Gendered Encounters

Challenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa

Maria Grosz-Ngate, Omari Kokole, Maria Grosz-Ngate, Omari Kokole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415916424
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136670589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on "globalization," culture and gender. Focusing on intersections of the local and the global in Africa, contributors elucidate how translocal and transnational cultural currents are mediated by gender, how they reshape gender constructs and relations, and how they both manifest and impinge on relations of power.

CROSSING BOUNDARIES/CHANGING IDENTITIES:
FEMALE SLAVES, MALE STRANGERS, AND THEIR DESCENDANTS IN NINETEENTHAND TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANLO

SANDRA E. GREENE

In the last twenty years, scholars interested in the social history of precolonial Africa have generated an impressive body of studies on gender relations in various parts of the continent. These studies have emphasized that women assumed a number of roles in the religious, political, economic, and social institutions of the societies in which they lived, but that their roles and activities did not have the same prestige as those of men. Women had political authority, but their power was limited in comparison with their male counterparts. Women held important religious offices and could gain significant social and economic prestige within their communities, but the majority of women had fewer opportunities than men to obtain such positions because of their gender (Alpers 1984a; Guy 1990; Musisi 1991). Some of these same studies also emphasize the fact that women in precolonial Africa attempted to defy their marginalization. Some joined religious orders, in part, to gain greater control over their lives. Others formed gender-based organizations which they then used as a basis of support when they faced difficulties within their husbands’ households (Alpers 1984b; Eldredge 1991; Greene 1996).

More recently, scholars have also begun to extend the study of gender to social groups that have traditionally not been the subject of this kind of analysis. These groups include those who were socially marginalized because of their ethnicity or their slave status. In my own work on the Anlo-Ewe, for example, I document the fact that there existed in this society a number of ethnic outsider groups who were denied the opportunity to obtain prestigious positions within the Anlo political, religious, and social institutions of the society because of their foreign origins. Such groups worked hard to redefine themselves as ethnic insiders throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but they also frequently did so in ways that explicitly disadvantaged the young women rather than the young men in their families (Greene 1996). Robertson and Klein (1983) have described a similar pattern of disadvantage based on gender in their study of African slave systems. They note that the majority of individuals enslaved in Africa were women and that from this slave population, more was frequently demanded of women than of men. Both studies also document the fact that women from ethnic outsider families and enslaved women resisted the disadvantaged positions into which they were placed by their family elders and masters, respectively. All took advantage of whatever opportunities came their way to improve their situation.

Despite these findings, many questions remain. We know, for example, that when nineteenth-century ethnic outsider women in Anlo successfully challenged their marginalization, they altered not only their own social status, but also helped change the very character of gender and ethnic relations in that society (Greene 1996). Did enslaved women effect similar societal changes as they too challenged their status? Evidence from the history of the Anlo suggests that they did. We know, for example, that in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anlo, marriages between enslaved women and stranger men were common and that these unions became for both parties the means to improve their own social positions. Enslaved women used these marriages to acquire substantial wealth, and their stranger husbands used them to establish linkages with prominent Anlo families in the areas in which they lived. While the men and women involved in these unions were rarely able to use the benefits they derived from their marriages to redefine their own or their children’s social positions during the nineteenth century, I argue that the wealth and social connections they established did provide a foundation for their twentieth-century descendants to effect major changes not only in their own identities as outsiders and the descendants of enslaved women, but also in the very character of twentieth-century Anlo gender relations.

I begin by examining briefly the nature of slavery and stranger/host relations in Anlo in the period between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries. I then discuss the ways in which stranger men, slave masters, and enslaved women manipulated for their own advantage the prevailing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural practice of arranging and/or supporting marriages between stranger men and enslaved women by focusing on the history of a select number of individuals and their families. In discussing these histories and the impact of British colonial rule on the social boundaries that distinguished slaves and strangers from the rest of the Anlo population, I prove not only that the descendants of stranger men and enslaved women altered their own identities as well as gender relations in twentieth-century Anlo; I also illustrate the pivotal role that enslaved women (as intermediaries between insiders and outsiders within Anlo and between this polity and the larger world) have played in the changing character of Anlo gender and ethnic relations as the Anlo have adjusted to greater involvement in the colonial and post-colonial world.

SLAVERY IN PRECOLONIAL ANLO

According to a number of European travelers’ accounts, Anlo involvement in the sale of slaves for export began in the late 1680s or early 1690s when a number of European merchants, especially those of Portuguese origin, began to frequent the Anlo littoral in order to purchase the prisoners of war made available by the residents in the area because of their conflicts with the polity of Anexo (Bosman 1705: 330, 331; Law 1982: 158). European interests in the area and Anlo’s exports of slaves continued thereafter as the Anlo engaged in additional conflicts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as European merchants began to view the area as a potential source of large numbers of slaves, especially when the same were unavailable elsewhere¹ Not all whom the Anlo captured in war or purchased on the market were sold for export, however. Family genealogies, Anlo oral traditions, and European documentary accounts concur that many of the enslaved individuals were also retained and integrated into Anlo families.² These same sources indicate as well that the majority of those retained were women and female children. In his study of the Danish role in the Atlantic slave trade, Sv. Green-Pedersen noted that between July 1777 and October 1789, the Danes purchased at Keta roughly twice as many men and boys as women and girls (Green-Pederson 1971: 193). And according to Anlo oral traditions and documentary sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was not simply because there existed more male prisoners of war. Rather the Anlo opted to retain as slaves the females they had captured or purchased to serve as wives and workers (Schlegel 1858: 398).³

Incorporation into free Anlo families almost never removed from these enslaved women or their descendants the social stigma associated with such origins, however. In 1858, the German missionary Bernhard Schlegel reported that “a slave stands, I think, seven times lower in respect than a free man” (Schlegel 1858: 398). And in a diary written between 1879 and 1925 by a local Anlo man of slave descent, the author noted that he and his family—who were all fairly wealthy—were still referred to as “Da awa li f e mamayoviwo”: grandchildren of a war-captive, despite the fact that his grandmother, who had been captured as a young woman in 1811, was married to and had children by her master/husband and was then later redeemed by her family before her own death in the mid-1800s.

The source of the lowly social status of both slaves and their descendants had to do, in part, with the fact that they or their ancestors had been personally and forcibly removed from their own communities, a situation that left them without kin, either maternal or paternal, from whom they could derive protection. Among the Anlo, for example, we know that both first- or subsequent-generation slaves could be sold at any time, based on the immediate financial needs of their masters. This was the case whether an individual was captured or purchased, whether she was single or married to another slave or to her master. Evidence in support of this observation comes from a number of German missionary accounts, two of which are quoted below. The first, recorded by Bernhard Schlegel, describes the situation for such wives in 1858. The second was written by D. Westermann in the early twentieth century.

[Among the Anlo, the enslaved] wife is so loosely connected with him… . [This kind of wife] lives independently and provides for herself and her girls. She cooks for her husband and looks after the bare necessities of his household. The man buys her with money, and if she becomes unfaithful, he sells her … and he buys another one from the proceeds…. The children of slaves were called “the ones that are born in-between.” When you bought a slave and wife for him, their children would be “born in-between.” The “born inbetween” is like putting money into a business and it gets more. The master viewed him as a child, but he was more valuable to him than his own children, because when the master has large debts, which can happen occasionally, he can always pawn the “born-in-between” and that way get the money needed for the payment, or he can also sell him since he is the masters property. (Schlegel 1858: 399)

Slaves were reminded of their status as object in a number of ways. Slave owners who were also economically prominent within the community measured their wealth by the number of their slave dependents. The owner offered proof of this acquired wealth by stringing a cowry, representative of each slave (as opposed to each free dependent) in his or her possession, around the central pillar of a stool which was then carried by a member of the person’s household before the master during ceremonial occasions (Greene, Field Note 53). Family elders also kept written and/or oral records of the origins of every family member. This record was then consulted when family elders had to select one of their members for an important office within the lineage, clan, or community. No slave descendant would be assigned to such an important office. Information about the slave origins of specific family members would also be revealed to the free children in the family who could then use this information to keep slave descendants in their place.

Slaves were also reminded of their low social status by the way in which their masters managed their marital affairs. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, free women were rarely if ever betrothed to stranger men, even financially prosperous ones. Anlo elders reserved unions with such men for the enslaved women in their families. They did so because of the perceived risks involved. As Anlo elder L. A. Banini noted, “If you tried to send your own child [i.e., your offspring from a marriage to a free woman] to the Europeans, your wife wouldn’t like her [child] to go” since there existed a real possibility that a stranger about whom the family knew little would disappear with their daughter and never return. “So, the slave descendants were sent.”⁴ This same situation obtained with regard to those children chosen to be handed over to a lender as a pawn. As the German missionary D. Westermann noted of the system as it existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because a free child’s maternal relatives would object to the possible loss of their niece or nephew if the father did not pay the debt for which the child served as collateral, it was the children of slave descent, who had no maternal relatives or parents to protect them, who were placed in pawn (Westermann 1935: 126, 284—285).⁵

The social stigma associated with slave origins that existed so overtly in the terminology, religious life, public performances, and marriage patterns among the Anlo- Ewe throughout the nineteenth century did not necessarily prevent enslaved women or their descendants from obtaining prominent positions within the economic hierarchy of Anlo society. Their ability to achieve such statuses had to do with the ways in which slave masters used enslaved women, and the abilities of these women and their descendants to take advantage of the situations in which they found themselves. If, for example, an enslaved woman had been taken by her master as a wife, and the master was deeply involved in trade activities and/or held important political positions, it was not unusual for one or more of the female children of such enslaved women to be offered as concubines to strangers who were resident in Anlo in order to reinforce the economic ties that existed between their father and their father s business partner. In a number of instances, these young women used their connections to their owner/father, and to the strangers to whom they were given, to take advantage of both the bonds of kinship and concubinage to obtain substantial wealth.⁶ Before citing specific evidence to illustrate this phenomenon, however, it is necessary to review briefly the status of strangers in nineteenth-century Anlo in order to understand their own social position within this society.

RESIDENT STRANGERS IN PRECOLONIAL ANLO

Documentary sources and oral traditions indicate that the Anlo received throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, numerous groups of strangers who opted to remain as residents in the area. In 1679, for example, refugees from the Adangbe area west of Anlo crossed the Volta River and settled in a number of communities, including the town of Anloga. In 1702, when Akwamu conquered Anlo, they brought with them Ewe-speaking intermediaries to help them administer the area. Many of the latter remained in Anlo after the 1730 collapse of the Akwamu empire and formed a group known as the Agave. In 1742, when Anlo was again conquered, this time by the polity of Anexo to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Women Negotiating Boundaries
• Part Two Gender And The Mediation Of Modernity
• Part Three Engendering Cultural Flows
• Postlude
• Index