“De Enige 'Man' Onder Hen Was de Koningin”. Vrouwelijke Juridische Autoriteit en Kolonialisme in Asante, 1880 – 1940.

Scholarship has often overlooked how British colonial administrators dismantled gendered indigenous legal practices in West Africa by imposing interpretations of 'customary law' centered around men. In the Asante ethnic group, legal and political authority was not a male-dominated domain. Instead, both men and women governed through intricate networks of allegiance, kinship and personal interests. As the British extended their authority over Asante - initially as a protectorate and later as a formal colony - they introduced legal mechanisms, informed by Victorian ideals of domesticity and 'natural' separations of the sexes, that systematically excluded indigenous women from positions of authority. New male 'Native Authorities' and male 'Native Tribunals' were imagined, reshaping Asante structures into neo-traditional legal systems determined by a 'customary law' that reinforced male dominance. Scholarship further marginalized women's roles in Asante's lawmaking, politics and adjudication by largely omitting them from historical accounts. This doctoral project addresses these academic and colonial legacies by examining gendered colonial interventions and by exploring how Asante rulers navigated and negotiated transformed legal and political contexts. Moving beyond the constraints of the imperial archive through integrating oral histories, this dissertation aims to construct the first proper gendered history of Asante, shedding light on the roles of both male and female Asante authorities in their interactions with the British Empire.