Role Relationships Between Husband and Wife in Rural Ghana* SJAAK VAN DER GEEST** University ofA msterdam Traditionally marriage in Kwahu (Ghana) was characterized by segregation of con- jugal roles and deference behavior on the part of the wife. School pupils, however, are overwhelmingly in favor of morejointness and companionship among partners in marriage. Interviews with adult men and women in a rural town suggest that al- though at present role segregation has decreased, it still plays an important role. The expectation thatjointness will increase among the young and those who have been to school finds very little statistical support. Data were collected through tests involving uncompleted sentences among school pupils and interviews with adults. Recent studies have shown that the concepts of jointness and segregation of conjugal roles are useful both for classifying marital unions and serving as independent variables.1 The discussion on jointness and segregation has, however, mainly been carried on in the Western environment or in urban elite circles of non-Western societies. Marriages in rural Africa, for example, have been largely clas- sified as having segregated conjugal roles, and few attempts have been made to differentiate between more or less role segregation within these rural marriages. Quantitative indices about the degree to which conjugal roles within communities are segregated are few and far between, as most descriptions of mar- ried life in rural Africa consist of the usual anthropological material based on qualitative analysis. Moreover, anthropological descrip- tions sometimes do not clearly discern be- tween what ought to be and what is. This lack of quantitative information about both ideas and practices seriously inhibits the study of those aspects of human behavior which are linked with conjugal role relationships. In the present work we want to look at some aspects of conjugal role behavior in rural Ghana. The activities on which we focus our attention are derived from the domestic do- main. The attitudes of school pupils and the practices of adults will be analyzed. An attempt will be made to answerthe question as to whether present conjugal role behavior is different from that of the past and whether any changes are taking place at the moment. The Research The data presented in this paper are based mainly on two six-month periods of fieldwork in the Kwahu area of Ghana. Two samples of adults were interviewed: 100 men and 179 women. The women were interviewed by six young Ghanaian women. As for the men, about half of them were interviewed by the author and half by two male Ghanaian assis- tants. It was discovered that the men tended to react in a more Western-like way to our ques- tions than to those of the Ghanaian assistants. We shall return to this problem later on. All interviews were conducted in one single rural "town" of about 4,000 inhabitants. In addition, 432 pupils of "middle schools" and secondary schools in that particular town and in surrounding places were submitted to a test involving uncompleted sentences, using a procedure which has been utilized by Molnos *The research was carried out in 1971 and 1973. It was financed by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. The writing-up of data was made possible through a subsidy of the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO). **Universiteit van Amsterdam, Antropologisch- Sociologisch Centrum, Keizersgracht 397, Amsterdam C, Netherlands. 'Jointness or segregation proved to be particularly fruitful in predicting the type of wider social network to which the marriage partners belong (Bott, 1957; Oppong, 1974); marital adjustment and sexual gratifica- tion (Blood and Wolfe, 1960; Rainwater, 1965); attitude toward family size (Hill et al., 1959; Westhoff et al., 1961; Rainwater, 1965; Rosen and Simmons, 1971; Oppong, n. d.); and actual fertility (Rainwater, 1965; Dehoyos and Dehoyos, 1966; Stycos, 1968; Back and Hass, 1973; Fawcett and Bornstein, 1973). 572 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY August 1976 This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sat, 7 Feb 2015 18:40:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions