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shelled pail by pail whenever it is time to send another quantity to the corn
miller. 14 The fine flour into which it is ground is never used for the purpose
of baking; it is either made into kenkey (which tomyknowledge no woman
would ever take the trouble to prepare only for her household) or into a
porridge by mixing it with water and, if possible, with tinned milk.
Sweetened with sugar this is known as kooko, a favourite breakfast dish for
many.
In the household cassava is commonly consumed as a boiled food,
the pieces being used to scoop up the vegetable stew with which it is eaten. IS
Many, however, will prefer to eat their stew with another type of ampesi (any
starchy food that is boiled in pieces), such as yam, coco-yam or plantain
(boiled in its green, unripe state). If the master of the household is
sufficiently assertive he may well order that the boiled cassava be mixed with
boiled plantain and pounded into fufuw. The pounding, heavy work which
some women have to perform twice a day, is done in alarge wooden mortar
(wodur) with a large wooden pestle (wombci) until the substance becomes
quite tough and doughy. It is then shaped into round lumps, the size of
which relates to the age and status of the eater, and consumed with a soup.
Most farm households keep some chickens, sheep or goats and
occasionally pigs. On the whole these animals are rather skinny as they are
neverreally 'reared' in the sense of being purposefully fed. Neither penned
nor herded, they are left to their own devices, feeding on left-overs and
waste, on corpses of dead animals and even on excrement. It is because these
animals run freely that one comes across fenced-in garden plots in the
immediate vicinity of settlements.
The slaughtering of an animal mostly has to await some special
occasion, and as catching an antelope which may get caught in the traps
with which farmers surround their maize fields, does not occur every day,
meat is not a regular part of meals. The supply of protein is ensured in the
form of smoked, dried or 'stinking' fish, 16 but this is not a subsistence food
and has to be bought in the market. The same holds almost invariably for
palm oil which is the indispensable basic component of every cooked dish.
But household consumption now contains many items which can only by
acquired through the market.
[In these pages we have examined the labour process in which peasants in
Southern Ghana are involved, including work done in the preparation of
food, something which is often ignored by outside observers. We must now
move to a wider sphere, that of the basic social relations within which the
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