'I Will Not Eat Stone': A Women's History of Colonial Asante (Social History of Africa)

Focusing on conjugal production and reproduction in colonial Asante, this text seeks to understand how broader social and economic factors - cash cropping, trade, monetization of the economy, British rule and Christian missions - recast the terms of domestic struggle and how ordinary men and women negotiated an ever-shifting landscape. By centring their analysis on Asante women, the authors provide building blocks for constructing a broader social 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 primarily upon the recollections of Asante men and women born during the years 1900 to 1925, the volume reconstructs and preserves for future generations the resiliency and tenacity of a generation of Asante women and their struggles to assert and defend economic autonomy.