"I Will Not Eat Stone"
A Women's History of Colonial Asante
Jean Allman, University of Minnesota, Victoria B. Tashjian, St. Norbert College
ISBN 978-0-325-07000-1 / 0-325-07000-8 / 2000 / 312pp / Paperback
Imprint: Heinemann
Availability: In Stock
Grade Level: College
*Price and availability subject to change without notice.
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This study of matrilineal Asante society provides a fascinating
counterpoint to the much more prevalent scholarship on African women in
patrilineal societies. Allman and Tashjian show how, as the colonial
economic and political systems increasingly favored male interests, Asante
women struggled to defend their economic rights (and) regain control over
the products of their labor and their personal lives.
This long awaited and definitive work on gender in Asante during the early
twentieth century provides a needed balance to emphasis on chiefship and external
relations evident thus far in the historical scholarship on colonial and pre-colonial
Asante. I am certainly looking forward to using this book in every possible
African studies course I teach.
—Elizabeth Schmidt, Department of History, Loyola College
—Gracia Clark, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University
By bringing women into the mainstream of Asante historiography, the authors
move us towards that singularly elusive goal: the realization of a comprehensive
Asante social history.
—Ivor Wilks Professor Emeritus, African History Northwestern
University
In an admirable collaborative effort, Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian focus on commodity production, family labor and reproduction in colonial Asante. The authors demonstrate how broader social and economic forces—cash cropping, trade, monetization of the economy, British rule, and Christian missions—recast the terms of domestic struggle in Asante and how ordinary men and women negotiated that ever shifting landscape. By centering their analysis on women, Allman and Tashjian recover the broader history of a society whose past has largely been understood in terms of the state, political evolution, trade, and the careers of political elites. Based on the recollections of Asante women and men born during the years 1900 to 1925 and on rich archival sources, I Will Not Eat Stone captures the resilience and tenacity of a generation of Asante women and their struggles in defense of social and economic autonomy.
Contents:
Glossary of Twi terms
By Way of Introduction
The World to Which They Were Born: Women's Life Stories and the Problem of Colonial Chronologies
"It's Mine" and "It's Ours" Are Not the Same Thing: Marrying and Marriage on a Shifting Colonial Terrain
Sika Ye Mogya/"Money is Blood"?: Transformations in the Domestic Economy of Childrearing
"Serving a Man Is Wasted Labor": Women's Conjugal Strategies in a Worold of Cash and Cocoa
Making Proper Mothers and Dutiful Wives: Chiefs, Missions, and Order out of Chaos
By Way of Concluding
Bibliography
Index
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This study of matrilineal Asante society provides a fascinating counterpoint to the much more prevalent scholarship on African women in patrilineal societies. Allman and Tashjian show how, as the colonial economic and political systems increasingly favored male...”
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