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Reinventing African Chieftaincy in the Age of AIDS, Gender, Governance, and Development University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2011 Reinventing African Chieftaincy in the Age of AIDS, Gender, Governance, and Development University of Calgary Press Reinventing African chieftaincy in the age of AIDS, gender, governance, and development [electronic resource] / edited by Donald I. Ray, Tim Quinlan, Keshav Sharma, Tacita Clarke. Series: Africa, missing voices series 8, University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/48426 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com REINVENTING AFRICAN CHIEFTAINCY IN THE AGE OF AIDS, GENDER, GOVERNANCE, AND DEVELOPMENT Edited by Donald I. Ray, Tim Quinlan, Keshav Sharma, and Tacita A.O. Clarke ISBN 978-1-55238-537-1 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing Reinventing African Chieftaincy a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at in the Age of AIDS, Gender, [email protected] Governance, and Development Edited by Donald I. Ray, Tim Quinlan, Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open Keshav Sharma, and Tacita A.O. Clarke access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: MAY NOT: • read and store this document • gain financially from the work in any way; free of charge; • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution • distribute it for personal use of the work; free of charge; • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; • print sections of the work for • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception • read or perform parts of the of academic usage within educational institutions such as work in a context where no schools and universities); financial transactions take • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its place. function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ 8 The Predicament of the Akan “Queenmother” (Ohemmaa) Christiane Owusu-Sarpong I. INTRODUCTION A word is not a thing.… A word is alive, it moves from mouth to mouth, from one context to another, from one generation to another. – Tzvetan Todorov (1981, 236)1 A word’s history reflects the changes a society has undergone. In the Akan2 world, the word ohemmaa most certainly took roots at the begin- ning of chieftaincy amongst the Akan people. Many centuries have gone by since, and the institution of traditional leadership in what is Ghana today has suffered tremendous changes. In order to track down the origin of the predicament of the Akan ohemmaa or “queenmother,” and in an at- tempt to prove that her predicament has been caused by a constant denial or misrepresentation of the power and authority that may well have been originally invested in her, I will first turn my attention to “texts of olden days” – namely to two Akan queenmother tales – before taking a closer look at colonial archives referring to “chiefs and queenmothers.” This glimpse into the past will hopefully shed a new light on the contemporary state of affairs: while chiefs have managed to secure a place for themselves in the Ghanaian society of today, queenmothers are sometimes still strug- gling to regain their lost strength. The fieldwork I conducted in conjunction with successive groups of students in Asante and Brong-Ahafo (Ghana) between 1992 and 20003 harvested a considerable number of Akan texts. Two of these archived stories will be reproduced in their English translation and then analyzed; they both have, as the central figure of their plot a female character, an Akan ohemmaa.4 While editing the texts of the collections, I was involved in two in- ternational research projects, namely WWA (an inquest into the secular voicelessness of African women) and TAARN (a comparative study of tra- ditional rule in contemporary African states)5; these seemingly different academic pursuits soon started to crystallize in my mind and one topic in particular appeared to be central to the multidisciplinary work I was involved in – that of “the Predicament of the Akan Queenmother.” Once again, Robert S. Rattray’s6 writings proved to be a major source of inspiration. In the Preface to his bilingual collection of Akan-Ashanti Folk-tales ([1930] 1959), Rattray quotes an Asante informant who offers the view that, during the oral performance of a folktale, … subjects ordinarily regarded as sacred, e.g. the Sky God, the lesser gods, fetishes, spirit ancestors, the rich, chiefs, sex- ual matters, appear to be treated as profane, and sometimes even tend to become the subject of ridicule ([1930]1959, x). The view expressed is that the public performance of an Akan folktale often became an exceptionally dramatic event, during which controversial matters of religious, social, or political import were raised; during those very special moments, when some amount of verbal licentiousness was permitted, normally “untouchable” people such as the political leaders were proverbially criticized and elements of social tension were purged (Rattray [1930] 1959, xii). 202 CHRISTIANE OWUSU-SARPONG Interestingly, Rattray had devoted some earlier pages, in his Ashanti ([1923] 1969), to those he then referred to as the “old Ashanti mothers,”7 or, more precisely, to the “position of the senior female in the ruling clan, i.e. the Ohema or so-called Queen Mother, and the part she took … in local government and in the selection and enstoolment of a chief” ([1923] 1969, 81). To date, this passage remains the earliest locus classicus on the subject.8 In those pages, which even today remain popular in Ghana and else- where, Rattray insisted on the importance of the institution of female leadership in pre-colonial Asante as well as on the fundamental need for its survival; yet, at the time of his writings, and probably partly because of the complete “gender chaos” that had by then started setting in, in Asante (Allman 1996, 49), this once strong Akan socio-political system of “Dual Leadership with Gender Parallelism” (Stoeltje 1997) was to be more and more denied, suppressed, and endangered by the Asante male rulers themselves, with the active support of the British policy of Indirect Rule. And, amidst the contemporary turmoil of a post-colonial African state, within which traditional leaders and central government are constitution- ally working out various forms of “divided sovereignty and legitimacy” (Ray 1998), the nhemmaa managed miraculously to survive, to increas- ingly regain and to continuously struggle for a proper recognition by their male “counterparts.” When I started editing Akan folktales with queenmothers as their central heroines, it dawned on me that the storytellers of today are still pursuing the poetic task of subversion, described by Rattray’s informant a century ago; each such story is, at the time and in the place of its per- formance, making a point that could probably help us grasp the puzzling historical “predicament of the Akan Queenmother” as the embodiment of the eternally suppressed voices of women in power in Africa and in the world at large. In order to develop this argument, which, basically, will be a develop- ment on a persistently negative “social discourse”9 on the Akan ohemmaa, first I shall give the English translation of the two selected tales, then conduct a semiotic textual study of those two texts, and follow this by an analysis of the complexity of female power in the Akan state and the con- stant academic and political verbal denial of female power in the colonial and post-colonial contexts. 8: The Predicament of the Akan “Queenmother” (Ohemmaa) 203 II. TWO QUEENMOTHER TALES In Akan culture, Ananse Kokroko (the Great Spider) first served as a meta- phor of the Supreme Being (Rattray [1916] 1952, 52) and later became “a symbol of tales, that is, of linguistic art and skill and intellectual play, which are the sign of the divine spirit in man” (Kropp-Dakubu 1990, 49).
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