Transformations in the Feminization of Unfree Domestic Labor: A Study of Abaawa or Prepubescent Female Servitude in Modern Ghana

This article breaks new ground for the study of postslavery gender and social formations in modern Ghana and Africa as a whole: It examines the expansion of involuntary female domestic labor known as abaawa in what is today Ghana. The study traces the transformative institutional processes that shaped the exploitation of involuntary female labor in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. Based on a variety of primary sources, including colonial, indigenous African newspapers, Christian missionary accounts, and oral history, the article maps out the paradoxical expansion of involuntary female labor during the age of abolition in the colonial period and the postslavery phase of social and gender formations in the era of the postcolonial state. The pivotal argument is that social and gender formations that emerged as a result of abolition, social change, and economic transformation benefited more males than females. As a result, males used innovative, empowering avenues of social mobility in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. For their part, disempowered females, especially those in backwater enclaves, were consigned to abaawa labor, which has ostensibly been projected as a benign, kinship-based, and apprenticeship-bound institution. In reality, contemporary abaawa has all the exploitative vagaries of slavery and debt-bondage of the pre/colonial epoch.