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

`Prostitution' had become a label men deployed against female assertiveness. Akan culture defined marriage and motherhood as the ultimate goal for women. Male hegemony was threatened when women opted out of marriage. Jean Allman's interviews with some of the female victims in these seizures confirmed the economic basis of this gender conflict: men had become miserly and lazy, yet keen to exploit female labour. Marriage had become unattractive, divorces frequent.

But this is not to trivialize the widespread concerns about prostitution and venereal disease in the colonial Gold Coast, especially from the 1920s. Even the interior, predominantly rural, state of Sefwi Wiawso -- in the wake of mechanized mining, road construction and cocoa production -- was transformed into a bustling hive of economic and social activity in the 1920s and 1930s. Incidence of venereal disease increased phenomenally, and prostitutes were blamed for this development. Penelope Roberts has summed up the situation:

The introduction of cocoa had provoked new conflicts between spouses

leading to `wife-stealing' and desertion by wives. The crisis in the rural

economy coincided with an upsurge of opportunities for trade for some

women. The association between trade and prostitution and the spread of

venereal disease were seen as results of these conflicts.(93)

Crucial in this gender crisis in Sefwi Wiawso was, again, the struggle to control female labour through the institution of marriage, which had little material return for wives. The colonial economy generated different types of economic opportunities for men and women, which fed into the existing division of labour by sex and the separate property interests of spouses.(94) Female accumulation strengthened female sexual autonomy, enabling women to prune the male dominated institution of marriage. Not coincidentally, female accumulation, female sexual autonomy, prostitution, venereal disease and witchcraft were seen to be connected. Successful female traders were often accused of witchcraft and the epithet `WAC' came to embrace not only prostitutes involved in accumulation, but also traders suspected of witchcraft.(95) The early twentieth century with its rapid socio-economic change, and the concomitant gender `crisis', supported the numerous anti-witchcraft cults that proliferated in the Gold Coast.(96) The crisis was grave: the cultural norms that underpinned gender relations were under siege.

Akan, Ga-Adangme and Ewe cultures viewed wealth and power as male prerogatives.(97) Two Twi proverbs underscore this belief: obaa yen guan a, obarima na oton (when a woman rears a sheep, it is the man that sells it); and obaa twa bommaa a, etweri barima dan mu (even if a woman possesses a talking-drum [the privilege of chiefs], she keeps it in a room belonging to a man). Women themselves were viewed by men as a form of wealth, and their sexuality and economic potential were subordinated to men. Women were compelled to pursue motherhood and accumulation within marriage. But the Twi saying, baabi ye sum na wode sika pe ho a, eho tew (if money is scattered in a dark place, the place brightens up), appealed to both men and women. It was only the lack of economic opportunities that made women quiescent in their subordination to men. Children, in and out of wedlock, were coveted in Akan and Ga culture. Men usually `outdoored' their children, even if they did not marry the mothers or the woman's relatives claimed and named the child.(98) It was the ritual of naming that made a child a social person. Women in the colonial Gold Coast now claimed sexual autonomy, acquired wealth, and had children outside marriage. For some Gold Coast women, property offered firmer security than marriage. They would have identified with the remark of a Kenyan ax-prostitute: `My house is my husband'.(99)