Undesirable Practices: Women, Children, and the Politics of the Body in Northern Ghana, 1930–1972

Abstract

Undesirable Practices makes a historical intervention on aspects that have come to define contemporary social, human-rights and policy-oriented studies on Africa. Organised into six distinct chapters, it weaves a narrative that explores colonial and post-colonial constructs of nudity, circumcision, prostitution, slavery and trafficking in Northern Ghana from 1930 to 1972. These social processes were categorised as “undesirable” in the colonial lexicon and permeated the colonial social fabric and influenced policy.