This article contributes to the recent wave of historical studies that have examined the immediate social transformations implied by slavery abolition on gender relations. It highlights slave women's attempts to alter their status and the personal agency they displayed in the immediate post‐proclamation period in the Gold Coast (present‐day Ghana). During this very early period (1874–1877) women were quite an active presence in the colonial court and the percentage of cases discussing the right of women to leave their husbands increased. Traditional and colonial powers soon reacted to this changing situation. There were two main constraints to women's emancipation. On one hand there was a general confusion on the legal status of wives within traditional family, and on the other, the logic of debt concealed within the repayment of dowries tried to force women back into bondage even when they succeeded in changing their status from slaves to free women.
This article explores the genealogy of the gorovodu religious order, a relative newcomer in the wider vodun landscape of Togo and Benin. Gorovodu was born from the combination of many of the antiwitchcraft movements that swept across the Gold Coast between the 1910s and the 1930s. Crossing the Volta River to the east, these movements encountered a space dominated by vodun orders that were able to absorb and transform them gradually. In Togo and Benin, the northern gods lost their explicit association with witch finding and were recontextualized within the parameters of vodun practices while retaining their strong moralistic aptitude. What remained was a neat dichotomy between good and bad that was not so typical of vodun: gorovodu’s moral dictates were and are clear and offered a sense of stability by the immediacy of reward or punishment. This article analyzes the initial stages in the genesis of a new vodun and the transformation within an antiwitchcraft movement with the intention of showing the peculiar interaction between motion and the colonial encounters, the agency of charismatic leaders and the influences of world religions.
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