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.

Abstract:Why is African Studies in North America dominated by white scholars? In this reflection piece, the 2018 president of the African Studies Association revisits the organization’s sixty-year history, exposing the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies at the organization’s founding in 1957 and then secured first by the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa and second by the “recolonization American-style” of knowledge production on the continent in the postcolonial era.

This article explores the changing dynamics of child-rearing in Asante (Ghana) through the problematic concept of ntamoba. In the historical record, and in popular memory, ntamoba has survived in a number of forms—as a marriage payment, as a rite connected with birthing and naming and as an indemnification paid to a father by a child's matrikin to signify the termination of a father's rights in that child. This article seeks to historicise and explain the multiplicity of meanings and the eventual disappearance of ntamoba by examining the ways in which a father's rights of use in his children were transformed into rights of ownership. It foregrounds time and social place/status as key variables in its investigation, demonstrating how the disappearance of ntamoba was connected with the conflation of subordinate social categories in twentieth-century Asante.

IN MARCH 1962, AS THE WEST AFRICAN nation of Ghana marked five years of independence from British colonial rule, the country's most popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic, introduced readers to yet another in a long list of high-profile international visitors. This visitor, however, was not the usual diplomat, artistic performer, or anticolonial freedom fighter. A prominent headline and accompanying photo announced her as "The Woman Who Dares the Heavens." 1 And who was this daring woman? She was, according to the news story, the famous West German pilot Hanna Reitsch, who was visiting the nation's capital, on President Kwame Nkrumah's invitation, to "advise" the government on flight and gliding. In addition to providing brief biographical information, which noted Reitsch's "carrying out [of] dangerous test flights" during the war and the fact that she had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class, the "highest German decoration," the article focused primarily on the reason for her visit to Ghana and her notably demure appearance. "Anyone who has heard of Hanna Reitsch," journalist Edith Wuver informed local readers, "would expect her to be tall and perhaps masculine in build. But she is only a small woman, hardly above five feet and feminine in every way. .. Hanna has the feminine approach to her profession." 2 What the journalist did not mention-nor any of her colleagues in the national news service who covered the visit-was that Flight Captain Hanna Reitsch was not just an extraordinary woman pilot, "feminine in every way," in a profession dom-This article began life as a short paper delivered at the "Revisiting Modernization" conference held at the University of Ghana in 2009. Over three years, it has been expanded, recast, and reconfigured in dialogue with colleagues at numerous gatherings: the Love and Revolution II and III conferences in Minneapolis and New Delhi

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