This article examines the history of voluntary death on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. Its focus is the suicide of a young woman named Adwoa Amissa (or Adumissa), who took her own life in dramatic fashion in the town of Cape Coast in the early nineteenth century. Adumissa killed herself in response to the earlier suicide of a thwarted suitor, who declared his own self-destruction to be ‘on her head’, thereby transferring the responsibility to her. These events, which were recorded by Sarah Bowdich, an English resident of Cape Coast in 1816–18, made Adumissa a legendary figure in the Fante region of the Gold Coast and beyond. Despite the interpretive complexities of Bowdich's text, two aspects of the episode reveal themselves as central to an understanding of its cultural context: the impact of the spoken word and the practice of aggressive ‘revenge suicide’ among the Akan and their neighbours. It is within this culturally meaningful and contingent framework that questions about Adumissa's emotional impulses, motivations and agency must be situated.

本文研究了当今加纳黄金海岸自愿死亡的历史。它的重点是自杀的一名年轻女子，名叫Adwoa Amissa（或Adumissa）的自杀，她在19世纪初期以戏剧性的方式自杀了。Adumissa自杀身亡是因为较早前一位受挫的求婚者自杀，他宣称自己的自我毁灭是“在她的头上”，从而将责任转移给了她。这些事件由1816–18年开普敦的英国居民莎拉·鲍迪奇（Sarah Bowdich）记录，使阿杜米萨（Adumissa）成为了黄金海岸范特及以后地区的传奇人物。尽管鲍迪奇文本的解释复杂，但这一集的两个方面显示出自己对于理解其文化背景至关重要：口语的影响以及阿寒及其邻国之间积极的“复仇自杀”行为。在这个具有文化意义和偶然性的框架内，必须提出关于阿杜米萨的情感冲动，动机和代理的问题。