spinsters”, “concubines” and “wicked women”: reflections on gender and social change in colonial Asante’, Gender and History, III (1991), 179–80.Google Scholar Cf. Chanock, M., Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985), 25–47Google Scholar and passim and his ‘Making Customary Law: Men, Women, and Courts in Colonial Northern Rhodesia’, in Hay, M. J. and Wright, M. (eds.), African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston, 1982), 53–67.Google Scholar

2 To date, I have found written evidence of arrests occurring in the Asante towns of Adansi, Asokore, Bekwai, Edweso, Effiduasi and Mansu Nkwanta.

3 Allman, J., interview with Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993Google Scholar. (Hereafter interviews are cited by name, town and date only.) Most of the interviews referenced below were conducted by the author with the very able assistance of N. O. Agyeman-Duah. Ivor Agyeman-Duah and Selina Opoku-Agyeman assisted with some of the 1993 interviews. At present, all transcripts of interviews are in the author's possession. They will be deposited in the Melville J. Herskovits Library, Northwestern University, after completion of the broader project.

4 Christaller defines osigyani (pl. asigyafo), as ‘an unmarried person, i.e. a man or woman who has either not been married at all, or a man who has sent away his wife, or a woman who has forsaken her husband, in general one who is not in the state of regular marriage’. See Christaller, J. G., Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Basel, 1933), 456.Google Scholar

5 See NAGK/ARA 1907: Assistant Chief Commissioner, Ashanti to Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Kumasi, 19 July 1932; District Commissioner, Bekwai to Assistant Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Bekwai, 23 July 1932; Bekwaihene to District Officer, Bekwai, dd. Bekwai, 23 July 1932; Mansu Nkwantahene to District Commissioner, Bekwai, dd. Mansu Nkwanta, 26 July 1932; Chief Commissioner to Assistant Chief Commissioner, dd. 18 July 1932. The fees involved in these arrests, though not exorbitant, were not inconsequential. As Rathbone indicates for the 1930s, a blacksmith earned roughly 3s per day, while a day-labourer earned about 1s 6d. One yam could cost as much as 1s and six plantains about 1d. Rathbone, , Murder, 19Google Scholar, n. 50 and Cox-George, N. A., Studies in Finance and Development: The Gold Coast (Ghana) Experience, 1914–1950 (London, 1973), 79.Google Scholar For discussions of the variety of marriage rites in Asante during the colonial period, see Rattray, R. S., Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford, 1929), 22–31Google Scholar and Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927), 76–86.Google Scholar See, also, Fortes, M., ‘Kinship and marriage among the Ashanti’, in Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. and Forde, D. (eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London, 1950), 278–83.Google Scholar

6 Meyer Fortes Papers, ‘Marriage prestations’, [no date], Centre for African Studies, Cambridge University. Unfortunately, Fortes gave no indication of the sources upon which his description is based. This makes it particularly difficult, for example, to ascertain how much the fees involved in ‘captured spinster’ marriages differed from those paid in other circumstances. Rattray wrote in the 1920s that the tiri aseda (money and wine payments) marking the marriage of commoners was usually 10s, with an additional 6d for rum or wine. Fortes, presumably with reference to the 1940s, remarked that tiri nsa (as aseda was increasingly termed) ‘was said to have been as much as £3 at one time, but in most of the descriptions spirits and a few shillings are referred to’. Fortes, ‘Marriage prestations’, and Rattray, , Religion, 81.Google Scholar

7 Vellenga, D. D., ‘Who is a wife?’ in Oppong, Christine (ed.), Female and Male in West Africa (London, 1983), 150.Google Scholar Vellenga's reference was a sub-file in the ‘Ghanaian archives’ entitled, ‘Forced marriage of African girls, prevention of, 12 June 1939’ and a letter to the editor, Gold Coast Independent, 15 01 1930.Google Scholar Unfortunately, Vellenga did not name the archive in which the sub-file was located and I have not come across it in the national archive collections in Accra or in Kumasi.

8 Roberts, P. A., ‘The State and the regulation of marriage: Sefwi Wiawso (Ghana), 1900–40’, in Afshar, H. (ed.), Women, State, and Ideology: Studies from Africa and Asia (Binghamton, 1987), 61.Google Scholar Roberts' pioneering work on gender, colonialism and indirect rule in Sefwi Wiawso has shaped the discussion which follows here in profound ways.

9 Ibid.

10 Professor Kofi Glover, University of South Florida, recently informed me of a 1950s incident in Nyageo, Volta Region, which bears striking similarities to the cases cited here. Unfortunately, I have no further information on this episode.

11 A comprehensive listing of pre-colonial sources is obviously not possible here. A representative sample for the nineteenth century might include: Arhin, K., ‘Rank and wealth among the Akan’, Africa, LIII (1983), 2–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewin, , Asante Before the British (Lawrence, KS, 1978)Google Scholar; McCaskie, T. C., ‘Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history’, Africa, LIII (1983), 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Ahyiamu – “A place of meeting”: an essay on process and event in the history of the Asante State’, J. Afr. Hist., xxv (1984), 169–88Google Scholar; State and Society in Precolonial Asante (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; E. Schildkrout (ed.), The Golden Stool: Studies of the Asante Center and Periphery, vol. LXV of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Wilks, I., Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar; Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens, OH, 1993).Google Scholar

12 McCaskie, T. C., ‘Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history, II: the twentieth century’, Africa, LVI (1986), 2Google Scholar and n. 14.

13 I am not alone in associating ‘chaos’ with ‘cocoa’. G. Mikell has used ‘chaos’ to describe the broader economic, political and social turmoil associated with the spread of cocoa production throughout Ghana in her book, Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana (New York, 1989).Google Scholar That Mikell and I came to use the term independently may underscore its appropriateness for highlighting the general disorder of this era. (It may also simply reflect a shared fondness for alliteration.) Certainly, my use of ‘chaos’ here is more circumscribed that Mikell's, for it is meant to capture the specific disorder in gender relations that occurred in Asante as a result of the expanding cash economy. Finally, it is worth noting here the fascinating body of literature on ‘chaos’ and history which seeks to apply the mathematical theory of chaos (‘the science of physical systems governed by nonlinear dynamical laws’) to historical narrative. See, for example, Reisch, G., ‘Chaos, history, and narrative’, History and Theory, xxx (1991), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCloskey, D. N., ‘History, differential equations, and the problem of narration’, History and Theory, xxx (1991), 21–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Forum: chaos theory and history revisited’, History and Theory, xxxiv (1995) 30–89.Google Scholar This paper makes no pretence of contributing to the development of this theoretical model, though the literature has convinced me of the appropriateness of using ‘chaos’ to describe this particular moment in Asante's gendered past.

14 NAGK/ARA 1907: Chief Commissioner, Ashanti to Assistant Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Kumasi, , 18 07 1932.Google Scholar

15 NAGK/ARA 1907: District Commissioner, Bekwai to Assistant Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Bekwai, , 23 07 1932.Google Scholar

16 The Mansu Nkwantahene reported that ‘the object of beaten gong-gong is to prevent venereal diseases and etc. prevalent within the Division’. NAGK/ARA 1907: Mansu Nkwantahene to District Commissioner, Bekwai, dd. Mansu Nkwanta, 26 July 1932.

17 While the chiefs spoke of a new tendency for women not to marry, it is virtually impossible to ascertain, via quantitative data, whether it was actually the case that women were not marrying at rates far greater than before. Unfortunately, sources simply are not available to judge whether the chiefs' fears were well grounded or simply articulated a general concern over women's ‘uncontrollability’ during this period.

18 NAGK/ARA 1907: Bekwaihene to District Officer, Bekwai, dd. Bekwai, , 23 07 132.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.

20 NAGK/ARA 1907: District Commissioner, Bekwai to Assistant Chief Commissioner, Ashanti, dd. Bekwai, 23 July 1932. It is worth noting that during this same period numerous Asante chiefs faced destoolment charges, often for impotence or sterility. Included among them was the chief responsible for the rounding up of unmarried women in Effiduase, Kwame Owusu. See Manhyia Record Office: ‘Mampong native affairs’, Queen Mother, Kwami Asreh and Loyal Elders to DC Mampong, dd. 15 May 1931. (I am grateful to T. C. McCaskie for this reference.) It is, of course, exceedingly difficult to ascertain whether there was any direct connection between the destoolment charges and the actions taken against unmarried women in the town.

21 Fortes Papers, Kwaku Afram v. Afuah Buo, Native Tribunal of Asokore, , 13 08 1929Google Scholar, mimeo.

22 Vellenga, , ‘Who is a wife?’, 145.Google Scholar M. Lovett has discussed the fluidity of marriage arrangements in the urban townships of the Copperbelt during the same period, noting how these arrangements ‘posed an especially powerful threat to the authority of the elders and to the maintenance of rural social relations. They also increased women's autonomy’. See, Lovett, M., ‘Gender relations, class formation and the colonial state’, in Parpart, J. and Staudt, K. (eds.), Women and the State in Africa (Boulder, 1989), 31.Google Scholar For a fascinating discussion of the dynamics of marriage in Asante today, see Clark, Gracia, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (Chicago, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 9, but esp. 344–8.

23 T. C. McCaskie set the parameters of the discussion for the nineteenth century in his ‘State and society, marriage and adultery: same considerations towards a social history of pre-colonial Asante’, J. Afr. Hist., xxii (1981), 477–94.Google Scholar Recently, Clark's Onions and Kyei's, T. E.Marriage and Divorce Among the Asante: A Study Undertaken in the Course of the ‘Ashanti Social Survey (1945)’ (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar have made important contributions to our understanding of marriage in colonial and in present-day Asante. Finally, many of the specific questions raised by this paper promise to be addressed in Tashjian, V., ‘It's mine and it's ours are not the same thing: a history of marriage in rural Asante, 1900–1957’ (Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1995).Google Scholar

24 Rattray, , Astianti Law, 26Google Scholar and Fortes, , ‘Kinship’, 280.Google Scholar The wealth of cases heard by Asante's Native Tribunals and Courts provide ample material for probing changing views of marriage during this period. Many of these records are held at the Manhyia Record Office, Kumasi. See, for example, Asantehene's Appam Court D, Civil Record Book 3Google Scholar, Yaa Mansah, Kwaku Boaki v., 23 12 1935, 370Google Scholar; Gyasehene's Native Tribunal, Civil Record Book 1, Atta Ya, Yaw Buoh v., 12 03 1928, 124Google Scholar and Asantehene's Native Court B, Civil Record Book 20, Ama Manu v. Kwasi Buo, 25 Sept. 1940, 180, See, also, Allman, J., ‘Adultery and the State in Asante: reflections on gender, class and power from 1800 to 1950’, in Hunwick, J. O. and Lawler, N. (eds.), The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society (Evanston, forthcoming).Google Scholar

25 Over the past three years, I have been collecting life histories and reminiscences from older Asante women as part of a broader project on gender and social change in the colonial period. These efforts have focused on the Ashanti Newtown district of Kumasi, on sub-urban Tafo and on the rural towns of Effiduasi and Asokore. While none of the women with whom I spoke in Kumasi and Tafo recalled the capture of unmarried women, many in Effiduasi and Asokore could remember the episode in some detail. Of those, nearly all were willing to talk about it generally or as something that happened to certain other women. In some cases, however, it was fairly obvious that the reminiscences were those of someone who had been captured, even though the story was told in the third person. Because of the stigma attached to being from ‘among those caught’, however, I did not ask women directly whether they had been arrested or not. Only Eponuahemaa Afua Fom volunteered that information and she did so nearly a year after our first discussions.

26 Akosua Atta (a.k.a. Sarah Obeng), Asokore, , 26 08 1992.Google Scholar

27 Oduro, Mary, Effiduasi, 25 08 1992Google Scholar and Boama, Rosina, Effiduasi, 24 08 1992.Google Scholar

28 Boama, Rosina, Effiduasi, 24 08 1992Google Scholar. Again, we are hampered by the dearth of demographic information for this period. Certainly, no such imbalance appears in the 1948 Census, and the Census for 1921 and for 1931, although admittedly unreliable, in fact suggest that the male population in Asante was growing faster than the female population during this period as a result of immigration from the Northern Territories. See Coast, Gold, Census of Population, 1948 (Accra, 1948).Google Scholar For an excellent overview of population trends and census data in Ghana from the mid-nineteenth century to the post-independence era, see Engman, E. V. T., Population of Ghana, 1850–1960 (Accra, 1986)Google Scholar, esp. 92 and 100–5 for data on sex ratios. It is far more likely that Boama's assertion of men outnumbering women reflected the fact that young men were delaying marriage longer than they had before. That is, women outnumbered men in terms of availability, if not in statistical terms. Why this may have been the case is open to speculation. Although far more local research is required before any conclusions can be drawn, it is not improbable that, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, young men were finding it far more difficult than their fathers or uncles to enter successfully the colonial cash economy. The Bekwaihene's assertion that men could not afford the marriage payments certainly substantiates such an hypothesis, as does Afua Fom's recollection that ‘in those days, the women were able to get money faster than the men’. Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993.Google Scholar

29 Nyarko, Beatrice, Effiduasi, 24 08 1992Google Scholar; Asare, Jean, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993.Google Scholar

30 Dufie, Yaa, Effiduasi, 25 08 1992.Google Scholar

31 Nyarko, Beatrice, Effiduasi, 24 08 1992.Google Scholar

32 So, Akosua, Effiduasi, 28 08 1992.Google Scholar

33 Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 1 09 1992.Google Scholar

34 It is difficult to retrieve the numbers involved in these arrests. Most of the women whose reminiscences I have recorded talked of ‘many’ or ‘not many’. The written sources provide no statistics. Afua Fom recalled that there were ‘maybe sixty… But there may be more than that because they were going to the farms. The sixty is what I saw. But we were more than sixty because they went far’. I am accepting Fom's figure, for the time being, because she is the only woman I have encountered who has identified herself as among those captured. Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993.Google Scholar

35 Addae, Adwoa, Effiduasi, 28 08 1992.Google Scholar

36 Ibid. 30 June 1993. Adwoa subsequently established her own farm on land given to her by her grandfather and reported, ‘right now I am enjoying from the fruits of that cocoa farm’.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Rattray, , Ashanti Law, 25–6.Google Scholar

40 Rattray, , Religion, 81–2.Google Scholar

41 Certainly, this incident must be understood in the light of broader contest within Asante over the meaning of marriage and the reciprocity of conjugal obligations. See n. 24 above.

42 Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993.Google Scholar I have found no written evidence of this order.

43 Ibid.

44 See National Archives of Ghana, Accra: ADM.52/5/3, Mampong District Record Book, 1931–1946, 11.Google Scholar

45 Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993.Google Scholar

46 Obviously, terms like ‘prostitute’ must be handled quite carefully. When colonial and chiefly concerns over growing numbers of ‘prostitutes’ - so pervasive in the written documentation - are not situated in a precise social/historical juncture or are not weighed against the testimony of women and/or subordinate men, there is a very real danger of misinterpreting women's agency for women's victimization. For example, see Grier, B., ‘Pawns, porters and petty traders: women in the transition to cash crop agriculture in colonial Ghana’, Signs, xvii (1992), 322.Google ScholarJeater's, D. recent study, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1930 (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar underscores the importance of disentangling women's economic agency and independence from moral discourses regarding promiscuity and perversion.

47 Hunt, N., ‘Noise over camouflaged polygamy, colonial morality taxation, and a woman-naming crisis in Belgian Africa’, J. Afr. Hist., xxxii (1991), 471.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Vaughan, M., Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, 1991), 144.Google Scholar Jeater's recent work on Southern Rhodesia provides one of the more thorough explorations of ‘the problem with women’. See Jeater, , Marriage, esp. 119–40.Google Scholar

49 An earlier version of the cocoa discussion that follows appears in Allman, J., ‘Making mothers: missionaries, medical officers and women's work in colonial Asante, 1924–1945’, History Workshop Journal, xxxviii (1994), 27–9.Google Scholar

50 Among the more easily accessible sources are: Austin, G., ‘The emergence of capitalist relations in south Asante cocoa-farming, c. 1916–33’, J. Afr. Hist., xxxii (1987), 259–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dunn, J. and Robertson, A. F., Dependence and Opportunity: Political Change in Ahafo (Cambridge, 1973)Google Scholar; Grier, , ‘Pawns’, 304–28Google Scholar; Hill, P., The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge, 1963)Google Scholar; C. Okali, ‘Kinship and cocoa farming in Ghana’, in Oppong (ed.), Female and Male, 169–78Google Scholar; Mikell, , CocoaGoogle Scholar; and Vellenga, D. D., ‘Matriliny, patriliny and class formation among women cocoa farmers in two rural areas of Ghana’, in Robertson, C. and Berger, I. (eds.), Women and Class in Africa (New York, 1986), 62–77.Google Scholar

51 Each of these authors draws from a very different research base. While Mikell's book concerns the impact of cocoa on Ghana generally, it draws very heavily from fieldwork in the Sunyani District in the early 1970s. Grier's recent analysis of gender, cocoa and colonialism in Ghana is based on existing secondary literature and on several published government reports from throughout the colony. While it provides a new reading of some of this literature, its conclusions largely echo Mikell's. Austin's work, by contrast, is located in Asante specifically, with much of the fieldwork drawing on the experiences of cocoa farmers in the Amansie (Bekwai) District of Asante. In the discussion which follows, I draw most heavily from Austin's contributions to our understanding because of their grounding in the specific dynamics of cocoa farming in Asante and because of the careful attention paid to organization of labour and to the subtle changes in that organization over time.

52 Implicit in Roberts' discussion of cocoa in Sefwi Wiawso is such a ‘gendered chronology’, though it differs in important respects from the chronology proposed here for Asante. See Roberts, ‘State’, 53–5.

53 Austin, ‘Cocoa-farming’, 260–2 and Grier, ‘Pawns’, 314. Mikell, , Cocoa, 107.Google Scholar See, also, Austin, G., ‘Human pawning in Asante, 1800–1950: market and coercion, gender and cocoa’, in Falola, T. and Lovejoy, P. E. (eds.), Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, 1994), 119–60.Google Scholar

54 Austin's earlier work is concerned with tying the abolition of slavery and pawnage to the initial use of hired labour on Asante cocoa farms, but not with changes in the gender division of labour. His recent discussions demonstrate quite convincingly that pawnage was not simply abolished, but declined in uneven, ambiguous and very gendered ways that profoundly impacted upon conjugal relationships. See his ‘Cocoa-farming’, 264–5 and ‘Human pawning’, 137–43.

55 Roberts, , ‘State’, 54.Google Scholar

56 Okali, , ‘Kinship’, 170.Google Scholar

57 Austin, , ‘Human pawning’, 141–2Google Scholar. Women's entry into cocoa farming occurred later and in important ways did not parallel men's entry. Most significantly, women's plots were generally smaller than men's, their size being limited, as Grier recently argued, ‘by the labour [a woman]…could spare, by the willingness of her kin members to help her out, and by her ability to acquire a pawn or hire a laborer’. Grier, , ‘Pawns’, 322.Google Scholar

58 Austin, , ‘Human pawning’, 141–2.Google Scholar

59 Mikell, , Cocoa, 102.Google Scholar

60 See Cox-George, , Finance, 66–8.Google Scholar

61 Austin notes the special case of pawn-wives who had to share some of their proceeds with their ‘creditor-husbands’ and thus had less incentive to acquire farms in their own right as a means of security and autonomy. See Austin, , ‘Human pawning’, 142.Google Scholar

62 Austin, , ‘Human pawning’, 142–3Google Scholar; Clark, , Onions, esp. 316–18.Google Scholar

63 Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 1 09 1992.Google Scholar

64 Countless numbers of such cases can be found in the record books stored at Manhyia Record Office. See, particularly, the records of the Kumasihene's Native Tribunal, 1926–35, the Asantehene's Divisional Native Court B, 1935–60 and the Kumasi Divisional (‘Clan’) Courts, 1928–45 (consisting of Kyidom, Kronti, Gyasi, Ankobia, Oyoko, Benkum, Akwamu and Adonten).

65 Roberts noted a similar pattern in Sefwi Wiawso. See her ‘State’, 54–5.

66 Austin, , ‘Human pawning’, 143.Google Scholar Grier suggests that the payment of tiri sika was a colonial invention. Grier, ‘Pawns’, 327–8. Austin counters that interpretation in ‘Human pawning’, 125–6 and 149, n. 44, rightly pointing out that nothing in Fortes' unpublished papers suggests that tiri sika was of recent origin. Much of Fortes' information on marriage for the ‘Ashanti Social Survey’ of the mid 1940s was gathered by T. E. Kyei and Kyei's work certainly confirms Austin's interpretation. See Kyei, T. E., MarriageGoogle Scholar

67 Asante women were not unique in this regard. As Lovett has written on the Copperbelt, ‘Women seized new avenues of power and agency, such as the creation of colonial courts, and also actively constructed other opportunities, such as prostitution and fluid urban marital arrangements, in order to accumulate surplus, gain autonomy, and exercise control over their own labor power, fertility and sexuality’. Lovett, ‘Gender relations’, 24.

68 Roberts, , ‘State’, 49.Google Scholar See, also, Allman, ‘“Spinsters”’, 176–89. Perceptions of a ‘moral crisis’ were not unique to Asante. Women's economic or social autonomy was often interpreted as sexual uncontrollability. See, for example, Hunt, , ‘Camouflaged polygamy’, 471–94Google Scholar and ‘Domesticity and colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura's Foyer Social, 1946–1960’, in O'Barr, J., Pope, D. and Wyer, M. (eds.), Ties That Bind, 149–77Google Scholar, esP. 155–6; C.Summers, ‘Intimate colonialism: the imperial production of reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925’, Signs, xvi (1991), 787–807; Schmidt, E., Peasants, Traders and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, NH, 1992), esp. 98–106Google Scholar and most recently Jeater, Marriage, esp. 119–69.

69 I discuss the role of missionaries and medical officers in this ordering process in ‘Making mothers’. Jeater argues that the very concept of ‘moral realm’ is a colonial construct - a process by which ‘Africans as well as whites began to conceptualize issues of gender and sexuality in terms of individual acts… which were disassociated from the broader context of family membership’. Marriage, esp. 32–8 and 260–6. Though the number of Europeans in Asante at this time make direct parallels with Southern Rhodesia problematic, Jeater's definition of ‘moral realm’ as colonizing process translates quite easily to the Asante context.

70 Vaughan, , Curing, esp. 129–40Google Scholar, and Parpart, J., ‘“Where is your mother?”: gender, urban marriage and colonial discourse on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1924–1945’, Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies, xxvii (1994), 241–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but esp. 244–9, make important contributions to our understanding of the gendered implications of indirect rule. Unfortunately, most scholars addressing this question work in areas with sizeable settler populations, in former colonies where indirect rule institutions bore little resemblance to pre-colonial political organizations. (Roberts' pioneering work on Sefwi Wiawso is an important exception here. See Roberts, ‘State’, esp. 48–57.) In these settler areas, customary law and native courts appear very much as colonial inventions. The Asante material is far more difficult to sort through because the information we have regarding the pre-colonial period is so extensive and continuities with the pre-colonial past so striking. For the nineteenth century, see the sources cited in n. 12 above. For some tentative reflections on the political economy of indirect rule and continuities with the nineteenth-century Asanteman, see Allman, ‘“Spinsters”’, esp. 183–6, and ‘Adultery’.

71 For example, chiefs and elders refused to consider allowing wives to inherit from their husbands, even if a woman had worked for years on her husband's cocoa farm, for fear that Asante women would simply poison their husbands at the slightest provocation in order to inherit the farm. See Asante Confederacy Council, Minutes of the Third Session, 7–23 03 1938.Google Scholar Not until 1948 did the Council rule in favour of allowing a wife and child to inherit one-third of a man's property if he died intestate. However, the ruling was without legislative effect. For a full listing of Council orders, including those on adultery and wives' fidelity, see Matson, J. N., A Digest of the Minutes of the Astianti Confederacy Council from 1935–1949 Inclusive and a Revised Edition of Warrington's Notes on Ashanti Custom (Cape Coast: Prospect Printing, c. 1951), 26–48.Google Scholar

72 Parpart, , ‘“Your mother?”’, 270.Google Scholar

73 Nyarko, Beatrice, Effiduasi, 24 08 1992.Google Scholar

74 Boama, Rosina, Effiduasi, 24 08 1992.Google Scholar

75 Addae, Adwoa, Effiduasi, 28 08 1992.Google Scholar

76 Grier, , ‘Pawns’, 323–8.Google Scholar While few would disagree with her notion that indirect rule ‘reinforced the legal and coercive power of chiefs and male elders over their historic dependents’, most would insist that the ‘whys and hows’ of that broad observation cannot be addressed by simply casting indirect rule as the obvious, invented and uncontested response of a colonial government intent on guaranteeing ‘girls and women as unpaid sources of labor’. One of the first casualties of such an equation is women's historical agency in the making of the colonial world.

77 Mann, Kristin and Roberts, Richard, ‘Law in colonial Africa’, in their (eds.), Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1991), 13–14 and 21.Google Scholar

78 Afua Fom, Eponuahemaa, Effiduasi, 30 06 1993.Google Scholar

79 For an important discussion of the ways in which women to the south of Asante used the British justice system during this period, see Gocking, R., ‘British justice and the Native Tribunals of the southern Gold Coast Colony’, J. Afr. Hist., xxxiv (1993), 93–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but esp. 108–10.