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

II

THE POLITICAL AND MORAL ECONOMY OF SEX IN PRE-COLONIAL GOLD COAST

Claude Meillassoux has examined the economic basis of kinship in West Africa, and how social stratification along gerontocratic lines develops in face-to-face communities.(17) In Akan society, male elders controlled land and agricultural production. Labour was drawn from wives, younger kinsmen, slaves and other dependents.(18) Graduation to adulthood was mediated by rural male elders, who decided when obedient young men had reached independence. Then, the elders granted the young men land, secured them wives, and aided them in constructing their separate huts. Ewe and Ga-Adangme societies exhibited the same features.(19 The importance of female economic production and biological reproduction bolstered polygyny, and the accumulation of women became an integral aspect of the ideology of wealth and power in these societies.(20)

In essence, there was unequal access to women, turning them into valuable economic goods. Wealthy men in Akan society invested in the sexuality of women. Writing on the coastal Fante in 1853, Brodie Cruickshank remarked:

It is customary for these [wealthy men] to keep a number of women,

whom they call their wives, among whom are included pawns and

slaves, as well as free women, for whom dowry money has been

paid, and who are in consequence, to be considered the most

legitimate wives. But as far as answering the purpose of establishing

a charge of adultery, the pawns and slaves are as serviceable as

the most legally-married women in Christendom.

Indeed, it is notorious that many of these women are maintained

for the express purpose of ensnaring the unsuspecting with their

blandishments, and carry on their infamous trade with the connivance

of their husbands, who frequently bestow upon them a portion of

the fine of the damages imposed, as a reward for their successful

enterprize, and an encouragement for future infidelity.(21)

In early nineteenth-century Asante, wealthy men arranged child-marriages (oyere akoda), a sure means of entrapping on adultery charges unsuspecting men who even affectionately touched the infant.(22) Indeed, in pre-colonial Asante, there was an impression that no woman was `free'. An Asante proverb stated: mmea se, `wo ho ye fe' a, ene ka (when the women say (to you) `you are a handsome fellow', that means you are going into debt).(23)

Different social dynamics in the smaller, less centralized communities of Axim, Assini and Ahanta underpinned the institution of public women. Axim in 1660 probably had a population of about five hundred inhabitants.(24) Polygamy by wealthy male elders in such small communities caused a serious imbalance in sex ratios -- more social than statistical -- and a potential rupture in social relations between the elders and the young men. The institution of public women pre-empted this and reinforced the status quo, maintaining the structures of gerontocracy and patriarchy.

Though public women were meant to alleviate tensions in domestic, intergenerational politics, they also, ironically, became pawns in Euro-African trading relations, as Bosman reported at the turn of the eighteenth century: