“Children For Death”

This article focuses on the changing cultural values of the matrilineage as kinsmen are integrated within the emerging conditions of economic transition in the early decades of British colonial domination and capitalist expansion in the Asante zone of the Gold Coast. Conditions of the modernities of colonialism, especially the rise of capitalist enterprises with its cash economies and consumption of European goods, bring about increasing tensions within the lineage as the allotment of wealth became unevenly distributed among kinsmen. Money symbolized new kinds of power, a power which was both occult and materialist in nature and which was associated with the nefarious deeds of witches. Witches, in turn, were consistently destructive within the realms of kinship and within other social relations, and were capable of committing the worst atrocities within Asante cosmology. Witchcraft maintained a physical presence in its abilities to bring about sickness, a material capacity to generate sudden levels of income, and a social tendency to ruin relations among kin. The destructive powers of witchcraft were subject to domination by the medicinal remedies and ritual performances of witch-catching shrines and the healer priests who owned and operated them. The numbers of such shrines greatly proliferated within Asante between 1906 and 1940. The article is based on fieldwork undertaken in 1994, 1995, 1997 in Kumase and within the National Archvies of Ghana in Accra, Cape Coast and Kumase.