Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders: Women in the Transition to Cash Crop Agriculture in Colonial Ghana

Abstract

-T HE EXPLOITATION OF WOMEN'S unpaid in agriculture has been central the process of capitalist accumulation in colonial and postcolonial Africa. In areas of southern and eastern Africa, where colonial penetration took the form of European capital in agriculture, mining, and rural women's subsistence production helped subsidize the low wages paid male migrant laborers. In western Africa, where colonial penetration took the form of peasant export crop production, women's continued production of subsistence crops and their contributions the export agricultural sector were crucial factors lowering the costs of production of coffee, cocoa, palm oil, and peanuts. Though colonial officials subsumed women's under the general category of family labor, they were keenly aware of the benefits capital derived from the preservation of certain exploitative aspects of precapitalist gender relations. Upon these relations depended capital's ability to obtain unskilled labour at a rate less than ordinarily paid in industry, implied a South African government report in 1944.1 With unpaid family labor and with access tribal land, the Gold Coast (Ghana) director of agriculture wrote in 1918, African farmers produced cocoa more cheaply than farmers in any other country with which he was acquainted.2 In those colonies where Africans retained control over the land, the