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This montage gives hints of local stories, situations and symbolisms that I picked up during my time at a community radio station in a town called Ada, Ghana. The audio montage includes a range of voices, from University lecturer, midwife and the local leader of community radio, to old and young women from farming and fishing villages. The material was gathered in 2007, the year of Ghana’s 50th anniversary of independence.

 

 Ghanaian Women [3:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been using the experiences related by the women in the audio montage to illustrate the way they move between their symbolic identities or cultural meaning as women, and their ‘real’ lives. For example, one young girl uses ideas of freedom and equal rights to talk about her aspirations as a ‘modern’ woman, yet her practical reasoning behind this seems to be that young men “nowadays” like a woman who is independent and educated.

The montage features two young women in different villages who went out to sea with the fishermen – a very rare act within the community. One of the women was the boat-owner/fisherman’s wife. The other woman, a young unmarried woman who went out to sea in her uncle’s boat, had a different experience. The norm in her village, she says, is for women to have their first child at fifteen, and in this they become a “good girl or good woman”. When she started going out to sea with the fishermen, the men began to tease her. But their gossip and abuse didn’t centre on her actions or abilities at sea. Instead, they focused on her ideological role as a woman, firstly as wife - that she wouldn’t find a husband, and secondly as mother, her biological role - that she wouldn’t be able to have children if she continued to go to sea. By going against the established division of labour between the sexes, the young woman was labeled ‘unnatural’ in very concrete, biological and social terms – going out to sea harmed her social meaning as a fertile woman, and therefore reduced her value within the structure of local gender relations. Incidentally, she was pregnant at the time I interviewed her: her mother had told her, ‘have some children, and then maybe you can learn to drive’.