Asante Traditions and Female Self-Assertion: Sister Abena’s Narrative

Exploring the relationship between narrative and conflict, this study takes as its subject the narrative of one individual woman in Kumasi, Ghana. In her account, she narrates the situation in which her former boyfriend places a curse on her, and the process she followed in order to revoke the curse. Utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of a dialogic process and recent work on the representation of conflict in narrative, the paper examines the significance of narrative in shaping social life. Specifically, it identifies the link between the performance of oral traditions, narrative in particular, and traditional institutions. It also reveals the process by which one genre links to another, moving the process forward, and it explores how experience is communicated and conflict interpreted and resolved through the performance of narrative.