Early European travellers’ accounts mention prostitution on various parts of the West African coast, mostly with Europeans as the clients. However, a few also describe something different: an institution providing sexual services exclusively for African men, located on the coast of what is now south-western Ghana. In this chapter, using comparative material as well as source criticism, I examine what the evidence tells us about these women. Does it warrant using the term ‘prostitution’? Did the women exercise any agency in the services they offered? Or should we rather view their sexual exploitation as evidence of girls’ and women's extreme vulnerability, perhaps even justifying the term ‘rape’?

The region is inhabited by speakers of four dialects of western Akan: Esuma, Nzima, Evalue and Ahanta. Little is known about the history of this area before 1800, because in commercial terms it had less to offer outsiders than the central or eastern Gold Coast, even though it did play a role in the gold trade. It was forested, politically decentralised and, in relation to areas further east, sparsely inhabited.

The Sources

Two early Dutch sources describe the initiation of women referred to as ‘whores’. Using an unidentified source probably relating to the early 1660s, the geographer Olfert Dapper wrote in 1668: