The most basic part of the social organization of labour in the nineteenth century was the respective roles of the free members of the same household: this was ‘basic’ in that it applied whether or not they had slaves or pawns in addition. Accordingly, Section A considers the consequences for investment and the accumulation of wealth of the particular division of labour between free spouses that characterized nineteenth-century Asante, and asks why the conjugal family was the basic unit of work in this otherwise predominantly matrilineal setting. Section B examines how slavery and pawning related to men's strategies within the family structures of nineteenth-century Asante society. It discusses the gender dimension of the Asante demand for slaves and pawns and explores the implications of this for the relative importance of the productive and, in a broad sense, the reproductive uses of slaves and pawns.

Gender and Kinship in the Allocation of Household Labour

The discussion here focuses on two key aspects of the ways in which productive resources were channelled by ‘household’ institutions: a characteristic division of labour between the sexes, and the paradox, pointed out by Arhin, that ‘in spite of their matrilineal inheritance system, the Ashanti basic unit of labour in mining, trading and farming has always been the conjugal family’.

We have seen that women were expected to give priority to the activities that enabled the household to survive and reproduce itself, physically and socially. Men, though making certain important contributions to food farming (especially clearing the land), were responsible for the bulk of the extra-subsistence economic activities.