Sexuality and prostitution among the Akan of the Gold Coast, c. 1650-1950

V

CONTESTING SEXUALITY AND MARITAL OBLIGATIONS IN COLONIAL GOLD COAST

Colonialism, by weakening the political authority of chiefs and male elders, especially their ability to impose coercive sanctions, acted inadvertently as an important catalyst in the restructuring of gender relations. In addition, the colonial cash economy generated new economic opportunities for rural and urban women. Female accumulation reinforced the desire of women to assert their autonomy and to define their expectations in marriage. Yet colonial rule, especially with the introduction of indirect rule, was supposed to facilitate the subordination of women in the domestic realm.(84) But the structure of colonial rule presented women with avenues for negotiating autonomy. The dual legal structure of British and customary law courts was important as it enabled women to strategically manipulate the law in their favour.(85) How these economic and legal opportunities in the colonial Gold Coast intersected with changing notions of sexuality--especially through prostitution and leisure activities among migrants in towns--to reshape female expectations in marriage is a promising line of inquiry. The interwar period was, in particular, an era of active social exchange between urban and rural areas.(86)

The exploitation of female labour was crucial in the economic transformation that underpinned the rise of the Gold Coast as the world's leading producer of cocoa by 1918. In their various capacities as pawns--as wives, daughters and nieces--women provided unpaid agricultural labour on cocoa farms and served as porters in carrying cocoa bags from interior farms to coastal merchants.(87) From being exploited, unpaid labour, women--even in the rural areas where indirect rule had re-empowered male elders--gradually found openings in the colonial economy and asserted their autonomy through establishing their own cocoa and food farms. Rural women increasingly withdrew their labour from exploitative husbands and uncles. Sexuality, marital obligations and the concept of family in matrilineal Akan societies, became fiercely contested.(88)

Whether rural-urban contacts and the sexual autonomy of migrant women in towns, including prostitutes, contributed to the radicalization of rural women (for example, through their trips to coastal towns as porters) in their relations with men has not been explored. In the Obubra Division of the Cross River Basin in Nigeria, young women from the village of Efut fled `into prostitution when they were asked to engage in palm production'.(89) For rural Atu women on the Kenyan coast, prostitution and marriage existed in a dialectical relationship. The relative proximity of the town of Mombasa, and a tradition of Atu prostitution in Mombasa, enabled some women to reject unsatisfactory marital situations. But this female empowerment had an adverse effect on marriage, for it made the institution fragile.(90) Abner Cohen pointed out in his study of Hausa migrants in Ibadan: `through frequent divorce, many women oscillate between prostitution and wifehood a number of times in their marriage career'.(91) Prostitution presented an escape route from the exploitation of female labour through marriage. The rhetoric of rural male elders, in describing the assertiveness of women in the colonial Gold Coast, confirmed that they had made the connection between prostitution, female accumulation and marital instability. In the early 1930s, in what was perceived to be a period of acute social chaos and decay, several Asante chiefs ordered the arrest of all unmarried women over the age of fifteen. They were to be released if they agreed to marry a man in the village--obviously with the man's consent: `This chaos, often articulated in the language of moral crisis, in terms that spoke of women's uncontrollability, of prostitution and venereal disease, was, more than anything, about shifting power relationships. It was chaos engendered by cash and cocoa, by trade and transformation'.(92)