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Transformations in the Feminization of Unfree Domestic Labor: A Study of Abaawa or Prepubescent Female Servitude in Modern Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry
Affiliation:
Shippensburg University
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Abstract

This article breaks new ground for the study of postslavery gender and social formations in modern Ghana and Africa as a whole: It examines the expansion of involuntary female domestic labor known as abaawa in what is today Ghana. The study traces the transformative institutional processes that shaped the exploitation of involuntary female labor in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. Based on a variety of primary sources, including colonial, indigenous African newspapers, Christian missionary accounts, and oral history, the article maps out the paradoxical expansion of involuntary female labor during the age of abolition in the colonial period and the postslavery phase of social and gender formations in the era of the postcolonial state. The pivotal argument is that social and gender formations that emerged as a result of abolition, social change, and economic transformation benefited more males than females. As a result, males used innovative, empowering avenues of social mobility in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. For their part, disempowered females, especially those in backwater enclaves, were consigned to abaawa labor, which has ostensibly been projected as a benign, kinship-based, and apprenticeship-bound institution. In reality, contemporary abaawa has all the exploitative vagaries of slavery and debt-bondage of the pre/colonial epoch.

Information

Type
Shifting Boundaries between Free and Unfree Labor
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Fall 2010 , pp. 28 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010

Much attention has been focused on the processes of abolition of domestic slavery and debt-bondage or pawnship that occurred from circa 1874 to about the 1930s in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana).Footnote 1 However, the ways that emancipation reconfigured the postslavery social structure and gender formations remain to be fully studied.Footnote 2 For Africa as a whole, studies regarding the processes of abolition, emancipation, economic transformation, and social change as well as their consequent emerging social structures deal mostly with the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 3 Thus, very little is known about the social space occupied by former slaves and their descendants in the postslavery era of the postcolonial period. In a 2001 article in African Economic History that deals with forced labor by women and children in the Gold Coast between 1900 and 1940, I called attention to the intensification of prepubescent female involuntary domestic labor, the so-called house help, apprentice, or maid-servant, all better known as abaawa in contemporary Ghana. I concluded that

Overall, the economic expansion, social change, and international antislavery crusades that led to the demise of servile institutions [in the Gold Coast] did not eradicate the exploitation of prepubescent females. The colonial state and the indigenous social formations structured the variables of change to benefit males. Thus the transformations in unfree labor forms and the eventual eradication of forced labor catapulted females into another arena of involuntary labor. This is euphemistically called abaawa or maid servitude, arguably a vestige of female slavery, pawnship, and forced labor; this is ostensibly a form of “apprenticeship” and has survived to the present day. It should form the subject of future studies.Footnote 4

This is a challenging proposition because, despite the vigorous efforts at improving the conditions of women in Ghana, the subject of abaawa, a thriving feminized involuntary labor, has become a sacred cow among scholars and activists alike.Footnote 5

The problem of abaawa has been neglected in the crusades of social activisms, conferences, conventions, and academic works that seek to liberate and empower Ghanaian women in the postcolonial era. In fact, activists, commentators, the media, academics, and government officials have vigorously paid attention to child labor associated with small-scale mining, stone quarrying, sand winning, farming and fishing, and petty-trading and hawking.Footnote 6 Conversely, the subject of abaawa, both as a facet of the pre/colonial social structure as well as an exemplification of the postcolonial and postslavery social and gender formations, has not received the attention it deserves. This may be due to the uncomfortable fact that those engaged in activism that seeks to liberate and empower women are themselves beneficiaries of abaawa labor: Most upper- and middle-class Ghanaian women use the services of abaawa in their homes.

Abaawa is an Akan word for a prepubescent female or a maiden. From comparative standpoints, based on the practice elsewhere, an abaawa may be described as a live-in domestic servant or a house-help. In fact, abaawa labor is known by many names worldwide; for example, “little nieces” in neighboring Ivory Coast and sirvients in southern Mexico.Footnote 7 In sum, the word abaawa has become synonymous with the feminization of involuntary domestic labor that deals mostly with household chores. More recently, due to the exigencies of harsh economic realities, abaawa laborers not only work at home, but also increasingly in the public-market sphere, where their labor yields money for abaawa-holders or their host families.Footnote 8 This transformation in abaawa labor appears to be the norm in other parts of Africa.Footnote 9

Breaking new ground for the study of postslavery society in Ghana and Africa as a whole, the present study examines the expansion of abaawa as a part of the postslavery social and gender formations. I argue that female slavery, pawnship, and forced labor subtly metamorphosed into and intensified abaawa labor and that in the postabolition period abaawa labor has been ostensibly projected as a benign “apprenticeship” and kin-based institution. I show that social change, economic transformation, and antislavery crusades that were decisively instrumental in the demise of domestic slavery and pawnship benefited males more than females. Among other things, the demise of slavery, debt-bondage, and forced labor did not lead to the complete autonomy of former female slaves and pawns. Rather, emancipation placed them in other forms of bondage, the most predominant one being abaawa.Footnote 10 This was a worldwide phenomenon during the age of abolition, colonialism, and postcolonial state formation that reinforced unequal economic opportunities for females and reconfigured them into frameworks of domestic servitude.Footnote 11

The first section of this study provides an overview of abaawa as an institution. The second portion looks at social change and abolition of domestic slavery, debt-bondage, and forced labor that paved the way for the institutionalized processes leading to the intensification of female involuntary domestic labor, including abaawa. The third part discusses postabolition official policies of “custodial care” or fosterage and “apprenticeship” that consigned prepubescent former female slaves into postabolition dependency and bondage. The fourth section illustrates that the old origins of slaves in the precolonial period have continued to serve as sources of contemporary abaawa labor, while the fifth part shows that uneven regional economic change in the colonial era promoted male wage labor but consigned females to involuntary menial labor. Changes in land tenure, which impoverished females and turned them into abaawa, are discussed in the sixth part of this study, while the final section briefly places the features of the abaawa institution in historical and contemporary perspectives.

Some caveats are duly warranted here. It should be stressed that abaawa labor existed alongside female slavery, pawnship, and forced labor in both the precolonial and colonial periods. Therefore, my intention here is not to argue that abolition of domestic slavery, pawnship, and forced labor created abaawa. Rather, the study seeks to explain how abolition and emancipation further expanded and vigorously institutionalized abaawa to replace domestic slavery, pawnship, and forced labor. The comparative scope of the paper is somewhat limited because of the ground-breaking subject matter and the unique timeframe that informs it; there is no substantive study in African history that has explored the ways that postabolition and postcolonial social formation reconfigured lower-class females into conduits of involuntary labor forms. Historical and sociological approaches are used to explain the ways that social change and economic transformation reinforce emergent social structures, in this case, the postslavery society in flux in the postcolonial period. The study does not seek to fully detail the features of the abaawa institution as it exists in today's Ghana. Rather, it contextualizes the structural features of the institution of abaawa that emerged as a result of the significant economic change in the early twentieth century. Additionally, in order to capture the geographical space of the varying social and economic developments that reinforced abaawa, I use the term “southern region” to refer to the present-day Asante, Eastern, Brong-Ahafo, Central, and Western Regions, while “the northern region” refers to the Northern, Upper West, and Upper East Regions. For its part, the Voltaic districts refer to the present-day Volta Region, including the mid-basin of the Volta River encompassing the Kete Krachi area.

Defining and Locating Abaawa in Ghanaian and Comparative Labor History

The use of female domestic labor is worldwide and can be found in both developed and developing countries. Compared to other regions, there is a dearth of information on abaawa in the extant literature regarding the labor history of modern Ghana. Abaawa as a subject punctuates the broader discussions of social formations in the Gold Coast; several studies suggest that abaawa labor has continued and expanded since the 1930s.Footnote 12 This is in line with the ways that female domestic service worldwide corresponds to economic growth, especially the systematic institutionalization of capitalist economies that leads to social formations defined by burgeoning middle-class families.Footnote 13 Although abaawa had existed alongside domestic slavery and pawnship, its expansion remains a historical puzzle. P.F.W. Bartle's and Nick Van Hear's respective studies suggest that the intensification of abaawa coincided with the demise of domestic slavery and pawnship in the 1930s.Footnote 14 This was a period of rapid economic development, urbanization, and the emergence of an urban middle class, mostly made up of middle school graduates, who used the services of abaawa. This view has been forcefully articulated by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch for Africa as a whole.Footnote 15 Thus, abaawa became the most convenient form of cheap involuntary labor and, disguised as apprenticeship, was often excluded from the spectrum of the antislavery, anti-forced labor proclamations of the 1920s and 1930s.

Bartle, writing about social inequalities and using the Kwahu district as his unit of analysis, explains that

While slavery survived many centuries in West Africa, it obviously did not survive the present. Or did it? Related forms of work without pay, such as pawning, appear to have all the features of modern roles, such as house maids and apprentices [abaawa], that they may be obvious adaptive survivals of old institutions in new guises.Footnote 16

Thus, Bartle attributes the expansion of abaawa to the vestiges of slavery and pawnship. He suggests that abaawa was a precolonial institution that expanded in the colonial period due to economic change and thereafter took on new features arising from abolition, emancipation, and social change. More recently, Peter Haenger has not only arrived at similar conclusions but has also added a gendered perspective by arguing in his study of slavery in the southeastern Gold Coast that ongoing gender disparity affected wage labor. He explains:

In the coastal towns the gradual move from the work-intensive activities that had previously dominated the area to capital-intensive paid work may have contributed to male laborers' making increasing use of the offer of paid labor, while little change came about in the working structures of the domestic realm: many households continued to depend on the labor of female and child slaves.Footnote 17

Thus Haenger's position is in line with Bartle; he points to the dominance of patriarchy, a product of both the indigenous social structure and the colonial social formation, which ostracized females to the site of involuntary labor.

For her part, Stella Dzidzienyo places abaawa in the continuum of precolonial kinship-based labor mobilization that has filtered into the postcolonial era. She writes that traditional society had “no distinction between household and economically productive work and families relied on children to help in the home or members of the extended family provided much needed help.”Footnote 18 Dzidzienyo's conclusions illustrate benign kin-based aspects of abaawa and hence overlook the exploitation and abuse inherent in abaawa from the precolonial era to the postcolonial period. Contrasting Dzidzienyo's viewpoint, but affirming Haenger's conclusion, The Independent (Accra) newspaper, commenting on social and gender inequalities in the late twentieth century, plaintively points to economic-determinant factors that underscore abaawa:

Ramatu Fuseini was 10 years old when her poor parents handed her over to a rich family living in the city. … Child labor is a major challenge of our times. It is a complex issue with no simple solutions. Massive in scale, corrosive to society, and fatal [sic] in its consequence, it is cruel to children and insulting to human dignity.Footnote 19

The above conclusions point not only to the problem of social inequality, but also to the issue of unequal regional economic developments. The Independent continues that “most child-workers are in domestic services. Domestic service need not be hazardous, but it often is. Children in domestic servitude tend to be poorly paid or not paid at all.”Footnote 20 In sum, the expansion of abaawa may have occurred with the rapid socio-structural change and economic transformation that coincided with the demise of domestic slavery, pawnship, and forced labor in the 1930s.

The size of the present abaawa population is not known; however, comparative figures on child labor in Ghana suggest that it may be several million. For instance, the Ghana Statistical Service's household survey of 2003 shows that about “1.5 million children under the age of fifteen were estimated to be working in Ghana”; this figure includes children engaged in “forced domestic” labor.Footnote 21 Certainly, the figure could be higher because the survey dealt with the major urban centers and excluded relatively small urban communities as well as rural and backwater communities where abaawa is also practiced. In sum, there is a large abaawa population in modern Ghana, and the actual number of abaawa, undoubtedly, defies precise categorizations.

Abolition, Social Change, Gender Inequality, and Abaawa

One major structural change in the colonial period was the expansion of female bondage in the form of domestic slavery, pawnship, and forced labor. This occurred from the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the formative stage of colonial rule with its attendant economic expansion and exploitation of African labor, to about the early 1920s, the period of consolidation of colonial rule.Footnote 22 But colonial reports on the early twentieth century, in response to the queries of the League of Nations and other antislavery societies, suggest that female slavery and pawnship had dwindled by the 1930s.Footnote 23 Assessing the impact of the massive school enrollments, the colonial state surmised in 1930 that Western education had led to the freeing of prepubescent pawns and that the “efforts of the Political Officers and the spread of education have got this problem [pawning of small girls] well under control.”Footnote 24 The above is corroborated by oral history, illustrating that education became a means of social mobility. Yet oral history contradicts the colonial state's claim that the pawning of girls had ended by 1930.Footnote 25 Additionally, several studies have disputed colonial officials' composite conclusions that female bondage had ended in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.Footnote 26 The literature clearly delineates that female pawning in the early twentieth century, just as much as its antecedents in the late nineteenth century, had expanded and replaced slavery as a result of the colonial economic expansion.Footnote 27 In fact, in the late 1930s, female pawnship was still being practiced. For example, the author of the Report on the Marketing of Cocoa states:

A farmer, who has already pledged his farm and has no other security to offer, may obtain a loan by entrusting a young daughter or niece to the lender to act as his servant until the debt has been paid.Footnote 28

The report also suggests that female slavery had been subsumed under the pretext of marriage to secure loans.Footnote 29 In sum, as a result of the colonial state's development of infrastructure and the expansion of a cash crop economy from the 1890s, female forced labor,Footnote 30 in addition to the preexisting female pawnship, had by the beginning of the twentieth century become an integral part of the colonial economy, charting pathways of involuntary female labor, including abaawa.

By the inception of colonial rule in 1874–1875, the impact of social change and diffusion of innovations had transformed not only the littoral communities but also the immediate interior states of Krobo, Akuapem, and Akyem.Footnote 31 As a result, social change served as an agency that altered the precolonial social structure of the southern states.Footnote 32 Overall, social change facilitated abolition, which was made more vigorous under the auspices of international antislavery crusades and colonial policies of intervention in the 1920s and 1930s. Although often evanescent, abolition brought change to the precolonial political economy, releasing revolutionary dosages of social and economic change instrumental in the demise of domestic slavery, debt-bondage, and forced labor.Footnote 33 Therefore, by the outbreak of the Second World War, domestic slavery, pawnship, and colonial forced labor had become a thing of the past. The prevailing social change in the aftermath of abolition facilitated social mobility, enabling people of servile origin, mostly males, to ascend the social structure in flux.Footnote 34 Consequently, females were left behind in the transformation from servile to wage labor, paving the way for the intensification of involuntary forms of labor in the postabolition period that involved more females than males.

Furthermore, the expansion of colonial education before the First World War paved the way for mass education and social mobility that involved people of servile origin.Footnote 35 Slave desertions to the Christian mission schools began in the precolonial period, were intensified by the colonial abolition of domestic slavery in 1874–1875, and in the long term enabled a considerable number of freed slaves, mostly boys, to enroll in the mission schools.Footnote 36 Kofi Affrifah's study, based on the missionary accounts, states that “during the pioneer days of ‘school’ education [in Akyem] the bulk of the intake was made up of slave children or at least children of servile origin.”Footnote 37 The population size of pupils with servile origin is difficult to determine. In fact, in Krobo, Akyem, Anum, Akuapem, and Kwahu, a large number of people of servile origin formed the nucleus of the Christian mission schools.Footnote 38 Both oral and written histories provide insights into the demographics of pupil recruitment, illustrating that more males of servile origin gained better access to education than their female counterparts, especially in the interior regions where the Christian missions held more sway than the colonial state.Footnote 39 The simple fact that the number of boys who attended school tended to be higher than the number of girls illustrates that more boys than girls used education as a means of social mobility. In sum, former slaves, mostly males, used education offered by the church and the colonial state as vehicles of social mobility to move themselves from the rungs of the underclass to positions of prominence, a subject that remains to be fully explored. Since the massive social change benefited more males than females,Footnote 40 the former, whether free or bonded, were able to rid themselves of forms of dependency and exploitation.Footnote 41 Thus, social change did not promote social mobility for females, but rather placed them in a continuum of involuntary female labor, including abaawa.

Postproclamation Custodial Care, Apprenticeship, and Abaawa

The conditions of former slaves, mostly prepubescent females in the postabolition period, illustrate the intensification of abaawa. Efforts made by the colonial state to assist former slaves in their adjustment to freedom tended to be sporadic and ad hoc. There were two amorphous colonial policies that sought to better the conditions of former slave children: custodial care or fosterage and apprenticeship.Footnote 42 According to Governor Brandford Griffith, custodial care of the 1890s and, by extension, apprenticeship of the post-First World War period, were based on the “Masters and Servants Ordinance” that was packaged to help the adjustment of former slaves from bondage to freedom.Footnote 43 But the records show that both were inadvertent responses to two separate incendiary reports submitted by Inspector R.E. Firminger and District Officer Ed. MacMunn to the London-based Aborigines Protection Society (APS) in 1889–1890, and both reports alleged that slavery was still widespread in the Gold Coast.Footnote 44 As a result, in 1890 an ordinance was promulgated by the Gold Coast Legislative Council to “provide for the Registration and Protection in certain other respects, of alien Children in the Gold Coast Colony.”Footnote 45 The alien children in question were former slave children, mostly prepubescent females, who had not been claimed by their relatives.

Due to the 1890 Ordinance, the colonial government implemented a policy of custodial care or fosterage from the 1890s to about the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote 46 Custodial care involved former slave children, mostly prepubescent females, placed under the care of influential prison wardens, district officers, and former slave holders; additionally, some former slaves were given in marriage to members of the constabulary force.Footnote 47 The records are silent on the actual number of former slaves involved; however, the spate of colonial reports on such former slaves shows that the number may be several hundred. These arrangements did not better the conditions of former slaves. Thus, prepubescent former female slaves, the most marginalized and vulnerable because of their foreign origins and their kinlessness, suffered the most from the paradoxical colonial policies that freed slaves but bundled them into other forms of bondage. Perhaps as a result of the imminent failure of the policy of custodial care, the colonial government came up with a new policy of apprenticeship to better the conditions of former slaves.Footnote 48 Like the custodial care of the late nineteenth century, the apprenticeship policy of the early twentieth century allowed not only colonial officials, but also the African elite to receive former slaves as apprentices.Footnote 49 For one thing, theoretically, apprentices were required to learn a trade, and for another, in practice, most freed slaves were not offered the opportunity to do so. Apprentices served as sources of cheap labor for apprentice-holders because the former were not paid or given remuneration. The pattern in the Gold Coast exemplifies Alain Morice's view that the usefulness of apprenticeship “depends largely on the intentions” of the apprentice-holder.Footnote 50 By the second decade of the twentieth century, a considerable number of female apprentices were in the service of the elite of the colonial society, both African and European.Footnote 51

The policies of custodial care and apprenticeship were not properly coordinated. In fact, what the colonial government did accomplish was a sloppy bureaucratic procedure that allocated former slave children, mostly prepubescent females, to the colonial elite. In sum, the colonial authorities did not satisfy the needs of former female slaves. As a result, they were forced into new forms of involuntary labor.Footnote 52 The policies of custodial care and apprenticeship became avenues of bondage, paradoxically supervised this time by the colonial state. These patterns of involuntary labor recruitment were transposed onto the postslavery social structure: Large numbers of former female slaves and other disadvantaged females found work as abaawa laborers for the emerging African elite, especially in the urban settings.Footnote 53

Old Sources of Slaves as New Sources of Abaawa Labor

The Salaga slave-trading area, broadly defined as the nexus of northern Ghana's emporium of trade, supplied slaves to the southern region in the precolonial period.Footnote 54 This pattern continued in the postproclamation era of the colonial period because the northern region continued to serve as sources of abaawa labor and other forms of involuntary labor to the southern region. Throughout the colonial period, prepubescent females, obtained from the Salaga trading axis, were brought to the south via the Voltaic routes in the east and the Praso route in the west.Footnote 55 They worked for the southern elite and urban dwellers, the beneficiaries of social mobility and economic advancement, rapid urbanization, and wealth acquired from cash crop production.

To this day, the southern region has continued to receive prepubescent females from the Salaga trading axis through child labor trafficking. Overall, a considerable number of the trafficked children eventually become abaawa, a phenomenon that is regularly reported by the Ghanaian media. For example, an article in the Daily Graphic (Accra) of July 16, 2002, under the headline, “Child Trafficking Booms in Kumasi,” plaintively states:

Every week, a vehicle arrives with a load of young children, mostly girls and traders of all sorts from the Northern, Upper East and West Regions … to Kumasi … on arrival in Kumasi, chop bar operators go to the stations to select the ones that they want in much the same way as one would go to the market place to select tubers of yams or plantains for retailing … children are brought to Kumasi to serve as commercial workers, domestic servants, chop bar [small restaurant] attendants, kayayei [commercial porters and peddlers], truck pushers, and ice water sellers … some of the girls work in smoke-filled and overheated workshops for roasting groundnuts on commercial scale.Footnote 56

Indeed, government officials tasked with the eradication of child labor have continued to point to northern parts of the country as the main sources of child labor in the country.Footnote 57 Prepubescent females are brought to the southern regions, especially major urban centers, not only to work as traditional abaawa, but also to provide involuntary labor service for traders, chop-bar operators, and owners of cottage industries.

Uneven Economic Change, Male Wage Labor, and Abaawa

Another factor that has contributed to abaawa labor has been uneven regional economic development. As will be explained below, the economic patterns of the regional disparities, especially in the colonial period, though detrimental to the regions involved, nevertheless promoted male migrant wage labor as well as the exportation of unmarried and prepubescent females to the southern region as abaawa laborers.Footnote 58 Overall, the southern region is better developed than the northern region and the Voltaic districts. The southern region benefited from colonial infrastructural developments, namely roads and railways, and their consequent economic development outcomes, such as mining.Footnote 59 The northern region and the Voltaic districts lagged behind the southern region in cash crop production, including oil palm, cocoa, rubber, and kola from the mid-nineteenth century to about the 1960s, when the northern region began to serve as an equally important breadbasket of the country.

Furthermore, the regional economic disparities compelled wage laborers, mostly males, from the northern region, and to a smaller extent, the Voltaic districts, to work for the European population and the emerging African elite in the Gold Coast. During the early part of the twentieth century, males from the northern region served colonial officials and the African elite as “washermen” or launderers, watchmen or security guards, cooks, and garden boys. In fact, by the beginning of the First World War, these menial wage laborers had to obtain special licenses in order to work.Footnote 60 The constant supply of male laborers, in particular, from the northern region led to the stereotypical ethnicization of menial wage labor, a subject that remains unstudied in the labor history of the Gold Coast. Overall, the Europeans in the Gold Coast and the African elite considered male laborers from the northern region as better and more reliable than their southern and Voltaic counterparts. Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s, the departure of Europeans from the Gold Coast, following the attainment of political independence, did not eliminate the stereotypical ethnic-based labor pattern.Footnote 61 The long-term result of the regional disparities in economic development is that well into the postcolonial period the northern region and the Voltaic districts have continued to serve as areas of cheap labor recruitment for economic developments in the southern region. Colonial labor recruitment for the mines and infrastructural developments in the southern region—for example, railway and road building—benefited from male wage labor obtained from the northern region and Voltaic districts.Footnote 62 During the two World Wars, the northern sector especially served as a major source of conscript labor and military recruitment.Footnote 63 These factors explain why the southern region has continued to remain a magnetic economic zone that attracts inhabitants of the northern region and the Voltaic districts. In sum, the regional disparities led to two types of export labor from the northern region and the Voltaic districts: male wage labor and female involuntary menial labor, including abaawa.

Land Tenure, Cash Crop Production, and Abaawa

Since the mid-nineteenth century, when the cash crop revolution in the Gold Coast began, free access to lineage lands for both males and females began to change. By the beginning of the twentieth century, commodification of land had become the norm. As a result, men increasingly gained sole access to land, and this created uneven distribution of wealth that favored men's accumulation of wealth. As land ownership and consequent accumulation became the markers of wealth, the status of women in the cash crop-producing areas declined. Beverly Grier's study of the use of female pawn labor shows the growing disparities between male and female employment as the former took to wage labor while females engaged in bonded and forced labor.Footnote 64 Colony-wide, colonial rule and its accompanying and encompassing patriarchal dictates promoted wage labor as an exclusive preserve for males.Footnote 65 These processes unleashed a more virulent form of female poverty as avenues of female employment in the cash crop-producing areas dwindled. Instead of being farmers, women became pawn porters for the booming agricultural and commercial enterprises.Footnote 66 Additionally, disadvantaged rural-based prepubescent and unmarried females were sent to urban areas to serve as abaawa. Indeed, it is important to stress that to this day this pattern still exists.

Cash crop production, especially cocoa, attracted male wage labor from the northern region and the Voltaic districts. For example, the area of the Densu-Birim-Afram basin in the southern region attracted a considerable number of farm laborers and sharecroppers from the northern region and the Voltaic districts.Footnote 67 Although most of them were males, sometimes they were accompanied by their spouses and children. Even today, the Densu-Birim-Afram basin in the present-day Eastern Region is home to a large number of Anlo-Ewe farmers from the Voltaic districts who were descendants of sharecroppers and migrant cocoa laborers.Footnote 68 Oral history shows that some of the sharecroppers were the descendants of slaves who had worked in the area prior to abolition.Footnote 69 The oral evidence is supported by the Basel Missio's report on the colonial abolition of domestic slavery in 1874–1875; assessing the responses of slaves in Akuapem and Akyem Abuakwa, the report identified numerous slaves who were returning to their original homes in the Voltaic districts.Footnote 70 Capitalizing on the unequal sharecropping relationship, Akuapem landowners compelled Ewe sharecroppers in the Akuapem satellite cocoa farming villages in the Densu-Birim-Afram basin to release their mostly prepubescent females to serve as abaawa in the main Akuapem towns. Some of the abaawa never returned to the cocoa farming villages but lived their adult lives in the Akuapem towns. Even when their abaawa years ended, they continued their relationships in the form of dependency and subordinated roles. Such former abaawa developed close familial bonds with the host-kinship family as a part of the socioeconomic arrangements that defined the relationship between sharecroppers and landowners.Footnote 71 This partly explains the large number of Anlo-Ewe abaawa in Akuapem in the immediate postcolonial era, a taboo subject that has been hardly broached, let alone studied.

Regional disparities in economic development are central to abaawa. From the late nineteenth century to about the early twentieth century, most prepubescent female slaves in the south had been obtained from the northern region, specifically the Salaga slave trading axis, the very area that served as sources of servile labor in the pre/colonial period. In the immediate postcolonial period, abaawa had originated from the northern region and Voltaic districts. For instance, in the Akuapem area, a considerable number of abaawa were obtained from the Voltaic districts.Footnote 72 Today abaawa continue to come from the northern region, a problem that has attracted the attention of the Ghanaian government, media, and women's groups.Footnote 73 Most recently, however, abaawa recruitment is determined more by mass poverty than by regional disparities and ethnicity. Impoverished families everywhere have placed their children and wards, mostly prepubescent females, in abaawa labor to make ends meet. This trend does not only involve household labor but also strenuous work, including hawking and porterage services.

The Abaawa Institution: Historical and Contemporary Trends

As noted, most abaawas are prepubescent females. With regard to the demographics of abaawa, Dzidzienyo writes:

The sample of the housemaid population was found to be relatively young. The youngest age at which a girl been [sic] employed was seven years and the oldest, twenty-five years. Half of the number of housemaids interviewed indicated that they left their parental home to begin employment before the age of six years.Footnote 74

The above age permutations correspond with the demographic patterns of female slavery and pawnship in the Gold Coast during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 75 In a local household, an abaawa is ostensibly an “apprentice” or a helping hand who, from a superficial standpoint, appears to be an organic part of the host family. In reality, however, an abaawa is a marginalized, involuntary laborer in various capacities. The labor of an abaawa is exploited by the abaawa holder for the economic benefit and social standing of the host family. Dzidzienyo, in her sociological survey of maid-servants in contemporary Ghana, notes that “Children in employment are used as housemaids, hawkers, manual workers or cleaners.”Footnote 76 Among other chores, an abaawa “is expected to wake up very early in the morning, sweep the yard, wash clothes and dishes, clean the kitchen, and run errands.”Footnote 77

Additionally, colonial reports show that abaawa worked at home and also served as porters for cocoa farmers, coastal traders, and expatriate merchants.Footnote 78 Abaawa porters, like female slaves and pawns, carried cocoa from the interior producing areas to the coastal ports. They also carried imported commodities from the coastal towns to the interior for redistribution and sale. Local goods, for example, salt and dried fish, were also transported by abaawa porters to the interior markets.Footnote 79 Certainly, what David Kimble has referred to as the “lorry revolution” of the early twentieth century decreased the use of abaawa porters in the burgeoning colonial economy.Footnote 80 But what remained unchanged long into the postcolonial period was abaawa porterage labor that sustained the transportation of produce from distant, isolated farms to marketing centers along motorable routes.Footnote 81 Compared with the early twentieth century, contemporary abaawa labor also entails commercial porterage services or kayayo in urban centers. The kayayos, like their precolonial and colonial counterparts, carry goods, but from one end of the urban center to another instead of from region to region as in the case of slave and pawn porters in the pre/colonial period. Abaawa also peddle cooked food, fruits, and other items for the abaawa holders. As noted, the shift from household-based abaawa to street-based abaawa is due to growing poverty that has forced families, including middle-class ones, to supplement their incomes through petty trading. The growing elitism among upwardly mobile urban dwellers prevents their children from engaging in petty trading; such tasks are realized through abaawa labor.

Often an abaawa lives with the host family until she marries but she may continue her “association” with the host family for life. There is no specific duration of servitude; each case is unique.Footnote 82 An abaawa works for the host family as long as her services are needed. Marriage may terminate an abaawa's labor, but the oral evidence shows that a larger number of former abaawa continue in their subordinate roles. Even in adulthood, the bond of dependency is such that some former abaawa return to serve the host family in times of crisis—for example, death in the host family. Only a few abaawa receive remuneration commensurate with the hard labor they perform. This said, most abaawa laborers do receive board and lodging from the abaawa holder, but again this tends to be deplorable.Footnote 83 Whether or not an abaawa laborer receives remuneration, it is involuntary labor. Prepubescent females hardly make the decision to engage in abaawa labor, rather their kin groups, mostly parents, are to be blamed. Just as in the past, when needy families used their children as collateral for debts, today poor families are the ones that place their children into abaawa labor, and a considerable number of abaawa come from impoverished backwater areas. A spate of recent reports in the Ghanaian print media suggests that the institution of abaawa has become an integral part of child labor trafficking in various parts of the country.Footnote 84

Other continuities in pre/colonial female slavery and debt-bondage or pawnship and abaawa in the postslavery and postcolonial periods involve class. Just as in the past, when the wealthy and the powerful used slave and pawn labor, today it is the rich and the middle class that benefit from abaawa labor.Footnote 85 My informants explained that the poor and the needy are the ones who continue to place their children, most often prepubescent females, into abaawa because of patriarchal leanings and the preference for the education of male children.Footnote 86 This practice explains the large population size of female pawns in the colonial period just as much as it illustrates the large number of female porters or kayayos in the postcolonial urban centers. Recently, The Independent, commenting on child labor, noted:

For poor families, the small contribution of a child's income or assistance at home that allows the parents to work can make the difference between hunger and a bare sufficiency. The parents of child workers are often unemployed or under-employed. They are desperate for a secure income.Footnote 87

As noted, most abaawa laborers in the early twentieth century tended to originate from the precolonial sources of slaves, namely the northern region and the Voltaic districts.Footnote 88 Today, abaawa laborers come from the same regions, but it should be stressed that a substantial number originate from rural backwaters nationwide, especially the economically deprived areas.Footnote 89 This is exemplified by the fact that Ramatu Fuseini, the ten-year-old girl in the story reported by the Independent, was handed over to a rich family in the city.Footnote 90

The postcolonial abaawa institution is, however, different from domestic slavery and pawnship in some respects. In spite of the obvious exploitation that abaawa laborers go through during their tenure of servitude, their treatment by abaawa holders, from a comparative standpoint, is not as brutal as the treatment of domestic slaves. For one thing, some abaawa holders enroll their abaawa in schools or train them in some trades to earn a living, and for another, most abaawa laborers do return to their kinship groups after working for a number of years. To a large extent, abaawa laborers manage to retain their cultural integrity and kinship affinities and do not go through the phase of “social death” experienced by slaves. From a comparative standpoint, abaawa laborers retain a sense of independence and autonomy that domestic slaves lacked. As noted, some abaawa laborers are remunerated for their services, though it is always meager. It is also worth noting that whichever period we look at, abaawa laborers receive harsh treatments and may end up as objects of sexual gratification for the males of the host household, just like the experiences of female slaves and pawns.Footnote 91 In sum, multifarious stories abound about the abaawa institution: Sometimes their life histories illustrate happy endings, but most often they deal with exploitation and abuse.Footnote 92

Conclusion

Unlike males, the exigencies of the transformative processes of emancipation catapulted females into another arena of exploitation and abuse, euphemistically called abaawa. The paradox, as noted, is that this occurred at a time when the colonial state, under pressure from international antislavery societies, such as the League of Nations and International Labor Organization, were forcefully seeing to the demise of unfree labor. Indeed, instead of being a benign kinship-based female apprenticeship system, as the name abaawa suggests, the abaawa institution retains the vestiges of precolonial and colonial servile institutions. What the various periods have in common regarding the abaawa institution is that they are fraught with abuse, exploitation, harshness, and above all underscore a social formation entailing structures of gender inequality and the feminization of poverty and marginality. Regional disparities, urbanization, patriarchy, and a growing elitist middle class have perpetuated and firmly cemented the abaawa institution in the postcolonial period in spite of social change and government policies. The emerging abaawa institution is not about ethnicity but derives from social inequalities between the upwardly mobile and urban-educated and the rural backwater poor. Since efforts are being made to reform the abaawa institution, let me project a ray of hope here. In September 2005, the Ghana branch of the Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa (LAWA) met to “build consensus on LAWA-Ghana's Draft Regulations on Domestic Workers with the hope that policy makers and stakeholders would adopt it.” The draft dealt “with minimum wages, social security, maximum hours [of work] and rest periods, [the role of] private employment agencies, servitude, trafficking, [and] sexual harassment among others.”Footnote 93 Indeed, the numerous voices that have been raised against child labor in Ghana portend great ideas for the reform, if not the eventual abolition of the abaawa institution. This said, it is likely that four factors will continue to pose formidable challenges to efforts and actions to reform or abolish abaawa. These are the continued disparity between the rich and the poor, escalation of rural-urban migration, the resurgence of child trafficking, and the expansion of an urban-based middle class that uses the services of abaawas. Indeed, an exceedingly rich oral history of the institution of abaawa exists for further research. Future research may plumb the depths of the abaawa institution to rethink the normatively constructed notion that it is a benign apprenticeship system defined by kinship networks. Such research should give voice to abaawa laborers and restore their stories of recruitment, treatment, abuse, and dilemmas of inequality to history.

References

NOTES

1. The subject of pawnship, also known as debt-bondage, in the Gold Coast is scattered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' scholarly and travelogue accounts. Generally, these accounts identify pawnship as a consequence of problems and crises within the kinship system that forced kin groups to pawn their members as collaterals for debts. Such accounts also show the features of the institution, including procedures of pawning, child pawning, marriage and pawning, interests on loans, and insights into the periodic attempts by the British colonial government to abolish pawnship. Such accounts indicate the transitions in pawnship over time, specifically the shift from human pawning to the pawning of immovable assets. Overall, this genre stressed the benignity of the institution of pawnship. See Cruickshank, Brodie, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, Vol. I (1853; London, 1966), 318 and 322–29Google Scholar; Cruikshank, Brodie, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, Vol. II, (1853; London, 1966) 198–200 and 247–50Google Scholar; Hutchinson, Thomas J., Ten Years Wandering Among the Ethiopians (London, 1861), 10–14Google Scholar; Ellis, A.B., The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa (1887; Oosterhout N.B., 1966), 285 and 289–300Google Scholar; Harris, John, Dawn in Darkest Africa (1912; London, 1968), 45Google Scholar; Claridge, W. Walton, A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti (1915; London, 1964), 177–86Google Scholar. For fuller accounts of pawnship or debt-bondage in Ghana, see, for example, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., “‘What Is and What Is Not the Law’: Imprisonment for Debt and the Institution of Pawnship in the Gold Coast, 1821–1899,” in Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism in Africa, ed. Lovejoy, Paul E. and Falola, Toyin (Trenton, NJ, 2003), 427–47Google Scholar.

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4. Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., “‘The Loads are Heavier than Usual’: Forced Labor by Women and Children in the Central Province of the Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana), 1900–1940,” African Economic History 30:1 (2001): 43–44Google Scholar.

5. The vigorous activities of the Ghanaian women's movements have included the introduction of women's studies, media coverage of issues of gender inequality and violence against women, and putting pressure on the Ghanaian government to bring about gender equality. Other issues that have garnered popular criticism include spousal abuse, rape, ritual murders of women, and widow rites and inheritance. These and other forces of the global communication revolution have empowered Ghanaian women. The Ghanaian women's movements include the National Council of Women and Development (NCWD) and the 31st December Women's Movement as well as several NGOS. See, for example, Oppong, Christine, Domestic Rights and Duties in Southern Ghana. Legon Family Research Paper No. 1 (Accra, 1974)Google Scholar; Robertson, Claire C., Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington, 1984)Google Scholar; Dolphyne, Florence Abena, The Emancipation of Women: An African Perspective (Accra, 1991)Google Scholar; Prah, Mansah, Women's Studies with a Focus on Ghana: Selected Readings (Schriesheim, 1995)Google Scholar; Oduyoye, Mercy Amba, Daughters of Anowa: African Women & Patriarchy (Maryknoll, 1995)Google Scholar; and Apt, Nana Araba et al., Maintaining the Momentum of Beijing: The Contribution of African Gender NGOs (Aldershot, 1998)Google Scholar.

6. See, for example, “ILO Urges Commitment to Child Labor Issues,” Ghana News Agency, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, General News of Wednesday, May 25, 2005; “10,000 ‘Kayayei’ in Accra,” Accra Daily Mail, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, General News of Monday, April 4, 2005; “1.5 Million Children Engaged in Child Labor,” Ghana News Agency, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, General News of Tuesday, September 28, 2004; “Ghana Faced With Rising Numbers of Street Kids,” Public Agenda (Accra), posted on www.ghanaweb.com, General News of Monday, October 9, 2006; and “Media Urged to Sensitize People on Child Trafficking,” Ghana News Agency, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, General News of Friday, September 22, 2006.

7. Jacquemin, Melanie, “Can the Language of Rights Get Hold of the Complex Realities of Child Domestic Work? The Case of Young Domestic Workers in Abidjan, Ivory Coast,” Childhood 13:3 (2006): 391–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howell, Jayne, “Of Servanthood and Self-Employment: Changing Patterns of Domestic Service in Southern Mexico,” Urban Anthropology 31:3, 4 (2002): 389–416Google Scholar.

8. It should be stressed that there were and are male domestic servants, but on a comparatively smaller scale. Such male domestic servants run errands, perform farming and gardening tasks, fetch water, and wash cars, etc. In fact, in a way the male servant's tasks were gender specific, putting them above female servants. Male servants are more likely to desert than abaawas, and once male servants come of age they are more likely to be let go than their female counterparts.

9. See, for example, Jacquemin, “Child Domestic Work,” 390–95.

10. Stella Dzidzienyo, “A Case Study of Domestic Helpers in Ghanaian Homes,” (Institute of African Studies Library, University of Ghana, Legon, N.D.), 583–99. It should be stressed that efforts to trace the full citation of this paper were not successful; however, it is available at the Institute of African Studies Library, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana. I wish to thank my late colleague, Dr. J.N.K. Brukum of the Department of History, University of Ghana, Legon, for assistance in the efforts to trace the full citation of the manuscript. For brief accounts of female domestics in other parts of Africa, see Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, African Women: A Modern History (Boulder, CO, 1994), 109–16Google Scholar; and Berger, Iris, “Dependency and Domesticity: Women's Wage Labor 1900–1920,” in Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980, Iris Berger (Bloomington, 1992), 16–45Google Scholar.

11. See, for example, Hansen, Karen Tranberg, African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992)Google Scholar; Howell, , “Of Servanthood: 389–419; Robert Lee, “Domestic Service and Female Domestic Servants: A Port-City Comparison of Bremen and Liverpool, 1850–1914,” History of the Family 10 (2005): 435–60Google Scholar; Jacquemin, “Child Domestic Work,” 389–406; Hegstrom, Jane L., “Reminiscences of Below Stairs: English Female Domestic Servants Between the Two World Wars,” Women's Studies 36:1 (2007): 15–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Bartle, P.F.W., “Inequality and Cyclical Migration: Changing Patterns of Traditional Society,” Ghana Journal of Sociology 12:1 (1978/1979): 32Google Scholar; Van Hear, Nick, “Child Labour and the Development of Capitalist Agriculture in Ghana,” Development and Change 13 (1982): 504–6Google Scholar; Busia, K.A., A Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi (London, 1950): 36–7Google Scholar; Acquah, Ione, Accra Survey (Accra, 1972), 74–76Google Scholar; and Schildkrout, Enid, People of the Zongo: The Transformation of Ethnic Identities in Ghana (Cambridge, 1978), 149–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. See, for example, Howell, “Of Servanthood,” 390–96.

14. Bartle, “Inequality and Cyclical Migration,” 31–33; Van Hear, “Child Labor,” 504–6.

15. Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, 109–116.

16. Bartle, “Inequality and Cyclical Migration,” 32. See also Van Hear, “Child Labor,” 504–6.

17. Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast, 165.

18. Dzidzienyo, “A Case Study of Domestic Helpers,” 583.

19. The Independent (Accra), July 21, 1999.

20. Ibid.

21. “1.5 Million Children Engaged in Child Labor,” Ghana News Agency, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, General News of Tuesday, September 28, 2004.

22. This is forcefully articulated by Dumett and Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” 94–5 and 106. See also Grier, Beverly, “Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders: Women in the Transition to Cash Crop Agriculture in Colonial Ghana,” in Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective, ed. Falola, Toyin and Lovejoy, Paul E. (Boulder, CO, 1994), 178–82Google Scholar; and Austin, Gareth, “Human Pawning in Asante, 1800–1950: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa,” in Pawnship in Africa, ed. Falola, Toyin and Lovejoy, Paul E. (Boulder, CO, 1993), 119–59Google Scholar.

23. Forced Labor, NAGA, ADM 11/1/1058, Case No. 22/1930; Employment of Women in Compulsory Labor, National Archives of Ghana (hereafter NAGA), ADM 11/1/967, Case No. 11/[19]27; and League of Nations, Slavery: Report of the Advisory Committee of Experts, Slavery, 1935. VI. B. 1, 28.

24. Children of non-European Origin Questionnaire, Case No. 14/1930, NAGA, ADM 11/1052.

25. Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994. The interviews, originally conducted in Akuapem Twi are in the author's personal archival holdings.

26. Robertson, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra,” 220–45; Grier, “Pawns”; and Austin, “Human Pawning in Asante.”

27. See, for example, Grier, “Pawns” and Akurang-Parry, “‘What Is and What Is Not the Law.’”

28. Report of the Commission on the Marketing of West African Cocoa (London, 1938), 24.

29. Ibid.

30. Akurang-Parry, “‘With a Load on His Head and Nothing in His Hands’”; “‘The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual’”; and “Colonial Forced Labor Policies for Road-Building in Southern Ghana and International Anti-Forced Labor Pressures, 1900–1940,” African Economic History 28 (2000): 7–9.

31. See an insightful pamphlet by Professor M.A. Kwamena-Poh, entitled, “The Basel Mission Period 1828–1918: The Planting of the Presbyterian Church in Mamfe Akuapem, 1858–1993” in Presbyterian Church of Ghana: Dedication of the Emmanuel Presbyterian Chapel, Mamfe, On Sunday May 9, 1993, 11–22. This piece reveals several Akuapems who by the 1880s were working as teachers, pastors, catechists, traders, and farmers. Although this piece was written as a part of the dedication of the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church, the various names mentioned in the piece point to the rich possibilities of historical reconstruction of the intelligentsia in Akuapem. I thank my sister, Gladys Akurang-Parry of Adenta-Accra, Ghana, for drawing my attention to this pamphlet. See also Akurang-Parry, “A Smattering of Education,” 49–50. Historians of the Gold Coast have overemphasized the littoral African intelligentsia, the so-called Euro-African elite. This underlines the exclusivist, Eurocentric, and Euro-African genealogical emphasis that denies Africans without European or diasporic roots membership of that group. Indeed, the efflorescence of Christianity in interior states of Akuapem, Akyem, and Krobo from the mid-1850s had provided a formidable African intelligentsia. The interior intelligentsia formed a unique ethnocultural group that interacted with the littoral intelligentsia. Both groups, especially the interior intelligentsia, assiduously grafted their dominant Africanity on the ethos of Euro-Christian culture.

32. See, for example, Seth Amoako Owusu, “Political Institutions of the Coastal Areas of the Gold Coast as Influenced by the European Contact,” (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1954), 76–77; Kimble, David, A Political History of Ghana 1850–1928 (Oxford, 1963), 61–167Google Scholar; Foster, Philip, Education and Social Change in Ghana (Chicago, 1968), 86–116Google Scholar; Boahen, A. Adu, Ghana: Evolution and Change in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1975), 102–7Google Scholar; Mends, E.H., “Inequality as a Problem of Sociological Analysis in Contemporary Ghanaian Society,” Ghana Journal of Sociology 12:1 (1978/1979), 12–18Google Scholar; Graham, C.K., The History of Education in Ghana (London, 1971), 120–68Google Scholar; McPhee, Allan, The Economic Revolution in British West Africa (1926; London, 1971), 263–71Google Scholar; and Nukunya, G.K., Tradition and Change in Ghana (Accra, 1992) 188–89Google Scholar.

33. See, for example, Akurang-Parry, “Colonial Forced Labor Policies,” 1–25.

34. See, for example, Mcphee, Economic Revolution, 263–64.

35. See, for example, Kimble, A Political History, 78, 87, and 109–24; and Foster, Education and Social Change, 112–32, discusses roadblocks to educational expansion, including ethnicity; Graham, History of Education, 150–60; Kay, G.B., The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics (Cambridge, 1972), 281–83Google Scholar; and Ajayi, J.F. Ade et al., The African Experience in Higher Education (Accra, 1996), 30–31Google Scholar.

36. See, for example, Amoako, “Political Institutions,” 73–74; Smith, Noel, The Presbyterian Church of Ghana, 1835–1960 (Accra, 1966), 114–17Google Scholar; Affrifah, Kofi, “The Impact of Christianity on Akyem Society, 1852–1887,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 16 (1975): 70–3Google Scholar; Robert Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa 1874–1943: A Study of the Impact of Missionary Activities and Colonial Rule on Traditional State,” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Ghana, 1980), 233–6 and 260–3; and Akosua A. Perbi, “A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Centuries” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Ghana, 1997), 267–8. This view punctuates Jenkins, Peter, Abstracts of Basel Mission Gold Coast Correspondence (Legon, 1970)Google Scholar, hereafter Jenkins, BMC. See, for example, Jenkins, BMC, Asante's Report on the Boarding School in Kibi, dd. January 5, 1877, No. 227.

37. Kofi Affrifah, “The Impact of Christianity on Akyem Society,” 70; see also 73.

38. See, for example, Amoako, “Political Institutions,” 73–74; Smith, Presbyterian Church, 114–17; Affrifah, “The Impact of Christianity on Akyem Society,” 70–73; Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” 233–6 and 260–3; and Perbi, “Indigenous Slavery,” 267–68.

39. Interview with Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994; and interview with Nana Afua Oye, Suhum, June March 26, 1994. Official reports also delineate gender disparity in education. The Inspector of Education's Report of 1890 indicated that there were 4,039 boys enrolled with the average attendance at 2,929, while 1,037 girls were registered with the average attendance at 712. In 1906, the Accra Grammar School had 237 boys and 48 girls, and in 1928–1929, the Prince of Wales College, now Achimota College, enrolled 351 boys and fifty-five girls. In July 1927, the numbers of trained teachers stood at 972 men and thirty-seven women, while the numbers of uncertified teachers were 1,084 men and 104 women. See Hillard, F.H., A Short History of Education in British West Africa (London, 1957), 72 and 83Google Scholar; and Kimble, A Political History, 72, 85–86, and 117.

40. The barriers to female education in the colonial period have not been adequately discussed. Even the best account on female education, Graham, History of Education, 131–38, does not explore the subject. For a discussion of social mobility of males in Africa, see Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life (Cambridge, 1990), 163Google Scholar.

41. See, for example, Children of non-European Origin Questionnaire 9, Case No. 14/1930, NAGA, ADM 11/1052.

42. Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “I Often Shed My Tears About This: Freed Slave Children and Apprenticeship Policy in the Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana) ca. 1890–1930,” unpublished paper.

43. Griffith to Knutsford, January 26, 1890, No. 7 in Correspondence Respecting the Administration of the Laws Against Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Parliamentary Papers, 1891 (hereafter C. 6354).

44. See Correspondence Respecting the Slave Trade, Parliamentary Papers, 1889, C. 6010, (hereafter 6010); Correspondence Respecting the Slave Trade, Parliamentary Papers, 1890, C. 6053, (hereafter 6053); Correspondence Respecting the Slave Trade, Parliamentary Papers, 1890, C. 6199, (hereafter 6199); and C. 6354.

45. C. 6354, The APS to Colonial Office, March 20, 1891, No. 8.

46. See, for example, C. 6354, The APS to the Colonial Office, August 20, 1890, No. 1; C. 6354, Griffith to Knutsford, January 26, 1891, No. 7; and No. S.P.11/09, June 21, 1909, in Slave Children, National Archives of Ghana, Cape Coast (hereafter Slave Children NAGCC).

47. See, for example, Despatches from the Governor to the Secretary of State, 1879–80, February 7, 1880, No. 57, NAGA, ADM ½ 23; C. 6354, Griffith to Knutsfrod, January 26, 1890, No. 7; C. 6053, Holmes to Hughes, July 27, 1889, Encl. 26 in No. 59; C. 6053, Cole to Hughes, September 17, 1890, Encl. 8 in No. 59; and Case No. 104, November 3, 1875, NAGA, SCT 17/4/2.

48. See Slave Children, NAGCC.

49. See, for example, No. S.P.11/09, June 21, 1909, in Slave Children, NAGCC ADM 21/1/126.

50. Morice, Alain, “Underpaid Child Labor and Social Reproduction: Apprenticeship in Kaolack, Senegal,” Development and Change 13 (1982): 518CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This study was carried out among metal workers in Kaolack, a large town in Senegal in 1981–1982. Notwithstanding the date, its theoretical underpinnings are relevant to the study of abaawa.

51. Akurang-Parry, “‘I Often Shed My Tears About This.’”

52. See, for example, the emancipation ordinance in C. 1139, Encl. 3 in No. 21. December 9, 1874; and C. 6351, The APS to Colonial Office, March 20, 1891, No. 8.

53. For this argument, see Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, 113–16.

54. See, for example, Johnson, Marion, “The Slaves of Salaga,” Journal of African History 27 (1986): 349–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Akurang-Parry, “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga.’”

55. Akurang-Parry, “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga.’”

56. “Child Trafficking Booms in Kumasi,” Daily Graphic, July 16, 2002.

57. See, for example, “Afrikids Organize Workshop to Curb Streetism,” Ghana News Agency, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, Regional News of Monday, December 18, 2006; and “Don't Use Underage Househelps–Participants,” Ghana News Agency, posted on www.ghanaweb.com, Regional News of Thursday, December 14, 2006.

58. “Child Trafficking Booms in Kumasi,” Daily Graphic, July 16, 2002.

59. See, for example, Godfrey T.Z. Chada, “Labor Protest, Group Consciousness and Trade Unionism in West Africa: The Radical Railway Workers of Colonial Ghana” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1981), 39–77.

60. See, for example, Gold Coast Gazette, No. 15, March 1, 1924; Case No. 397/24, NAGCC, ADM 23/1/676; and No. 2/1/25, March 2, 1925, Case No. C.P. 397, NAGCC, ADM 23/1/676.

61. For other examples of ethnicization of labor in Africa, see Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, 113.

62. Chada, “Labor Protest,” 63–72.

63. Interview with Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994; and interview with Yao Vi, Dokorokyewa, March 16, 1994.

64. Grier, “Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders”; Akurang-Parry, “Colonial Forced Labor Policies”; and Akurang-Parry, “The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual.”

65. S.N.A. no. 325, dd. August 29, 1930, in Forced Labor, NAGA, ADM 11/1/1058, Case No. 22/1930. See also the Report of the Provincial Commissioner of the Central Province, filed as SNA No. 325, dd. August 29, 1930, in Forced Labor, Case No. 22/1930, NAGA, ADM 11/1/1058.

66. Grier, “Pawns”; and Akurang-Parry, “The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual.”

67. Interview with Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994; and interview with Yao Vi, Dokorokyewa, March 16, 1994.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. See, for example, Smith, Presbyterian Church, 114–17; Affrifah, “The Impact of Christianity on Akyem Society,” 70–73; Addo-Fening, “Akyem Abuakwa,” 233–36 and 260–63; and Perbi, “Indigenous Slavery,” 267–68.

71. Interview with Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994; and interview with Yao Vi, Dokorokyewa, March 16, 1994.

72. Interview with Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994. Additional research will have to be done to make this conclusion definitive.

73. Several reports in the Ghanaian newspapers confirm this. See, for example, “Child Trafficking Booms in Kumase,” Daily Graphic, July 16, 2002.

74. Dzidzienyo, “A Case Study of Domestic Helpers,” 587.

75. See Akurang-Parry, “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga.’”

76. Dzidzienyo, “A Case Study of Domestic Helpers,” 583.

77. The Independent, July 21, 1999.

78. Grier, “Pawns,” 174–75; and Akurang-Parry, “‘The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual.’”

79. Akurang-Parry, “‘The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual.’”

80. Kimble, A Political History.

81. Akurang-Parry, “‘The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual.’”

82. Interview with Nana Afua Oye, Suhum, March 26, 1994; interview with Akosua Anima, Koforidua, June 10, 1997; and interview with Nana Afua Oye, Suhum, June 17, 1997.

83. See, for example, The Independent, July 21, 1999.

84. See, for example, Peperah, Henry Owusu, “Child Labor, Trafficking Impediments to Poverty Alleviation,” The Ghanaian Chronicle, July 18, 2002Google Scholar; and “Child Trafficking Booms in Kumasi, Daily Graphic, July 16, 2002.

85. Acquah, Accra Survey, 75.

86. Interview with Oheneba Kwasi Akurang, Mamfe-Akuapem, March 13, 1994.

87. The Independent, July 21, 1999.

88. Van Hear, “Child Labor”, 504–6; and Reynolds, “Slave Trade,” 580.

89. Busia, Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi, 36–37.

90. The Independent, July 21, 1999.

91. Acquah, Accra Survey, 75; Busia, Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi, 37; and Van Hear, “Child Labor”, 505–6.

92. Interview with Nana Afua Oye, Suhum, March 26, 1994; and interview with Akosua Anima, Koforidua, June 10, 1997.

93. “LAWA–Ghana Builds Consensus on Draft Regulation for Domestic Workers,” Ghana News Agency, posted on Ghanaweb.com, General News of Thursday, September 29, 2005. LAWA constitutes the Ghanaian alumni of female lawyers, who took part in a Master's of Law (LL.M.) degree program at Georgetown University, sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) exchange program from 1992–1998.