Akwamu and Otublohum: An Eighteenth-Century Akan Marriage Arrangement

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Abstract
This paper may be taken as an essay in the application of anthropological theory to other fields, in this case history. In it I am concerned to give a detailed account of a marriage arrangement that bound together the royal family of Akwamu and the ruling house of the Otublohum quarter of Accra. Akwamu, now a small state locked in the wooded hills of the Volta Gorge in south-east Ghana, was, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the strongest of all the Akan powers and centre of an empire that extended for about 250 miles along the Gold and Slave Coasts of Guinea. Accra, now the capital of Ghana, was incorporated within that empire by conquest in 1681, but recovered its independence half a century later. Unquestionably a whole series of historical events involving Akwamu and Accra would be quite incomprehensible without reference to the structural implications of the marriage arrangement linking the two. The arrangement persisted through four generations, spanning the greater part of the eighteenth century. Fortunately the period is a well-documented one. The archives of the Dutch West Indies Company are especially useful. In particular, sufficient genealogical detail is recorded in the various sources for the marriage arrangement to be recognized as involving successive patrilateral cross-cousin unions.

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