In the opening years of the nineteenth century, a young woman named Adwoa Amissa committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest with a pistol. The precise year of her death is unknown, but the location is clear: Adwoa took her own life in her family house in Cape Coast, an Atlantic port town on the central reaches of the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. In contrast to the death of the overwhelming majority of Africans on the Gold Coast at the time – or, for that matter, anywhere else at any point in history – that of Adwoa has been recorded in some detail. For hers was not an ‘ordinary’ death, nor even an ordinary suicide: she killed herself in an ornate public ceremony, having already presided over the opening stages of her own funeral. These dramatic circumstances meant that the story of Adwoa Amissa (or, as contracted in typical Akan fashion, Adumissa) would pass into local legend, memorialized by subsequent generations in song and by a particular patterned cloth that bore her name. Within a few years of her demise, that story was written down by another young woman, an English visitor to Cape Coast named Sarah Bowdich. It is largely thanks to Bowdich's account that the event can be disentangled from legend and situated in a broader history of suicide in the Akan world.
The story of Adumissa provides a rare glimpse into intimate matters of life and death in early nineteenth-century Atlantic Africa.Footnote 1 In recent decades, death and dying in Africa have been subjected to considerable scholarly scrutiny. Mortuary rites and the veneration of ancestors were established concerns of colonial-era ethnography, but this new literature has begun to explore with increasing sophistication the continent's diverse funerary cultures, ‘necrogeographies’ and ‘deathways’, focusing on a range of themes from the prominence of the funeral as a site of sociability and of contest to the impact of biomedicine on registers of mortality and on to the meanings of dead bodies.Footnote 2 Recent research, however, is more anthropological than historical, with only a limited sense that contemporary transformations in cultures of death and ways of dying might be shaped by patterns stretching to the deeper past. In Ghana, for example, the ethnographic gaze is fixated on the increasing exuberance, cost and ubiquity of the funeral as a very public celebration of the dead.Footnote 3 Yet as we will see with the death of Adumissa two centuries ago, the performative entanglement of despairing grief and vibrant celebration has long been a feature of funerary culture on the Gold Coast and in its Akan forest hinterland (see also Parker Reference Parker2021).
Two themes emerge as salient aspects of this episode, both of which have been the subject of recent historiographical reflection in the African context and beyond. The first is the gravity of spoken language among the Akan peoples and their neighbours of what would become southern Ghana. Historically, orality in the Akan world was freighted with great power, but, as in many cultures, the spoken word was at its most potent when taking the form of a sacred oath.Footnote 4 The action that precipitated the chain of events leading to the suicide of Adumissa was the uttering of such an oath, in this case of a particular type: one sworn in extremis, at the moment of taking one's own life, declaring the killing to be ‘on the head of another’. By doing so, it transferred the responsibility for the death to that other person. The ritual swearing of oaths is ubiquitous in the documentary records and oral histories of the Akan and neighbouring peoples, and historians have noted its importance in the realm of high politics and in oiling the wheels of Atlantic commerce. The notion that the spoken word could itself cause death, however, has not fully been considered. Words could kill, and they could kill not just by triggering human action but by activating punitive intervention by mystical powers.
The second theme is that of suicide itself. In his recently translated general history of suicide, Farewell to the World, Marzio Barbagli argues persuasively for the importance of such distinctive cultural repertoires in an understanding of voluntary death. A wide-ranging critique of Emile Durkheim's foundational sociological typology of suicide, Barbagli's work seeks to demonstrate that ‘the factors that have most influenced the frequency of different types of suicide are cultural’: that is, ‘the wealth of cognitive schemas and classificatory systems, beliefs and norms, meanings and symbols available to men and women’ that ‘define and limit the range of possible choices for individuals in terms of suicide’ (Barbagli Reference Barbagli and Byatt2015: 7).Footnote 5 Although he mobilizes an impressive range of sources on European and Asian societies, however, evidence from Africa is noted only in passing. That very little is known about the history of voluntary death in Africa is clearly a constraint in bringing the continent into the comparative analytical frame. It also impacts upon efforts to understand from a psychological or mental health perspective the phenomenon of suicidal behaviour in the present day.Footnote 6 Indeed, Megan Vaughan has noted that it has long simply been assumed that African societies historically have had very low rates of suicide. While the almost complete absence of statistical evidence may prevent that assumption from ever being disproved, Vaughan uses a sequence of coroners’ inquests to sketch a tentative intellectual history of suicide in late colonial Malawi (Vaughan Reference Vaughan, Kalusa and Vaughan2013; also Vaughan Reference Vaughan2012). In contrast to Malawi, written accounts of suicides on the Gold Coast go back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While they are too episodic to use in any quantitative way, individual cases such as that of Adumissa are revealing not only of the underlying cultural repertoires identified by Barbagli and others as crucial to understanding the history of self-destruction, but of the emotions and conflicts that motivated such extreme behaviour. It is here that the episode also raises important questions about gendered historical agency and the emotional impulses which propelled individuals to voluntary death.Footnote 7 ‘Suicide, even publicly committed, remains the most private and impenetrable of human acts,’ Richard Cobb wrote in his ground-breaking Death in Paris (Reference Cobb1978: 101). As Rebecca F. McNamara and Juanita Feros Ruys argue in their analysis of suicidal emotions in medieval Europe, however, ‘close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts’ can ‘help unlock the silences of the self-murdered’ (McNamara and Ruys Reference McNamara and Ruys2014: 58). Let us turn first, therefore, to the interpretive complexities of our principal textual source.
T. Edward and Sarah Bowdich
Thomas Edward Bowdich is a key figure in the history of the nineteenth-century encounter between the British and the Akan forest kingdom of Asante. A member of the first British embassy to visit the Asante capital Kumasi in 1817, his record of that journey, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (Reference Bowdich1966 [1819]), is a landmark in European writing about Africa. Bowdich sailed to the Gold Coast to take up a writership with the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (or the African Company) in 1815, an appointment procured by his uncle John Hope Smith, an officer of long-standing service who in 1816 became Governor in Chief. He was followed to West Africa by his wife of two years, Sarah (née Wallis), and their infant daughter. Sarah Bowdich would reside at the company's headquarters at Cape Coast for two years, until she and her husband returned to England in 1818, having lost their daughter Florence, who died of fever. The couple then relocated to Paris, where they entered the orbit of the natural historian Georges Cuvier and made plans for further journeys of scientific exploration in West Africa. After three years in Paris they embarked on an expedition to the River Gambia, where, in 1824, Thomas too died of fever. Not only would Sarah play a leading role in securing his posthumous reputation, she would also carve out a multifaceted literary career for herself, publishing popular stories based on her experiences in Africa and scholarly works in the field of natural history (McCaskie Reference McCaskie, Peterson and Macola2009; Orr Reference Orr2015).
In 1825, the young widow was invited by Rudolph Ackermann, publisher of London's leading literary annual, Forget Me Not, to contribute a story about Africa.Footnote 8 At first she refused, in part because ‘I had all my life been occupied by facts, and felt, that anything I could produce would be sadly misplaced in a work of fiction’ (Lee Reference Lee1835: xi). Ackermann persisted, ‘requesting me merely to relate any one of the traditions I had happened to meet’, and she duly delivered an account titled ‘Adumissa’ (Bowdich Reference Bowdich1826). Other ‘traditions’ followed, all of which would reappear in Stories of Strange Lands (Reference Lee1835), under the name Mrs R. Lee – she had remarried – ‘formerly Mrs T. Edward Bowdich’.
In the corpus of nineteenth-century publications on West Africa, Stories of Strange Lands is little known. It has, however, recently been examined by Silke Strickrodt in a work that seeks to reinsert Sarah Bowdich's writings in the genre of European travel writing. This neglect may be due to its problematic nature as a historical source: as Strickrodt notes, ‘Some of the stories are founded on the experiences of real persons or on legends which Sarah had been told in West Africa. These were embroidered with a mixture of additional information and some fantasy’ (Strickrodt Reference Strickrodt1998: 47; see also Pratt Reference Pratt2008: 104). Indeed, the stories betray a distinctly Romantic sensibility, with occasional fantastical and Gothic elements. Given the allure of the exotic and the supernatural that Africa held for Sarah's intended readership, none of this is surprising. Yet for the republication of the stories in 1835, Sarah added detailed footnotes of an altogether different, scholarly, tone, which contain rich ethno-historical material of a value not dissimilar to that of her late husband's famous work. The story of Adumissa, for example, is accompanied, inter alia, by tangential expositions on the use of cloth, jewellery and cosmetics by Fante women, providing information on issues of physical comportment, sexuality and embodied identities. There can be no doubt that Sarah Bowdich, aged twenty-five in 1816, was an astute observer of local society – and especially of its gendered dimensions so often ignored by male writers.Footnote 9
Yet, a key question remains: is the account itself ‘true’? Can we be confident that Adumissa was a historical figure? Evidence suggests that we can, beyond Bowdich's own assurances that ‘every story is founded on truth; every description of scenery, manners, and customs, has been taken from life’ (Lee Reference Lee1835: xiv). She admits that she did not herself witness Adumissa's death, which occurred before her arrival at Cape Coast, but to have constructed her narrative from interviews with local informants – including John Hope Smith – who did so. This enables us broadly to date the episode, as Smith was first commissioned as an officer on the Gold Coast in 1800, with internal evidence pointing to a date around 1809–11.Footnote 10 The papers of the African Company have failed to yield eyewitness evidence from Smith or from other officers. However, two other written accounts of the death of Adumissa exist: that of T. E. Bowdich himself, in Mission from Cape Coast Castle (and therefore predating that of his wife), and of the knowledgeable Cape Coast-based merchant and official Brodie Cruickshank, in his Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa (Reference Cruickshank1966 [1853]).
T. E. Bowdich's account is of importance beyond providing verification of the historicity of the event. Shorn of the literary elaborations of Sarah's tale, it forms part of his survey of the ‘constitution and laws’ of Asante and the Akan kingdoms more broadly, which includes commentary on types of self-destruction involving the uttering of an oath. One variation was for the prospective suicide to force another to commit the act by swearing on the head of the king or omanhene:
If a man swears on the King's head, that another must kill him, which is understood to be invoking the King's death if he does not, the other man must do so, or forfeit the whole of his property and generally his life. This very frequently occurs, for the blacks in their ardour for revenge, do not regard sacrificing their own lives to bring a palaver on their murderer, which their families are sure to do. (Bowdich Reference Bowdich1966 [1819]: 256–7)
Such an oath was known in the Twi language euphemistically as ohyira ohene – literally ‘blessing the king’ but actually ‘cursing the king’ – and, given that it carried a mandatory death penalty, was a most effective method of indirect suicide (Rattray Reference Rattray1929: 311–12). Another was for the suicide to commit the act himself, Bowdich mobilizing information from Ahanta, a coastal region to the west of the Fante: ‘If a man kills himself on the head of another, the other must kill himself also, or pay 20 oz. [of gold] to the family: in Fantee the sum is indefinitely great: this is frequently resorted to, when there is no other prospect of revenge’ (Bowdich Reference Bowdich1966 [1819]: 259). It is to illustrate this variation that Bowdich cites the death of Adumissa, confirming the narrative core of Sarah's account and adding an additional detail that ‘the beautiful Adumissa is still eulogised, and her favourite patterned cloth bears her name amongst the natives’.Footnote 11
Writing some thirty years later, Cruickshank also considers the episode in a description which is informed by local memory rather than recycled from the Bowdiches’ written accounts. Cruickshank, who served as a magistrate in the British courts on the Gold Coast in the 1840s, was interested too in the indigenous legal context of Adumissa's suicide. For good reason: as British judicial officers sought from the mid-1840s to appropriate power over life and death from African rulers, killing ‘on the head’ was one of a range of homicides recast simply as murder.Footnote 12 Yet Cruickshank is also drawn, like Sarah Bowdich, to its emotional power and romantic drama, using it as evidence against the mistaken belief held by many Europeans that Africans ‘are insensible to tender passion’. ‘The fame of Adjuah Amissah,’ he writes, ‘is still kept fresh in the memory of the natives, by the songs which they sing in honour of her death. People are still alive, who remember the great beauty which hurried her to an early grave’ (Cruickshank Reference Cruickshank1966 [1853]: Vol. 2, 206, 212).Footnote 13
By that time, too, the death of Adumissa had entered debates in Europe about whether suicide might be seen as a manifestation of mental illness or a rational assertion of human liberty rather than simply a criminal perversion (see MacDonald and Murphy Reference MacDonald and Murphy1990: 2; Minois Reference Minois and Cochrane1999: 321). As early as 1824, Reverend Solomon Piggott (drawing on Mission from Cape Coast Castle) cited her fate in his widely read treatise Suicide and its Antidotes as evidence against the notion of suicide as a peculiarly ‘English malady’. ‘The causes of suicide seem so strange and various,’ Piggott reflected, ‘that we cannot rank them under any particular head except that of mystery or infidelity’ (Piggott Reference Piggott1824: 164–5). Thus, Sarah Bowdich's ‘Adumissa’ might be seen as a continuation of a sequence of European literary accounts of heroic and liberating self-destruction by Africans in the world of Atlantic slavery, from Aphra Benn's Oroonoko (1688) to The Dying Negro (1773) – which in turn fed into perceptions of suicide as a marker of racial difference and debates about the morality of voluntary death.Footnote 14 Disentangling the motives for and perceptions of suicide among the Akan from these mediated representations is therefore no easy task. That said, embedded within the narrative are crucial insights into the two contingent forms that animated the choices of Adumissa as a historical actor: the deadly, incantatory power of the spoken word and the institution of committing suicide ‘on another's head’ as a way of securing redress or revenge.
Invitation to a suicide
Bowdich's account opens with her perambulating the streets of ‘Igwa’ (i.e. Oguaa, the Fante name for the town of Cape Coast) and her servant pointing out the family house of the late Adumissa. ‘What, missy, you no hear of Adumissa, who pass all woman handsome that black man ever saw? White man think her handsome, men die for her – they like her too much’ (Lee Reference Lee1835: 1).Footnote 15 ‘My curiosity having been excited,’ she writes, ‘I made several inquiries, both of mulatto women and Europeans, and collected the following little history’ – which, she notes, was well known throughout Fante country and beyond.
Adumissa was the only child of a prosperous Cape Coast merchant and large slave-owner. ‘Red skinned’ (Twi: koko), strikingly beautiful and much loved by her devoted family slaves, she was given to parading about town in a palanquin bedecked in rich clothing and gorgeous jewellery. ‘I have been assured by Europeans, that they never saw a finer form, nor a sweeter countenance [but] … Her coldness to, and rejection of all her suitors, were proverbial’ (ibid.: 19). Adumissa's father, however, determined that she must marry and decided to favour the suit of one Amoisee, a nephew of a neighbouring Fante ‘king’ (i.e. omanhene). Not wishing her carefree existence to end, she consulted a well-known ‘fetish priest’ (okomfo) named Adoo, entreating him to make ‘her father believe that the fetish had commanded her not to marry, until she did so with her own consent and desire; and … that if he should persist in disobeying this mandate, sudden death would be the consequence to one or more members of the family’ (ibid.: 8). Emboldened by this ritual sanction, Adumissa disobeyed her father and rejected the advances of Amoisee, who declared: ‘I will have you for ever: but I will not die unavenged!’ True to his word, Amoisee took his own life, declaring on the point of shooting himself: ‘I die! I die! My blood be upon Adumissa's head! My family will revenge me!’ Here, we find one of Bowdich's explanatory endnotes, which accords with her husband's analysis:
This is the most solemn oath that can be taken; many suicides are committed on the head of an enemy when revenge is sought. The person thus addressed is then looked on as the murderer of the self-devoted criminal, and not only the law, but the relations, pursue the survivor, with the utmost severity and rancour. (Lee Reference Lee1835: 28)Footnote 16
Hoping to appease Amoisee's family, Adumissa's father made a large financial contribution to his funeral. This strategy appears to have paid dividends: the aggrieved family expressed a willingness to spare her life, on the condition – in accordance with well-attested Akan legal practice – that a member of her family die in her stead. In the words of the omanhene, as ventriloquized by Sarah: ‘You know that blood demands blood, even if a slave be killed; but Amoisee was a nephew to a king, and we must have gold also … We shall then see if my nephew's angry spirit, which now roams unavenged, will be appeased’ (ibid.: 13; cf. Cruickshank Reference Cruickshank1966 [1853]: Vol. 2, 211). Such a replacement was found: a young man named Arqua, ‘destitute of parents, and indebted for his life to his relative Adumissa, offered himself as a willing sacrifice, provided he was buried with extraordinary pomp, and plenty of gold was put into his grave’ (Lee Reference Lee1835: 13–14). Thus guaranteed a secure status in asamando, the afterworld, Arqua in turn took his own life.
Yet Arqua's self-sacrifice was not considered sufficient satisfaction to expiate the dispute, which Adumissa determined to end by committing suicide herself. Boldly announcing her intention in Cape Coast's marketplace, she proceeded to assemble friends and family to celebrate her imminent demise.
Immense quantities of provisions were collected to feed the expected multitude; bands of music were provided; dresses of various kinds were made; small huts of palm-leaves were erected for the nearest of kin to sleep under; muskets and powder were purchased to large amount; pieces of silk were fixed to palanquins and umbrellas were extended over them for those who were to be carried in the procession. (Lee Reference Lee1835: 16)
‘She employed the few days of respite,’ Cruickshank was told, ‘in singing with her young friends her farewell dirge’ (Reference Cruickshank1966 [1853]: Vol. 2, 211–12).Footnote 17
Bowdich strains to convey the macabre theatre of the fateful day. ‘Three hundred men, armed with muskets, were stationed without,’ she writes. ‘The slaves, all dressed in dark blue, formed the inner circle; the younger relatives were covered with white chalk’ (Twi: hyire). Assembled within the house were Adumissa's family and companions together with the late Amoisee's uncle and his councillors.
Adumissa advanced with a firm, dignified step to the table where the pistol lay, and taking it up called Amoisee's uncle to her and said, ‘You must load this’. He obeyed her. Then fixing her eyes on him, she resumed:- ‘You here behold me, a willing victim to the spirit of Amoisee. I caused his death, and it is fit that I should expiate my crime: but before I leave you, swear by the sacred fetish, and by the great Yancoompun, that you will never injure my father, my mother, their family, their slaves, or their property of any kind but that you will be satisfied with my death, and return to your former amity with them’. (Lee Reference Lee1835: 17)Footnote 18
The uncle swearing to this, she calmly opened her cloth and shot herself. ‘Adumissa's death was … announced by a discharge of musquetry. The slaves rushed out, screaming and tearing their hair and cloths.’ Her use of a golden bullet might seem fanciful – but this detail is repeated by T. E. Bowdich (Cruickshank has a musket loaded with a silver ball) and, given the symbolic importance of gold to the Akan, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. The veracity of this dénouement is supported by Sarah's endnote: ‘I have had the description of this scene from my uncle [i.e. Governor John Hope Smith], who had been admitted to the solemn ceremony’ (Lee Reference Lee1835: 17–18, 30).
The narrative concludes with the ongoing funeral rites of Adumissa, including the public display of her richly adorned body arranged upright in a chair for three days, her interment under the floor of the family house, the following six weeks of mourning, and subsequent anniversary celebrations. Like the pre-mortem celebrations, all of these are well-documented components of the highly elaborated funerals of wealthy and powerful individuals in the trading towns of the Gold Coast.Footnote 19 Although it is difficult to disentangle precisely what happened from customary procedure subsequently observed and woven into the narrative by Sarah, one thing seems clear: the tragic Adumissa dramatically stage-managed her own death and, in a striking example of what has been called ‘aware dying’, presided over the opening phase of her own funeral (Seale Reference Seale1998: 7). It seems hardly surprising that she entered local legend: not only did she bravely sacrifice herself, upholding local custom, and end her life with stirring last words, she died young and, by deliberately shooting herself in the chest rather than in the head, left a beautiful corpse.
The power of the word
‘Adumissa’ does not directly record verbatim speech. Bowdich's claim that ‘as much of the language of the actors has been preserved as is consistent with civilized ears’ refers to her effort to capture local idioms as translated from Fante Twi, as well as in the coastal English of her interlocutors. An exception may be Adumissa's last words as witnessed by John Hope Smith, whose comprehension of events would certainly have been assisted by his Fante wife, Fanny. Mrs Fanny Smith (aka Ama Akwa) was, in turn, likely to have been one of Sarah's ‘mulatto women’ informants: as a group, key cultural brokers between the European forts and the local communities of the coastal towns (see Smith Reference Smith, Sapong and Pohl2014; Reese Reference Reese, Catterall and Campbell2012). Yet the spoken word (kasa), especially in its ‘heavy’ form of public oratory (dwamu kasa) and in its most dangerous form of an oath (ntam), lies at the heart of the narrative. Amoisee's declaration that his suicide lay on the head of Adumissa unleashed destructive forces which were ultimately tamed only by the counter-oath uttered by the latter in the dramatically staged dwamu kasa of her own final moments. It is in the context of the elaborate conventions that governed the spoken word in the Akan world that the sequence of three suicides must first be understood.
Akan orality was profoundly shaped by the recognition of the ambivalent nature of the word. The word held power, but also, when used inappropriately, grave danger. Spoken language was hedged by a complex array of verbal taboos: the two principal categories were ammodin (unmentionable words) and ntam (oaths), but a range of other linguistic features such as kwatisem (avoidance terms), kasakoa (metaphor), akutia (innuendo) and ebe (proverb) all served to contain its potency. For the Fante, for example, ammodin – words that were never to be spoken aloud – included those for such everyday (but symbolically potent) objects as womma (pestle), waduro (mortar) and prae (broom). The enforcement of laws governing appropriate language is attested throughout the historical record, particularly with respect to one topic: owuo, or death. It was in the matter of mortality that lexical avoidance was at its most elaborated. This was especially so with respect to the mortality of the powerful and wealthy: no chief or royal, for example, was ever said to have ‘died’ (wawu); rather, their passing was reported metaphorically as odupon atutu, ‘a great tree has fallen’; nana ko akuraa, ‘nana has gone to the village’; or okyeame ho dodo no, ‘the okyeame [the chief's linguist] is indisposed’ (Yankah Reference Yankah1995: 49–51, 103–6; McCaskie Reference McCaskie1989).
It was the fearful spectre of death, moreover, that was evoked by the swearing of an oath. Ntam took a variety of forms. Perhaps the most common was the uttering of the name of a particular obosom (deity or ‘fetish’): Adumissa's ‘by the sacred fetish, and by the great Yancoompun’. Such an utterance, known as nsedie, served to bring the deadly wrath of the deity down on either the speaker or the person against whom the oath was spoken, if a stated covenant was broken or a declaration was untrue. As the verbal oath was often underpinned by the ingestion of some sanctified substance, this was known by Europeans in the era of the slave trade and beyond as ‘eating fetish’. Early sources point to the gravity with which eating fetish was regarded. As reported by Pieter de Marees in 1602, if a husband suspected a wife of being unfaithful:
he confronts her with it and makes her eat salt on it, with some other conjuration of her Idol or Fetissos. The woman will gladly take the oath if she knows she is not to blame …but if she knows that she is not innocent, she will not dare to take the oath, fearing that her Fetisso will kill her for taking a false oath. (De Marees Reference De Marees, van Dantzig and Jones1987: 20)
That same dread was observed in 1753 by the African Company governor Thomas Melvil, as he struggled to forge a treaty with Fante notables:
They are a faithless and rapacious people. A consciousness of this appeared when they drank the Fettish, no sooner did the Braffoe's Son and Curranteers see the Fettish water, than their countenances altered, a sudden tremor seized ’em, and such a languor that they had scarcely spirits to pronounce the words of the Oath, and put their hands to the paper.Footnote 20
That European slave traders readily conformed to the local culture of oathing underlines its importance; indeed, the oath can be seen as a central dynamic of the cross-cultural space of Atlantic Africa's coastal littoral in which, as William Pietz has argued, the hybrid notion of ‘the fetish’ itself emerged (Pietz Reference Pietz1985).
Ntam also took the form of oaths associated with corporate groups, whether a family, chiefly office (‘stool’) or an entire oman or kingdom. Rather than invoking a deity, such oaths evoked a remembered calamity of the past. At the level of the state, the ntam was invariably an allusion to a catastrophic military defeat, typically in the form of the location of that calamity coupled with the day of the week on which it occurred. The most famous was the ‘great oath’ or ntam kese of Asante, which alluded to the demise of the first Asantehene Osei Tutu in 1717. Such was its gravity that the actual formulation, Kormante ne Memeneda, ‘Kormante and Saturday’, was rarely if ever uttered – the euphemism having its own circumlocutions. Joseph Dupuis, the British envoy who in 1820 followed Bowdich to Kumasi, witnessed a pronouncement of the ntam kese, and his account remains unsurpassed in capturing the power of the word for the Akan:
The words, as recorded, are deemed too profane to utter, unless in a whisper between friends; and this redoubtable oath is most commonly taken by inference only, as, the dreadful day, the days of God's chastisement, etc. The effect of these expressions only, as I have witnessed at the court, clouds every brow with woe, from the king to the slave who stands behind his chair. Many fly from the presence, – such, for instance, who are not men of influence … Others cover their faces with both hands, uttering at the time a charm or invocation to the patron Gods to shield them from the ominous import of those words, and the effects of the king's wrath or sorrow. (Dupuis Reference Dupuis1966 [1824]: 232–3; see also Bowdich Reference Bowdich1966 [1819]: 297)
Dupuis points to a fundamental distinction between nsedie and ntam. With regards to the former, the agent of retribution was an obosom or deity, whereas with the latter, the utterance was deemed to be an offence against the ancestors. Thus, death occurred by human hand at the instigation of the king, charged with defending the good name of his forebears. Nsedie might well trigger a judicial procedure, but the swearing of ntam invariably would do so. In Asante at least, the result was often execution for one or other of the parties involved in the dispute. Death, however, was not inevitable. As a prerogative of the Asantehene, an individual destined for execution could, usually at great monetary cost, ‘buy his head’ (atitodie). Among the Fante and other coastal states, as T. E. Bowdich noted, the commuting of death sentences to fines in gold or in slaves appears even more common: by the early nineteenth century, seven slaves was a standard atitodie payment all along the Gold Coast.Footnote 21 The functioning of atitodie is apparent in the case of Adumissa, who, as a member of the local elite, was offered the chance to buy her head for a combination of gold and its replacement with that of a servile family member. Be that as it may, it is clear that the dominant emotional element underpinning the culture of the oath was fear (ehu): fear of retributive intervention by stern and vigilant deities, or by earthly rulers charged with mediating the ongoing power of the ancestral dead.Footnote 22
Awu ama no: death on the head of another
In his Twi dictionary of 1881, Reverend J. G. Christaller offers an extensive lexicon of awude, ‘things pertaining to death’, including wawu ama no or wawu ato no so: ‘he has killed himself upon another, i.e. so that the other must kill himself likewise’ (Reference Christaller1933 [1881]: 566). Appearances of such killings in the documentary record speak of homicide as well as suicide and invariably mention ‘the head’ as integral to the oath. The emphasis on the head (ti or tiri) in these verbal formulations is notable: far from being simply a synecdoche for the person, its recurring use points to a complex of understandings linking the capital of the human body with both ritual and political power (ibid.: 509–11; cf. Law Reference Law1989). In an early example from 1658, a dispute at the coastal town of Winneba descended into violence when an English trader Herrick struck one of the local king's followers. The latter ‘tooke his sable [i.e. sabre] and said hee would kill a white man upon Mr Herrick's head, which most Certainly hee [would have] Effected upon one of Mr Swifts men had hee not had a funnel in his hand to defend the Blowes’ (Makepeace Reference Makepeace1991: 21–2). A century later, the Cape Coast-based missionary Thomas Thompson railed against this ‘monstrous Practice’ following an incident in which a man ‘attempted to kill his [own] Child, upon some Person's Head with who he had a Quarrel’. ‘Killing upon another's Head, as they term it, is to serve a Revenge, when the malicious Purpose Cannot otherwise be obtained,’ Thompson explained. ‘The Sacrifice is made of any indifferent Party; and by this this Blood-shedder subjects his Adversary to a Prosecution, the same as if he had committed the Fact. I think I have heard of some who have, from the same Motive, destroyed themselves’ (Reference Thompson1937 [1758]: 53).
A further variation is apparent from the minutes of the council of the African Company under Melvil's governorship, which record another incident at Cape Coast:
Billy Contah complained that Old Dick upon a Quarrel with one of his own wives, had, in the heat of his passion thrown a Fetich [sic] upon him whereby he obliged him to kill that wife whenever Dick her husband died. That he Contah not liking the task imposed on him engaged Bogoe Assien, Dick's Heir, by Fetich, to execute the woman upon Dick's Death. That shortly after this Dick died, & Bogoe Assien had neither kill'd the Woman, nor freed Contah from the Obligation of the Fetich Old Dick threw upon him, & that consequently his life was in danger.Footnote 23
Whether the wife was supposed simply to be murdered or to be immolated as a sacrifice at Old Dick's funeral custom is unclear. What is clear is the fear on the part of Contah that the named obosom or ‘fetish’ would indeed take his life if the grisly task were not carried out – either by him or, as transferred by his counter-oath, by Bogoe Assien.
Fifty years later, H. C. Monrad left a more nuanced account based on his knowledge of the Ga peoples of the eastern Gold Coast. Monrad, who from 1805 to 1809 served as chaplain at the Danish headquarters of Christiansborg Castle, locates such suicidal behaviour in a broader understanding of local ideas about mortality. The starting point of these reflections is his observation that ‘the Negroes have no fear of death’. ‘They enjoy life happily as long as they can, but suicide, which is quite common among them, is not considered wrong at all. “Why,” they will ask, “should one not have the right to die when one has no desire to live?”’ Monrad believed that this attitude was notable in the Akan kingdom of Akuapem to the north of Accra, where, he writes, the bodies of suicides are buried with great reverence and where ‘some so-called holy women … when they are angry at someone, kill themselves on his account, or in his name, by severing a blood vessel in their thigh’. Such suicides were often occasioned by domestic tensions, Monrad recounting an episode from the Anlo region further to the east when a young man who lived in discord with his father killed himself on the head of the latter, who was in turn compelled to take his own life. The practice also extended to the more mundane world of work, taking the form of a sort of life insurance. When a man was asked by a superior to perform a hazardous job, Monrad writes, ‘[H]e will answer, “Yes. I can certainly do it, but on your cabes [from Portuguese cabeça: head], i.e., on your account.” If he should die in so doing, his family is paid the value of one slave – a considerable compensation for him’ (Monrad Reference Monrad and Winsnes2009 [1822]: 46–7).
A final example can be considered. In 1881, the Asante kingdom and the British colonial regime on the Gold Coast, having seven years earlier fought a costly war, were again on the verge of military confrontation. Following the defeat in the conflict of 1873–74, the government of Asantehene Mensa Bonsu was divided on whether to send an army south, a stalemate that was resolved by a dramatic intervention on the part of the Asantehemaa (or ‘queen mother’) – Mensa Bonsu's biological mother – Afua Kobi. An advocate of peaceful coexistence with the British, Afua Kobi reportedly caused ‘a great commotion’ in Kumasi when she threatened to hang herself if Asante went to war. ‘As this would have been a terrible fetish or misfortune,’ the British governor was informed, ‘the King had got alarmed and sent down a would-be-peaceful message.’Footnote 24 ‘The queen-mother, who possessed enormous influence,’ colonial officer A. B. Ellis subsequently elaborated, ‘threatened to commit suicide “on the heads” of the principal chiefs of the war party if they persevered in their intentions, and this threat sealed the fate of their party. Most of the bellicose chiefs returned to their towns to sulk in dignified silence, and Mensah had things entirely his own way’ (Ellis Reference Ellis1883: 242; see also Wilks Reference Wilks1975: 523–7). This was not the first time that Afua Kobi had issued such a threat: in 1874, she threatened to ‘destroy herself if war is persisted in’.Footnote 25 The mother of two sovereigns and perhaps the most politically astute and ruthless ohemaa in Asante history, she was not above at least threatening to take her own life in order to further her ambitions and those of her sons (McCaskie Reference McCaskie1995: 193–5). As a deadly weapon – if carried through, a weapon, quite literally, of last resort – the practice of awu ama no extended from the quotidian world of passion, thwarted ambition and generational tension to the very apogee of Akan political power.
Suicides in the Akan world
It is clear, then, that the suicides of Amoisee, Arqua and Adumissa proceeded according to the logic of a well-established form of voluntary death. Sarah Bowdich was only too aware of that logic, which happened to be in tune with her own Romantic literary sensibilities and which she used to fashion the narrative of her heroine's inexorable path to a tragic demise. But how did awu ama no fit into broader local interpretations and emotional registers of suicide? Was Monrad correct in his belief that self-destruction on the Gold Coast was common and ‘not considered wrong at all’? Here we come up against a recurring trope in European perceptions of African attitudes towards mortality, including among Gold Coast or so-called Coromantee slaves in the Americas: that the Akan were strikingly stoical about death. ‘This is what makes them, without caution but with steadfastness, rush into the most dangerous circumstances,’ the seventeenth-century slave trader Jean Barbot explained, describing a shipboard suicide attempt. ‘The women have the same spirit and the same resolution.’Footnote 26 It was such resolution, combined with the single-minded determination to secure revenge for the perceived loss of honour, that can be seen to underpin the recourse to aggressive self-destruction.
In fact, a spectrum of different types of voluntary death was recognized by the Akan and their neighbours. The key distinguishing factor was the perceived motivation on the part of the suicide, which would be established, if necessary, by judicial investigation. In certain circumstances, taking one's own life was not just ‘not considered wrong’, it was considered an act of nobility and self-sacrifice; in others, posthumous trial and punishment by profane burial and forfeiture was the outcome. The most prominent types of suicide in the historical record are those by disgraced male office-holders whose political fortunes had taken a downturn or by military commanders facing defeat on the battlefield. Indeed, a deposed office-holder in Asante, even if he escaped execution, was fully expected to take his own life. One example was the suicide of the Anantahene Apea Nyanyo, after being found guilty in 1817 of lèse-majesté and dereliction of military duties. T. E. Bowdich, who observed Apea Nyanyo's trial, recorded its aftermath:
He was deprived of his stool and the whole of his property, but permitted to retire with three wives and ten slaves; the King, hearing the next day that he still loitered in the capital, exclaimed, that no proper man would bear so much shame before all the people, rather than leave his home, and ordered only one wife to be left for him, whereupon Appia Nanu hung himself. The King considers, that none but the basest spirits can endure life after severe disgrace. (Bowdich Reference Bowdich1966 [1819]: 129; for context, see McCaskie Reference McCaskie1995: 63, 228–9)
Battlefield suicides were similarly driven by a fear of disgrace in defeat, in combination with an imperative to prevent one's decapitated head from being acquired as a trophy by the enemy. This was looked upon with profound dread and explains the propensity of the suicide to destroy his cranium in the process by gunshot or gunpowder explosion.
Based on his observations in Asante, Dupuis lists such actions ‘by men of rank’ as the first of three distinct classes of suicide, all of which were ‘materially different from the horrors so called in Europe’. The second was suicide on the head of another. The third he considered to be ‘totally different from either of the foregoing, from its connexion with the religious or superstitious belief of the people’: that is, ‘when the priests ordain that a sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary, is incumbent upon an individual, who may have incurred their displeasure, (the displeasure of the gods or fetische, as they term it) or whose wealth may have fired their avarice’. It is not entirely clear what Dupuis is getting at here, although the similarity of his description of such a suicide to that of Adumissa suggests that this category might include the response to a suicide on the head:
The victims of blind bigotry go singing and dancing into the grave, for when their doom is sealed, they habit themselves in their best attire, and adorn their persons with pieces of sacred gold, chaunting [sic] their own dirges, and dancing about for several days, previous to the appointed one of sacrifice; or, as it [is] usually called, making their own custom. (Dupuis Reference Dupuis1966 [1824]: 238)
The pioneering Gold Coast historian Carl Reindorf recounted a similar scene preceding the suicide in 1811 of the omanhene of Akyem Abuakwa, Asare Bediako, who after being defeated on the battlefield by the Asante ‘spent a week in drinking, dancing, and singing in anticipation of his own funeral’ (Reindorf Reference Reindorf1895: 165).
In other circumstances, however, taking one's own life was deemed, as in European societies to at least the eighteenth century, to be the quintessential bad death and a crime of the worst order: self-murder. Rattray, writing in the 1920s, was informed of a fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, a suicide to wipe out dishonour or ridicule and, on the other, ‘when it was carried out to avoid the consequences of some wrongful deed, or when, after investigation, it was not possible to ascribe any motive to the act’ (Rattray Reference Rattray1929: 299). The latter was regarded as self-murder and as such a capital offence, often leading to the posthumous trial and decapitation of the corpse of the offender and the confiscation of his or her property. This distinction was further underscored by the contrasting nature of the disposal of the corpse: whereas Adumissa's body was ceremoniously interred with full honours, the bodies of commonplace suicides were allowed neither funerals nor to be interred in clan burial grounds or, as was the custom in the coastal towns, beneath their own houses. Rather, they were hastily interred along the side of roadways or simply cast unburied into the bush along with the bodies of unloved slaves, women who died in childbirth or others deemed to have died bad deaths.Footnote 27 Here lay real terror: not of death, but of endless exclusion from the cosmic community of the living, the ancestors and the yet to be born.
It was such commonplace forms of suicide that trader John Adams described as being held ‘in such abhorrence that a family considers it one of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to it’. Adams wrote:
The eldest son of John Addo, a wealthy native of Annamaboe, hung himself; which caused the principal members of his family to shut themselves up in their houses for some time. When they appeared in public, shame and grief seemed to cover, and afflict them; and it was remarked that their townsmen were cautious never to mention the name of the deceased in their presence … When I inquired why he had hanged himself, they answered, abuddam, he was a madman. (Adams Reference Adams1966 [1823]: 36)
Interestingly, here is a hint that the mystery of suicide, as was increasingly the case in nineteenth-century Europe, was in some cases explained by the notion of mental instability.
Conclusion
‘The more individual suicides are treated with silence, the more talk there is about suicide in the abstract,’ Georges Minois writes in his fine overview of suicide in Western culture in the early modern period. ‘This is a sign that voluntary death continues to disturb us’ (Minois Reference Minois and Cochrane1999: 321). For Minois, despite the three centuries of slow progress in seeing suicide as a social phenomenon requiring compassion and understanding rather than as a criminal or moral aberration, voluntary death has continued to be seen by many as unnatural, a mental or social ill. Simon Critchley, writing from a philosophical perspective, concurs:
Even when society or the state has taken the place of God, even when suicide is decriminalized, as it has been in the West for the past half century, it is still regarded as a kind of failing that invites an embarrassed response. We think that suicide is sad or wrong, often without knowing why. (Critchley Reference Critchley2017: 12)
That is certainly the case in present-day Ghana, where attempted suicide remains a criminal offence and where suicidal behaviour is widely perceived to be the result of diabolical intervention. This article seeks to think more historically about suicide in Ghana and in Africa more widely. Its focus on one sequence of events in Cape Coast some two centuries ago is in part determined by the silences of the archive but is also a response to a scholarly shift away from quantitative treatments concerned largely with the issue of causation towards more nuanced interpretation of discrete historical episodes. The dramatic triple suicide of Adumissa, her thwarted suitor Amoisee and her household retainer Arqua was propelled by a specific cultural register turning on the potency of sacred oaths and on the blurred judicial boundary between homicide and suicide. Yet it also seems to have shared a number of key elements with voluntary death in other parts of the early modern world.
Perhaps the most notable of these is the wide variation in perceptions of suicide. Among the Akan, suicide was regarded neither with universal abhorrence nor with universal sympathy; as is now becoming apparent from recent studies of early modern Europe, one crucial factor was ‘a broadly defined, situational understanding of blame’ (Houston Reference Houston2010: 271; see also Minois Reference Minois and Cochrane1999: 12, 40–1, 326–7). Far from being shameful, certain forms of suicide tended to be applauded – and it is here that the entanglement of gender and agency seems to be of importance. By choosing to sacrifice herself in order to expiate a destructive blood feud, and by doing so in a distinctively masculine way, in public and by gunshot, Adumissa can be seen to have crossed a gender code in perceptions of suicide. She may well have been trapped by the implacable logic of the oath, yet her assertion of agency extended, to use Dupuis's phrase, to ‘making her own custom’. Meanwhile, common people brought intense shame upon their families by continuing furtively to take their own lives – most often by the dishonourable and more feminine means of hanging or drowning – for a variety of melancholy reasons related to poverty, sickness, physical hardship, humiliation, enslavement and fear of cruel punishment.Footnote 28
Let us conclude with a final thought on honour and revenge. We have seen that a number of surveys compiled during the era of European imperialism identified revenge suicide as a feature of voluntary death among those who used to be called ‘primitive peoples’ of the non-Western world. The death of Adumissa provides evidence for a highly elaborated mechanism of personalized vengeance through self-sacrifice, one underpinned by a perception that deities and ancestors exhibited the same propensity for retribution as that which characterized human society. Yet such mechanisms were not as aberrant or as exotic as the pioneering ethnographers of suicide considered them to be. Has not suicide across history and in all cultures often been a way of exacting revenge or dishing out punishment – often as a weapon of last resort used by the weak and disempowered in society? Is not self-hatred often hopelessly entangled with intense declarations of love and with a righteous and exhibitionist desire for public vindication? For Critchley, these ambivalent sentiments emerge most strikingly in the modern suicide note (Reference Critchley2017: 45–61). In an oral, intensely face-to-face culture like that of early nineteenth-century Cape Coast, one in which the upholding of honour and the avoidance of shame were of utmost importance, such feelings were manifested in the dramatic public pronouncements and macabre theatrical display of awu ama no.
The voluntary deaths examined here are historical examples of what Agamben refers to as performative ‘speech acts’, ‘which, in the thought of the twentieth century, represent a sort of enigma, as if philosophers and linguists were coming up against a magical stage of language’ (Reference Agamben and Kotsko2010: 54). ‘Suicide on the head’ in the Akan world can certainly be seen to have had an element of magical linguistic power, but I agree with Agamben that this need not be regarded as enigmatic or inexplicable. Recent research has indicated how speech acts involving the pronouncement of emotion words are constitutive of emotional registers themselves (Boddice Reference Boddice2018: 41–68). Why people kill themselves, as many historians have pointed out, often remains a perplexing mystery; for Minois, ‘the best the grand theories have done is to throw some light on the context of that decision’ (Reference Minois and Cochrane1999: 321–2). We will never know what Amoisee, Arqua and Adumissa ‘felt’ or exactly why they chose to take their own lives. Yet thanks to the observant Sarah Bowdich, we at least know something of the cultural context of those fatal decisions.
