It is almost only during the bumper season, when fish is in abundance and prices are low, that Adjoa has a chance to be active in fish processing and trade. Then Adjoa buys fish from women at Moree beach, or she goes to Elmina. Sometimes when her mother's sisters buy fish from the cold stores in Tema, she can buy some on credit from them. She smokes the fish in her mother's brother's fie. Adjoa sells the few fish she smokes in Kumasi through other women's symbols, or she goes herself to Mankessim. But she does not earn much, especially since she is only able to trade during the bumper season when market prices are very low: "When I go to Mankessim these days, I am only left with 50 cedis".
We met Adjoa during the lean season, and she was struggling really hard to make ends meet. Her husband was not able to fulfil his duties towards the children, nor to give Ajoa money for cooking. The husband had no money to lend her to buy fish and smoke, and there was nobody else she felt she could turn to. Not even to the church she used to attend: "I have been in the house for three months, so if I should turn up in the church again now, I would feel embarrassed". Adjoa and her family lived on the margin and could only wait for the fishing season to start. Then the husband could go fishing, and Adjoa hopefully afford fish to smoke. During the three or four months before the season of activity and income, there was no security network to lean on. Adjoa lacks credit, fish supply and labour resources, and the social relations she needs to get access to these resources. She is one of the poor in Moree, one of those "who have nobody to turn to", a category spoken of in Moree, and the basis for building a successful career through entrepreneurial activity is not there.
Aba's husband is not a canoe owner, but he has a good network in the fisheries through his relatives and employer. Through him and through the female canoe owner Aba extends her social network which can enable her to make a viable career as a fish trader. One of the constraints of Aba, her sister and mother, is the limited smoking oven capacity in the fie of her mother's brother; "there is no space to build ovens", Aba says. Aba's goal is to help the mother to build a house. Then her mother could establish her own fie in which Aba would have a central position in fish processing and long distance trade. The expansion of Aba's career is going to be a slow process, and she cannot afford more loans to purchase larger quantities of fish. With time and with hard work, and good cooperation with the husband and her mother, she may expand from being the canoe owner's carrier to become one of her regular fish buyers; her profit potential would increase, especially if she could "find space to build ovens". But the most important relation for the potentials of the careers of both Aba and her husband, a relationship they tend well, is the one to their employer; the woman who ownes the canoe the husband works on and the fish Aba carries.
In 1977 Efua married again. The husband was a rich canoe owner, who already had a wife. Efua met him when she was processing fish from the mother's canoe on seasonal fisheries in Axim. Efua became one of the two enam enyi on his canoe. Later the husband has married two more wives. In the early eighties, after more births and a growing fish business, Efua was able to buy her first canoe. By that time, she had established a considerable fish-smoking enterprise in which she employed many people. These were mainly her sisters, her children, her clientele of regular fish buyers and carriers, and women from other villages as seasonal helpers.
Today Efua has built a big house. She is the head of her fie, in which six of her nine children live, in addition to tenants. Efua owns two canoes, and is planning to buy a third. Since Efua cannot go fishing with her crew, she has employed her sons as captains on both her canoes, and she explains why: "It is better, because the money stay in the family, and they can deal with the fishermen". Moreover, an adolescent son is crew member and her son-in-law is the motor-man on one of the canoes. Efua's daughters and the two wives of the oldest son are employed in the fish smoking, and she sells fish to them on credit so they can establish independent careers. During the bumper season she sends the oldest daughter as her representative to Kumasi to sell smoked fish trough the sending system. The youngest children help in carrying and washing the fish.
Efua is economically independent of her husband and they do not have much contact apart from the fish business. One episode illustrates her present relationship with the husband quite clearly. One evening Efua said: "My husband has declared me hopeless, so he does not help me any more." By this Efua referred to an episode a few days earlier when she had been shouting: "Send it back, send it back, send it back!" She shouted this to a boy who came with a bag with dirty clothes from her husband, which he wanted his wife to wash for him. The spouses did not have much contact at the time, and Efua never went to the husband's house to sleep. Even when they went together to Anomabo to have a look at the third canoe she was going to buy, Efua returned to Moree the same evening and did not spend the night with her husband. People were talking about their disagreements related to the financing of the new canoe. Efua's husband probably found the gossip embarrassing and wanted to remind his wife of her duties towards him. As a demonstration he sent the dirty clothes to her for washing, but Efua was not going to obey him at all, and sent the clothes back. This must have been a terrible offence, and thus she was "declared hopeless", and they were not for the moment on talking terms. Probably the problems in the marriage had roots in the husband's inability to give a partial loan for the purchase of her third canoe, and thus Efua was turning against him in public. So far they keep up the marriage, but they do not see each other much.
When Efua was younger, the credit from her mother, the labour and cooperation of her sisters, and later the access to buy fish from the husband's canoe, were her most crucial resources. Now Efua has reached the stage where she has secured fish supply from canoes that she owns herself. The crucial inputs are smoking capacity and labour, which she ensured when she built her house and became the head of her fie. The supply of fish from her husband's canoe is no longer of such a great importance; she has enough management problems as it is in administering her crew, children and workers.
The success of Efua and her sisters is interlinked through a complex network of extended family and marriage relations which gave them access to resources and the right contacts, and at the right time. The three sisters are well known in Moree for their success and influence. They have each built big houses next to each other, and they all own canoes. The second sister is married to a man who happens to be a trawler company's contact person in Moree. So, through her sister's husband, Efua has also managed to get a Syco-contract with the Koreans, which ensures her supply of fish during the lean season.
Without doubt Efua has authority as canoe owner, fish trader, wife, sister and mother, both when she is at home in the house and when she is on the beach managing the business. By making other people dependent on her support, she has created something in life, and will be remembered as a "matron" to whom many feel grateful. In this way she has converted economic wealth in the fisheries into a social network that gives her economic security, political influence and prestige. But a prerequisite to achieve this wealth was her ability to manage the resources that she had through kinship, marriage and children in such a way that her enterprises could grow and blossom. In a society where the extended family is so important, economic success and hence the ability to share can be converted into prestige by letting the success "trickle down" to other people. The network that gave her the opportunities in her youth is now the "investment object" of her success.
