Fathering, mothering and making sense ofntamoba: reflections on the economy of child-rearing in colonial Asante

This article explores the changing dynamics of child-rearing in Asante (Ghana) through the problematic concept of ntamoba . In the historical record, and in popular memory, ntamoba has survived in a number of forms—as a marriage payment, as a rite connected with birthing and naming and as an indemnification paid to a father by a child's matrikin to signify the termination of a father's rights in that child. This article seeks to historicise and explain the multiplicity of meanings and the eventual disappearance of ntamoba by examining the ways in which a father's rights of use in his children were transformed into rights of ownership. It foregrounds time and social place/status as key variables in its investigation, demonstrating how the disappearance of ntamoba was connected with the conflation of subordinate social categories in twentieth-century Asante.