Women’s Gendered Roles in the Diamond Fields

When Mr. Kwofi penned his petition to Dr. Nkrumah in 1957, he was a reputed figure in Wassa’s diamond business circles—which, unlike the Akyem fields, was controlled by Africans. Since around 1933, when diamond mining started in the Wassa area, Mr. Kwofi partnered with other African diggers to prospect diamondiferous lands for local chiefs, signing contracts with expatriate businessmen for financial support to develop the industry and training several African apprentices as they prepared to join the industry as professional diggers.Footnote ⁸ Some Africans who became professional diggers in Wassa, especially ethnic-Nzema men, later migrated to the Akyem district, where Albert E. Kitson of the government Geological Survey Department had discovered diamonds in 1919. The Akyem area was the richest of the two major diamond fields in the colony (Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh1985, 37). The uneven distribution of diamonds on Akyem (or Birrim-Pra) and Wassa (or Bonsa, in the Tarkwa district) lands meant that the subsequent development of industries in each region was different. The rich Akyem diamondiferous lands attracted international firms, which considered the sporadic and scattered finds in Wassa difficult to profitably mine. Hence, the operations that emerged in the two areas differed in scale, in the stakeholders who developed the fields, and in the extent to which African industry grew parallel to European commercial operations.

The Akyem and Wassa fields contained small-sized industrial diamonds, or bort, excavated from shallow pits. A year after Mr. Kitson’s find, the Akim Diamond Fields Limited started mining on Akyem lands, followed by the African Selection Trust in 1922, WADS in 1923, Consolidated African Selection Trust (CAST) in 1924, and so forth (Sewordor Reference Sewordor2023, 96). While expatriate companies mined the diamond fields in Akyem alongside a handful of African diggers, an exclusively African-run industry grew in the Wassa area. In Akyem, the African chiefs, on whose land diamonds were mined, variously concluded written agreements with mining companies while their counterparts in Wassa contracted African diggers to prospect for them. Until recently, scholars held that before the 1950s, business transactions were negotiated orally in the Wassa area. For instance, historian Peter Greenhalgh has inaccurately claimed that “in the Bonsa Diamondfields there was no written agreement and a form of customary law governed [land] usage” (Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh1985, 164 and 169, endnote 2).Footnote ⁹ Fresh evidence shows that already in the 1930s, written agreements existed in Wassa but were limited to transactions between African chiefs, notable diggers like Fred Kwofi, and expatriate private businessmen. Decades later, when the industry expanded to include African migrant laborers from different parts of the colony and continent, the use of written agreements in Wassa consequently increased (Sewordor Reference Sewordor2023, 101–3; Sewordor Reference Sewordor2024).

In the first three decades after diamonds were discovered in Ghana, the colonial government did little to regulate the various enterprises that constituted the industry. In addition to adopting the existing Concessions Ordinance passed in 1900, colonial administrators enacted a law to tax diamond exports in 1919, and later the Diamond Mining Industry Protection Ordinance (DMIP) in 1926.Footnote ¹⁰ Until 1950, no legislation was passed. And those which existed had serious flaws that, coupled with their poor enforcement, made them inadequate legal provisions to regulate the industry.

From a modest amount of 102 carats exported from the colony in 1920 (Gold Coast Government 1931, 21), the combined output from African diggings and European companies reached 1,440,322 carats in 1938/9 (Gold Coast Government 1939, 48–49), making Ghana the third largest producer globally. About fourteen years later, in 1952, the colony moved to second place, exporting a little over two million carats (Daily Graphic 1953, 10). Behind these statistics are the unsung women (and men) whose toil in the fields unearthed diamonds. They used basic tools including pickaxes and shovels to dig concentrates, which were then processed with shakers or washed by panning method with large wooden cone-shaped bowls. The fine gravel was finally “treated in a hand jig which consists of a very fine meshed sieve which is jerked up and down in a pit of water by a long arm working on a fulcrum by hand.”Footnote ¹¹ By the 1940s, women and girls were hired as laborers (alongside men and boys) to work in small groups for licensed prospectors under different contractual arrangements. Laborers in Wassa earned about 4 shillings daily on a non-profit sharing basis, while their colleagues in the Akyem fields received 16 shillings and 4 dimes for each carat they recovered.

Until the 1950s, women originating from Ghana and West Africa more broadly rarely appear in the archives as licensed diamond prospectors or dealers. Yet, exceptional cases of documented women, albeit sporadic and faint, include Comfort Odugabe, Lydia Adeyemi, Rebecca Idowa, Mabel Amoah, Akwasua Obiaah, Affua Oye, Akosua Konadu, and Afua Birrim.Footnote ¹² On the one hand, these women slowly carved out spaces for themselves to participate in the industry without wholly depending on their male counterparts. On the other hand, they sometimes radically reconfigured previously established gendered norms of production by rising to positions where they employed male laborers to work on their concessions. Though there is much to be uncovered about the lived experiences of the above-mentioned prospectors and dealers to reconstruct a detailed gendered narrative about the diamond industry, we learn from recent scholarship that the enterprise’s post-1950s boom-and-burst episodes in the Akyem and Wassa areas restored men as the dominant actors in the industry, even if at different times aspects of the extraction process remained gendered (Oti-Akenteng Reference Oti-Akenteng2017; Adjoboah Reference Adjoboah2015).

Since men have historically dominated the diamond-mining business, it is unsurprising that the accounts of women’s enterprise remain patchy at best in the existing historiography on colonial Ghana (Sewordor Reference Sewordor2023; Oti-Akenteng Reference Oti-Akenteng2017; Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh1985), and other parts of Africa (Sewordor and Daudi Reference Sewordor and Daudi2024; Amupanda Reference Amupanda2022; Press Reference Press2021; Calvão Reference Calvão2017; Cleveland Reference Cleveland2014; Turrell Reference Turrell1987; King Reference King1979). This truth is, however, insufficient to excuse the current state of the literature, which has not systematically accounted for women’s participation in the formal or legal diamond industries during the colonial era. Unlike colonial Ghana, historical works that focus on southern Africa have given some attention to women’s roles—as mine laborers, as wives who accompanied their husbands to work in the mines, as members of diamond-thieving gangs, as caregivers who maintained the family at home while their kinfolk migrated to the mines to make ends meet, as sex workers in the vicinities of mines, or as mules who facilitated diamond smuggling (Press Reference Press2021; Cleveland Reference Cleveland2015; Kynoch Reference Kynoch2005; Thabane Reference Thabane2000). While this body of work offers useful insights, it has not thoroughly examined women’s gendered roles in the making of diamond industries in Africa. The simultaneous development of African-run and expat-owned diamond businesses in colonial West Africa (D’Angelo Reference D’Angelo2023), enables the telling of a richer story of women in the diamond fields as compared to Namibia or South Africa, where the industry was monopolized by foreign companies and rarely included women.Footnote ¹³

Gender scholars of colonial African contexts have rightly critiqued contemporaneous archives for their disproportionate coverage of women, compared to men (Musisi Reference Musisi, Sooryamoorthy and Khalema2022; Burton Reference Burton2003; Geiger Reference Geiger1986). The literature has long established that the patriarchal structure of colonial society enabled men to occupy and maintain positions through which they authored much of the written sources produced in/about that era (Allman, Geiger, and Musisi Reference Allman, Geiger, Musisi, Allman, Geiger and Musisi2002). This imbalanced representation of voices offered in the colonial archives defined the narratives historians of colonialism crafted. Yet, it also challenged historians in the postcolony to critically read between the lines of colonial written sources and look beyond them—to nondocumentary alternatives including oral testimonies. The innovative use of inclusive sources, however, coexists with the colonial archives that independent African states inherited, which at best marginally recorded women. Therefore, in using the “essentially neocolonial archives,” as historian Jean Allman has put it, “we are grappling with documentary sources no longer penned, categorized, or deposited by a colonial officer or his missionary counterpart” (Reference Allman2013, 107). With this in mind, sociologist Aboabea Akuffo (Reference Akuffo2023) has examined postcolonial commemoratory dates, the iconography of currency, and names of monuments in the context of Ghana to strongly argue that a state-sanctioned “erasure of women” occurred via “de-historizing,” which resulted in national collective memory and history that is not only problematic but also male hegemonic. An unnerving variation of “erasure” is given in Joel Cabrita’s Written Out (Reference Cabrita2023)—a damning account of how different powerful forces altogether marginalized women’s voices by critically examining the silenced life of Regina Gelana Twala, a Black southern African woman political and intellectual activist. Though Gelana Twala’s case is an exceptional feat of erasure from the written archives, it invites us to think carefully about the nature of the (post)colonial archives and the implications for reconstructing gendered and women’s histories.

Women’s voices are sparse in the colonial archives and sometimes actively erased (Allman Reference Allman2009). To mend this gap, African historians partly resorted to oral sources to find women’s voices that were missing in colonial records. While using oral sources to foreground a critical reading of the colonial written archives, gender scholars of Africa have long demonstrated how different types of sources co-condition each other through feedback loops, as public constructs of historical “facts” take shape (Arnfred Reference Arnfred2004). What we know about how oral sources cement into official accounts largely follows what David Henige (Reference Henige and Philips2005), Terence Ranger (Reference Ranger, Hobsbawm and Ranger2012), and others have theorized as the “invention of tradition.” Building on these works, this article pushes beyond the fact that women’s presence in the colonial archives is marginal and often mediated by men. It highlights moments when oral narratives centered on women seep into the colonial written archives, and later vice versa. Particularly, it reassesses how the making of what may initially seem like distinct sources in the written colonial archives (e.g., Fred Kwofi’s petition) overlap and document women’s voices through male mediation.Footnote ¹⁴ By combing through colonial archives, collecting and analyzing oral traditions, historical photos, and newspaper accounts, the rest of this article examines three key moments between 1949 and 1957. These moments, shaped by male-centered narratives about the diamond industry, offer new readings that recover the transformations in the gendered roles African women performed.

Unsettling Formalized Male-Centered Narratives

When I found Mr. Kwofi’s petition during an archival search at the PRAAD office in Sekonde, little did I imagine what came next. The petition breathed unexpected life into my research when I decided to follow its trail back to the Tarkwa district, from where it had been written. At this point, my focus was to visit Tarkwa town, the district capital, and I thus paid little attention to a place called “Ahwetieso,” indicated as Mr. Kwofi’s residential address on the top right corner of his petition. When I arrived in Tarkwa, I printed a copy of the petition and went about enquiring for stories about diamonds in the town. Repeatedly, the people I spoke to told me that the town was popular for gold mining, not diamonds.Footnote ¹⁵ To make any inroads, I needed to change strategy. I decided to visit Ahwetieso, and there I struck luck. At the taxi station, I met Jerry Arkah, a driver who lived in Ahwetieso before relocating to Tarkwa. We quickly started a conversation as he drove to Ahwetieso and informed me that the settlement was historically, and still is, known for diamonds. Jerry kindly offered to introduce me to his uncle whom he said was knowledgeable about diamonds. Unfortunately, his uncle was not home when we arrived at Ahwetieso. But Jerry found another acquaintance at Ahwetieso to ask for a possible informant. Following a recommendation, we arrived at the homestead of one Elizabeth Essien. Meeting her was an immense stroke of luck because she was Mr. Kwofi’s granddaughter. She granted me the first interview in the series I conducted in a week, which I will discuss below.

Three elements underpin the narrative Mr. Kwofi presented in his petition about the discovery of diamonds in Wassa and the subsequent development of an industry. First, Abina Nokuba’s incidental find in 1930. Second, the start of an industry in about 1933. Third, how Abina Nokuba fades from the narrative after she discovered diamonds. These narrative elements have survived to date, differently conveyed in the testimonies of several informants I interviewed at Ahwetieso, Dompim, and Tarkwa. I argue that Mr. Kwofi was central to the construction of this composite narrative. Leading up to his 1957 petition, Mr. Kwofi was present at crucial turning points in formalizing the storyline that begins with Abina Nokuba but forgets her after. Today, just as in the episodes of 1949, 1953, and 1957, Fred Kwofi looms large over his contemporaries, including Abina Nokuba, who helped build a diamond-mining industry in Wassa. For instance, when I showed Figure 1 to members of the Kwofie family during my fieldwork in 2021, they quickly identified Mr. Kwofi, who was central to their oral testimonies about the diamond industry. Rarely did anyone talk about Abina Nokuba without me asking.Footnote ¹⁶ When they did, it was increasingly clear that they were not deliberately erasing Abina Nokuba from the history of diamond mining in Wassa. However, their failure to mention her unless specifically probed had a similar effect to that of decades of excluding women from the history of diamond mining, reinforcing gendered representation in the narrative.

Figure 1.

“Group with (in extreme right foreground) Madam Abina Nokuba who claims to have first discovered diamonds in the [Kyirifan] Stream on Dompim Stool land in April 1930 whilst washing for gold. The Ohene of Dompim [Pepisa] Nana Nyonwa Penyin stands behind her.” Source: PRAAD, Kumase, 1949.

We may begin in 1949 when the colonial government asked A.G. Loveridge, G.W. Stacpoole, and W.S. Bond to form a committee to investigate African enterprise in the colony’s diamond-mining industry and recommend ways to improve it.Footnote ¹⁷ After concluding their work, the members of the committee compiled an eighteen-page report alongside an appendix of maps and photographs.Footnote ¹⁸ Mr. Kwofi appears in two photographs in the Loveridge committee’s report. In Figure 1, Mr. Kwofi is seen squatting in the foreground, holding an unclear object with a hat placed before him on the ground. Figure 2 shows Mr. Kwofi standing under an umbrella with a large group and directly behind a woman bending between two others, all of whom were demonstrating how diamonds were panned and picked from a dug-out pit containing water and concentrate. The committee’s documentation about Wassa’s diamond industry was a crucial moment when stories of the discovery locally circulating in the area passed into the official colonial record. The caption accompanying Figure 1 aptly records this feedback loop but curiously minimizes the public knowledge that Abina Nokuba first found diamonds as “claims.” Consequently, what we know about women in the diamond industry is limited, for individual cases and more so collectively. The resulting methodological challenges, as variously articulated by Cabrita (Reference Cabrita2023), Allman, Geiger, and Musisi (Reference Allman, Geiger, Musisi, Allman, Geiger and Musisi2002), and Achebe and Robertson (Reference Achebe, Robertson, Achebe and Robertson2019) in African contexts, reiterate the question of why and/or how we know so little about women women, underscoring the importance of amplifying the voices of women in understanding how oral traditions about the industry have been passed down from one generation to another.

Figure 2.

“Panning and picking out diamonds.” Source: PRAAD, Kumase, 1949.

During their investigations, Loveridge, Stackpole, and Bond traveled through the Wassa and Akyem diamond fields, met and photographed leading stakeholders of the African enterprise, and conducted interviews. As Figures 1, 2, and 4 demonstrate, most of the key actors in the African enterprise were men, of whom Fred Kwofi and Ben Kwofi together with Abina Nokuba later earned the accolade “the historic three” for spearheading the establishment of the diamond industry in the Tarkwa district (Daily Graphic 1953, 10). The dominance of men over women in controlling the African diamond industry in Wassa did not mean that they always agreed on how to conduct the enterprise, or that the women were entirely sidelined. For example, the business interests of Fred Kwofi and his cousin, Ben Kwofi, sometimes conflicted. In 1940, as Greenhalgh notes, Ben Kwofi wrote to the district commissioner of Tarkwa encouraging him to refuse Fred Kwofi’s application for permission to use a machine to prospect for diamonds. Ben Kwofi’s action was prompted by the “grave financial difficulties” Fred Kwofi had allegedly caused the Dompim stool in a previous diamond business deal (Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh1985, 160, endnote 10).Footnote ¹⁹ Though little is known about the work of African women diggers or prospectors in Wassa at this time, the unnamed women who appear in Figures 1, 2, and 3 are preliminary visual testaments of the efforts women and girls put into developing the diamond industry.

Figure 3.

“Carrying gravel to the washing plant.” Source: PRAAD, Kumase, 1949.

In my interviews with some descendants of Abina Nokuba at Ahwetieso, they confirmed that their great-grandmother taught them how to pan for diamonds. Vida Agyakum, the queen-mother of Ahwetieso, remembers not only that she learned to pan for diamonds from her great-grandmother, but she also demonstrated in my presence the specialized technique of washing and picking diamonds. The agile performative swoop with her right hand of imagined concentrate from a conical wooden bowl she held with her left hand mimicked what the women in Figure 2 also exhibited to the Loveridge committee in 1949.

When the Loveridge committee simply reported that the “final washing is performed by women” it minimized the important work women did in the Wassa and Akyem diamond fields and gave a partial view of the gendered relation of production. As Figure 3 shows, and the committee members knew, the “employment of women and girls in the industry occurs” for duties beyond washing. The report added that “In the Bonsa fields it is large domestic employments of the women of a village whose menfolk are engaged in the diggings although there is a proportion of employed female labour. Throughout the industry we estimate that 10 percent of the labour is female.” The report characterized this female labor base as neither “undesirable” nor giving “rise to any scandalous conditions.”Footnote ²⁰ Though fragmentary available sources show that women and girls dug diamonds alongside their male counterparts in colonial Ghana, existing histories of the industry remain heavily focused on men. This narrative lens ignores the unfulfilled potential to write colonial Ghana’s diamond history while accounting for the fact that the industry was built on a gendered division of labor.

From a combination of photographic and written materials, we only learn that in 1949 African women in the Wassa diamondiferous fields did the “panning and picking” of diamonds (Figure 2). Yet, they did more. For instance, in the Akyem area, young girls were employed by African prospectors to transport headloads of concentrates from dugout pits to designated washing plants, as seen in Figure 3. Nonetheless, rarely do colonial archives capture the names of these women or girls whose labor was integral to the development of the diamond-mining industry in Ghana. This truth warrants my call to read the history of the diamond-mining industry as built on gendered labor roles to shed fresh light on women’s involvement in the enterprise not only as final washers, but also up to the 1950s as independent discoverers, prospectors, and licensed diggers in the African-run part of the industry, or diamond sorters employed in state-owned companies since about the 1960s. Altogether, what we know about these women expands our understanding of how the different positions women increasingly occupied reconfigure scholarly assessments of the diamond enterprise beyond the restrictions of a male-centered lens. Contrary to what male-authored colonial written records like the Loveridge committee’s report would have us believe, women’s productive labor exceeded washing concentrates to finally reveal diamonds.

In April 1953, the next major episode that manwashed Abina Nokuba’s biography in the history of diamond mining unfolded. Twenty-three years after Abina Nokuba chanced upon diamonds in the Kyirifan Stream, Moses Danquah visited Ahwetieso and wrote a story about the local diamond industry for the state-owned newspaper, the Daily Graphic. “Much attention was given to the diamond industry during the recent Budget Session of the Legislative Assembly” the author stated to open his article. He continued:

The key role Tarkwa’s diamond industry played in the colonial economy bolstered the constituency’s political position in Ghana, and in turn the colony’s place in the global trade of industrial diamonds. The second part of the newspaper article chronicled the historical evolution of Ghana’s diamond-mining industry and placed a spotlight on African output. The reporter said that Abina Nokuba told him in an interview that “she did not know it was diamond” she had picked up when she went panning for gold in the Kyirifan Stream decades ago.Footnote ²¹ Probably for the first time, if not a rare instance, Abina Nokuba found a voice in a contemporaneous source to speak for herself. Yet, like previous and future iterations of the story of diamond discovery in Wassa, the shine Moses Danquah put on Abina Nokuba was brief and punctuated with skepticism.

Two photos were printed alongside Moses Danquah’s article for the Daily Graphic. One is reproduced here as Figure 4. The second shows a seventy-eight-year-old Abina Nokuba holding a walking stick, like her pose in Figure 4. “Though Madam Abena Nokubaa had made the historic ‘discovery’,” the writer said,

… it was entirely due to her nephew, Nana Ben Kwofi, Chief of Simpa, 18 miles south-west of Tarkwa, and her son Fred Kwofi of Dompim and Ahwetieso that the identity of those … scintillating stones which had attracted the attention of the old woman as she was picking gold from the concentrate she had brought home from the Kyirifan river was established. It was also to them, especially Fred Kwofi, that negotiations were completed with the Government to enable Africans to participate in the industry and with, first, the West African Diamond Syndicate … and, later, with the British Bank of West Africa at Tarkwa to market the diamonds. (Daily Graphic 1953, 10)

Figure 4.

“The historic three who laid the foundation of the African diamonds industry….” Left to right: Fred Kwofi, Abina Nokuba, Ben Kwofi, and an unidentified man. Source: Daily Graphic, 1953.

Moses Danquah’s framing of the diamond discovery story and evolution of an enterprise in Wassa teased his readers into expecting more about Abina Nokuba’s role, only to divert attention to Fred Kwofi and Ben Kwofi. Indeed, Mr. Danquah’s half-hearted acknowledgment of Abina Nokuba as the woman whose diamond finds birthed an industry in the Tarkwa district is evident in his constant use of parentheses to describe her discovery. Moses Danquah knew that A.E. Kitson found diamonds in 1919. So, we must consider the possibility that his tone may have signaled his attempt to qualify Abina Nokuba’s discovery as, strictly speaking, not the first in the colony. Yet, the Daily Graphic article was another moment that reinforced a male-dominated narration of diamond history in colonial Ghana—strongly influenced by Mr. Kwofi’s (or a masculine) voice while exalting him and lowering Abina Nokuba (or women) to footnotes in the larger story. Abina Nokuba died a few years after the Daily Graphic article was published, making it her last and potentially only chance to have directly shaped the story of diamond discovery in Wassa as a gendered narrative. As we have seen, Abina Nokuba’s agency, captured in surviving records, remained ephemeral during her lifetime.

If Moses Danquah’s article about Wassa’s diamond industry, like other renditions, conceals more than it reveals about Abina Nokuba’s role, interrogating Figure 4 opens further lines of inquiry. What does Abina Nokuba’s clothing reveal about her socio-economic standing considering her historic role as the woman who first discovered diamonds in the Tarkwa district? What does her outfit say about her son’s claim that she did not receive the money Wassa chiefs promised to pay her from diamond proceeds? How can Fred Kwofi’s claim be read alongside oral testimonies from surviving members of the Kwofie family suggesting that Abina Nokuba received some payments? What contemporary politics of historical claim-making are engendered in the murky facts about Abina Nokuba? These questions return us further critically speculate on the petition introduced at the beginning of this article. Abina Nokuba’s clothing in Figure 4 is not affluent. It is modest, compared to the neat buttoned-up shirt and trousers of Fred Kwofi or the elegant cloth of Ben Kwofi. Perhaps Abina Nokuba’s outfit was a telltale sign of her economic situation, deprived for twenty years of the money Wassa chiefs promised her for discovery of diamonds. If so, she stood in contrast to the financial benefit that the colonial state and male members of her extended family were reaping from her find. While all three men captured in the photo frame smiled as they looked into the camera, Abina Nokuba maintained a somber posture, as though waiting for her story to be told. Alone, Fred Kwofi’s claim in his petition—that Wassa chiefs gave his mother a cash reward for finding diamonds in the district for only three years, 1930–33, despite a lifelong promise—is hard to prove. Yet, when I showed up in Ahewtieso with a copy of Fred Kwofi’s petition and delivered it to members of his family, some young kinsmen fixated on this claim and asked me about the validity of the archival document as a basis to recoup the said cash. This intent to retrieve money supposedly owed to their progenitor mirrors Fred Kwofi’s attempt in 1957 to get financial support based on Abina’s labor. Furthermore, Fred Kwofi’s claim contradicted the testimonies of other relatives, who said that their great-grandmother told them she received the said money—though for an unspecified duration.Footnote ²² Despite Abina Nokuba’s role as the woman who discovered diamonds in Wassa, my attempt to reconstruct her life in connection to the industry attracted some male kin who sought to reap the fruits of her labor, while doing little to retain her memory.

The potential for writing historical narratives that take gendered roles in the diamond industry seriously in colonial Ghana remains unrealized in the research literature because scholars have yet to systematically compile the irregular traces of women in the industry in the archives. If the colonial archives present unenticing invitations to thoroughly read the history of diamonds through a gendered lens, oral traditions add to it. To flesh out this point, I draw on the interviews I conducted at Ahwetieso, Dompim, and Tarkwa. During several interviews, I experienced the “invention of tradition,” manifesting as the oral recounting of versions of the diamond discovery story that center on Fred Kwofi, even if they mention Abina Nokuba.Footnote ²³ When I interviewed Francis Kweku Bukru—a nonagenarian, ex-diamond digger, and Fred Kwofi’s contemporary—his recollection of diamond discovery in Wassa was strikingly similar to the narrative Mr. Kwofi presented in his petition to Dr. Nkrumah.Footnote ²⁴ The marginal place Abina Nokuba occupies in popular memory about diamonds in Wassa begs the question of what foundation men like Fred Kwofi and Ben Kwofi would have built on without her find. This critique highlights the need to render Ghana’s diamond history, particularly in the Tarkwa district, with sensitivity to its gendered dimension. Following David Henige (Reference Henige and Philips2005), I argue that oral tradition about diamonds in Wassa contributed to fixing formalized narratives, in written and photographic forms, on three occasions—firstly, in 1949 via the Loveridge committee’s report; secondly, in 1953 through a Daily Graphic publication; and thirdly, in 1957 through Fred Kwofi’s petition.

Ongoing transgenerational transfers of oral tradition about the diamond story in Ahwetieso, Dompim, and Tarkwa involve multiple translations (i.e., straddling oral tradition and written text) that relive the historical trend of diminishing gendered work relations that were central to the creation of the industry. For instance, on the day I first interviewed Elizabeth Essien, one of Mr. Kwofi’s granddaughters, she retrieved a piece of paper containing a short history of Ahwetieso that partly mentions diamonds (Figure 5). The “old history” was written by Elizabeth Essien’s uncle, whose name she did not disclose. Whether this telling of the family’s history by a man was a coincidence is hard to say, but it is still telling. Stories about diamonds remain in the contemporary historical imagination of the local inhabitants of Ahwetieso, some circulating at the risk of neutralizing a gendered past—what Cabrita (Reference Cabrita2023) and Akuffo (Reference Akuffo2023) respectively call “erasure” and “de-historizing” of African women.

Figure 5.

“Old History” of Ahwetieso. Source: Author’s photo, courtesy Elizabeth Essien, 2021.