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During the spring of 1927 a dialog was initiated through correspondence with the District Commissioner of Asante regarding the existence of a witch-finding shrine near the town of Mampong. As in most Asante communities, the people of Mampong had become both business patrons and seekers of the medicines offered through dozens of witch-finding movements that had proliferated throughout the Gold Coast Colony since at least late in the nineteenth century. Many in the British administration, and virtually all the Christian clergy, saw the practice of witch-finding and the presence of the shrines in towns and villages where the churches retained converts as icons of unenlightened behavior and contrary to Christian morals. Since some converts were also patrons of the witch-finding priests, the shrines were also seen as threats to the stability and retention of Christian folds. Europeans brought to Africa a multitude of social practices and ideologies of the person which they tried to impose through various forms of taboo, law, health administration, technology, and education. (Beidelman 1982: Comaroff/Comaroff 1997: Conklin 1997) Yet in the Gold Coast Colony after the annexation of Asante in 1896, no feature of the European colonial presence was more contested than the legal suppression of witch-finding shrines.The opposing sides to the debate had witnessed the same events in Mampong, but regarded the disciplinary measures taken by the colonial officials from extremely contrary points of view. Acting under the direction of the District Commissioner, local British officials were on the lookout for new witch-finding shrines, identified by the British in the archival literature with the European term of “fetish.”

This article focuses on the changing cultural values of the matrilineage as kinsmen are integrated within the emerging conditions of economic transition in the early decades of British colonial domination and capitalist expansion in the Asante zone of the Gold Coast. Conditions of the modernities of colonialism, especially the rise of capitalist enterprises with its cash economies and consumption of European goods, bring about increasing tensions within the lineage as the allotment of wealth became unevenly distributed among kinsmen. Money symbolized new kinds of power, a power which was both occult and materialist in nature and which was associated with the nefarious deeds of witches. Witches, in turn, were consistently destructive within the realms of kinship and within other social relations, and were capable of committing the worst atrocities within Asante cosmology. Witchcraft maintained a physical presence in its abilities to bring about sickness, a material capacity to generate sudden levels of income, and a social tendency to ruin relations among kin. The destructive powers of witchcraft were subject to domination by the medicinal remedies and ritual performances of witch-catching shrines and the healer priests who owned and operated them. The numbers of such shrines greatly proliferated within Asante between 1906 and 1940. The article is based on fieldwork undertaken in 1994, 1995, 1997 in Kumase and within the National Archvies of Ghana in Accra, Cape Coast and Kumase.