Paper short abstract:

Privacy in sexual relations is problematic for family memory. Moral and health discourses are cultural strategies via which such actions are revealed. In this paper, Dagara notion of sexuality in marriage is confronted with the moral visions of colonial and missionary agents on African family.

Paper long abstract:

My grandparents were enjoying adolescent years when colonial rule began in northwest Ghana. The colonial officers held the view “that the present family system should break down as soon as possible for the sake of the future welfare and prosperity of the country.” To them Dagara “women did not make good wives; the unfaithfulness of wives had led to a considerable amount of armed conflict before colonial intervention; and the disputes over the custody of children were so common between rival males that, quoting a line from Homer’s Odyssey, ‘it is a wise child that knows his father’. (Hawkins, 2002:229). Shortly after, the missionary fathers came and launched their missionary campaign. My grandparents had just settled down as couple with two boys following their prescribed cross-cousin marriage. Soon after, my grandfather, took on the second wife when the missionaries and colonial government began to appropriate family farmlands for public buildings (parishes, schools, hospitals etc.). The missionaries also stipulated monogamy as requisite condition for Christian baptism which soon became the most significant symbol of social identity. Individual migration to southern Ghana for fortune (which my grandfather effected only to return a dying man); drafting of males into the army to fight in foreign lands (which happened to his junior brother with young wife and child); and the collective family migration within the region in search of farmland remain disruptive situations within family memory. In this paper I discuss the moral and medical languages developed to deal with private and painful memories.