Controlling deviant wives: Marriage and justice in the early Ghanaian novel Helen Yitah and Kari Dako* University of Ghana This article looks at two early Ghanaian novels, A. Native’ s Marita: or the Folly of Love (serialized in 1886–88) and R.E. Obeng’ s Eighteenpence (1943), which portray conjugal life in colonial Ghana during a time of legislative and judicial transition. They deal with ways in which both the colonial administration and traditional authori- ties attempted to regulate the contested arena of marriage. The novels create the impression that such external controls freed married women from traditional restraints and turned them into deviant wives who asserted their own interests, overturned gen- der norms and undermined their husbands’ authority in private and in public. We argue that far from liberating women, the external control of marital affairs left women bereft of traditional support systems and therefore dependent on, and submissive to, men. We conclude that an underlying male angst is responsible for the representation of wives in both novels, as well as for the texts’ silencing of resistant women. Keywords: Ghana; colonialism; judicial transition; marriage; gender; women’ s resis- tance R.E. Obeng’ s Eighteenpence (first published in 1943) and A. Native’ s Marita: or the Folly of Love (serialized in a newspaper from 1886 to 1888), are two early Ghanaian novels which portray conjugal life in colonial Ghana during a time of legislative and judicial transition, and represent attempts by both the colonial administration and tradi- tional authorities to regulate the contested arena of marriage. These novels create the impression that such external controls freed women from traditional restraints and turned them into deviant wives, but we will argue that an underlying male angst is responsible for this perception, as well as for the silencing of resistant women. Our gendered reading reveals that in both novels the real villain is not women but the colonial administration and its laws; therefore, the texts’ suppression of feminine subjectivity in the name of jus- tice to males denies females both poetic justice and legal justice. The two novels depict Akan societies in transition: Marita is set in colonial Cape Coast in the mid-1880s and Eighteenpence in Kwahu in 1913, after Kwahu had emerged from Asante overlordship and been incorporated into the Gold Coast Colony in 1901. Though the two novels were published more than fifty years apart, it is appropriate to refer to both as “early Ghanaian novels”. First, their settings are closer in time than their publication dates indicate, because Eighteenpence, though published in 1943, actually covers events that occurred in 1913, as the dates of Konaduwa’ s court cases indicate. *Corresponding author. Email: karidako@gmail.com Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 48, No. 4, September 2012, 359–370 ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.629126 http://www.tandfonline.com