38.1.mccaskie

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE:AN AKUAPEM TWI HISTORY OF ASANTE

TOM C. MCCASKIESOAS, LONDON

I

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh Is eighty-nine page manuscriptThe History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself of 1907 waspublished in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of alliedtexts.1 The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing thefour hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh IIsHistory of Ashanti written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both ofthese texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources onthe Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attentionand treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source ofthis kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished inwritten form in Akan Twi in 1915.2

II

The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles north-east of Ghanas capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small

History in Africa 38 (2011), 169192

1Albert Adu Boahen, Emmanuel Akyeampong, Nancy Lawler, Tom C. McCaskie andIvor G. Wilks (eds.), The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself andOther Writings by Otumfuo, Nana Agyeman Prempeh I (Fontes Historiae Africanae,New Series, Sources of African History 6) (Oxford, 2003).2A different version of this paper was presented at a conference on The Production ofKnowledge, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2009). I am grateful to all who com-mented.

170 Tom C. McCaskie

polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills ontwo parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There aremore towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twenti-eth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speakingAkan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the

early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matri-lineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this sit-uation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These weremilitary adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. TheAkyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establishtheir own conquest dynasty in 1733.3The consequence was a kingdom ruled from its capital at Akuropon

(Akropong) by a king or omanhene supported by titled office holders of thestandard Akan kind. Akuropon and one other town were peopled by AkyemAbuakwa incomers. Three other towns were populated by resident Akwa-mu. The remaining Akuapem towns were home to the descendants of theoriginal Guan settlers, many of whom came to be bilingual in Twi.Guan-speaking indigenes and remnant Akwamu formed a subordinated

majority, uneasily and often resentfully incorporated into the new politicalorder. Thus the seven Kyerepon Guan towns in north Akuapem were organ-ised into the right wing or nifa in the new Akan structural dispensation.Two of these towns, the divisional capital at Adukrom and neighbouringAwukugua, play a part in the story set out below.Akuapem is not like Asante, the optimally developed Akan state. It lacks

gold or any other significant natural resource. In particular good farmland isscarce among the hill slopes and ridge scarps. Famously, Akuapem successin the colonial cocoa economy was achieved through migration to cultivableland in other parts of the Gold Coast. Asante was a centrally controlled andmonitored polity dedicated to the accumulation of wealth for its king, chiefsand their chosen clients. Chiefship in Akuapem had no such power. Rulingover an ethnically heterogeneous, quarrelsome and often violently dividedpopulation, Akuropon never commanded the resource base needed to stampits authority on society. Among the Akan more generally the kingdom isinfamous for its dynastic conflicts, stool disputes and periodic outbreaks ofcommunal disorder.

3See Ivor G. Wilks, Akwamu 1640-1750: A Study of the Rise and Fall of a West AfricanEmpire (Trondheim, 2001); Michael A. Kwamena-Poh, Government and Politics in theAkuapem State 1730-1850 (London, 1973).

An Akuapem Twi History of Asante 171

The best informed commentator on Akuapem has described its weakchiefship order as being predatory upon society and geared to exploitingdivision and despair amongst its own people to sustain itself. The legacy ofthis today is that Akuapem chiefship is depleted not only of substance butalso of resonance and relevance in the daily lives of its subjects who arenow Ghanaian citizens. Symptomatic of this state of affairs is the increasingtrend for the ritual props of Akan chiefship to fall into disuse and forgetting.What it might mean or purport to be Akuapem today is a difficult questionand perhaps one that is increasingly otiose.4Chiefship however is only one lens that affords a view of past and pre-

sent. Consider the historic place of the individual in Akuapem society. Aweak and divided polity, imposed on by the Danes and then the British fromAccra, and subject to periodic ravages and overrule by the Asante, was notin a position to offer its subjects security of the kind afforded by the morepowerfully evolved Akan state. It might be argued then that Akuapem chief-ship was in permanent breach of contract. It compounded this failing bypreying upon its own people.Furthermore extensive intermarriage between the patrilineal Guan and

the matrilineal Akan occluded and made the rules and bulwarks of everydaylife. Kinship relations, obligations, reciprocities, succession and inheritancewere all caught between radically different normative structures and under-standings. This made for an uncertainty that threw individuals back on

4I have plundered but I trust not misrepresented Michelle Gilberts excellent work onAkuapem. See Michelle Gilbert, The Person of the King: Ritual and Power in a Ghana-ian State, in: David Cannadine, and Simon Price (eds.), Rituals of Royalty: Power andCeremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987), 298-330; Michelle Gilbert, TheSudden Death of a Millionaire: Conversion and Consensus in a Ghanaian Kingdom,Africa 58 (1988), 281-315; Michelle Gilbert, Sources of Power in Akuropon-Akuapem:Ambiguity in Classification, in: William Arens, and Ivan Karp (eds.), The Creativity ofPower: Cosmology and Action in African Societies (Washington DC, 1989), 59-90;Michelle Gilbert, The Leopard Who Sleeps in a Basket: Akuapem Secrecy in EverydayLife and Royal Metaphor, in Mary H. Nooter (ed.), Secrecy: African Art that Concealsand Reveals (New York, 1993), 123-39; Michelle Gilbert, The Cimmerian Darkness ofIntrigue: Queen Mothers, Christianity and Truth in Akuapem History, Journal of Reli-gion in Africa 23 (1993), 2-43; Michelle Gilbert, Aesthetic Strategies: The Politics of aRoyal Ritual, Africa 64 (1994), 99-125; Michelle Gilbert, The Christian Executioner:Christianity and Chiefship as Rivals, Journal of Religion in Africa 25 (1995), 347-86;Michelle Gilbert, No Condition is Permanent: Ethnic Construction and the Use of Histo-ry in Akuapem, Africa 67 (1997), 501-33; Michelle Gilbert, and Paul Jenkins, TheKing, His Soul and the Pastor: Three Views of a Conflict in Akropong 1906-7, Journalof Religion in Africa 38 (2008), 359-415.

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themselves in the absence of agreed unequivocal norms about all of lifesfundamental guidelines. The archives are replete with court cases concern-ing the sorts of irreconcilable family quarrels that arose from opposed struc-tures and ways of seeing the world and the self.Disadvantages can also be opportunities. Akuapem people, unable to

reside with comfort and assurance in either polity or society, led the wayamongst the Akan in pioneering individual resource and enterprise. A bodyof now venerable scholarship has analysed and described some of the out-comes of this in the colonial period.5 However, this persuasion towardsindividual self-reliance and self-reflection was already present in the pre-colonial era. Akuapem people traded often on their own behalf with Euro-peans at Accra throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6Most significantly, the coming of a particular kind of mission Christiani-

ty to Akuapem in the 1830s drew forth personal responses from and I usethe terms advisedly those ambitious, aspirational or alienated Akuapemindividuals who were in search of a more responsive and rewarding modelfor their lives.

III

The Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft, derived from and influenced byWrttemberg pietism, was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1779-1780. Itgave rise to the Swiss Basel Mission Society (henceforth BM).7The BM privileged contemplation and self-examination (Innerlichkeit)

as the path to a personal belief in Christ. Allied to this, in both spiritual and

5For example, the classic Polly Hill, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: AStudy in Rural Capitalism (Cambridge, 1963); an incisive update is provided by GarethAustin, New Introduction, in: Polly Hill, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of SouthernGhana: A Study in Rural Capitalism (1997 [second edition]), ix-xxviii; Marion Johnson,Migrants Progress, Bulletin of the Ghana Geographers Association 9-2 (1964), 4-27and 10-1 (1965), 13-20; David Brokensha, Social Change at Larteh, Ghana (Oxford,1966); David Brokensha (ed.), Akwapim Handbook (Accra/Tema, 1972).6See Peter Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Under-standing of Social Bondage in West Africa (Basel, 2000); Ole Justesen (ed.), DanishSources for the History of Ghana 1657-1754 (Fontes Historiae Africanae Series VariaVIII) (Copenhagen, 2005).7See Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England,Wrttemberg and Prussia (Cambridge, 1983); Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age ofBurckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000); Jon Miller,Missionary Zealand Institutional Control: Organizational Contradictions in the Basel Mission on theGold Coast 1828-1917 (Grand Rapids MI, 2003).


material realms, was an injunction to a ceaseless Christian self-awareness inthe struggle for improvement and betterment in every aspect of life. BMconverts were launched into a journey through life that was laid down andsignposted for them by Christian reinforcement and other forms of civilisa-tional and material achievement.8BM mission personnel were mostly drawn from southern Germany and

western Switzerland, areas that experienced rapid and discomfiting socialand industrial change in the nineteenth century. Missionary files list agricul-turalists, artisans and handworkers as the majority among BM recruits.These were culturally conservative and in truth rather nostalgic folk.Once established in the mission field they sought to redeem and recreate

the vanishing pre-industrial sociabilities of the European agricultural andartisanal world of their own or their immediate ancestral past. They turnedtheir faces away from the headlong changes wrought by the forces of capi-talist modernisation, and they encouraged their converts to explore andrecord their own cultures, orally and in writing. They were Christian devo-tees of an imaginary of the small scale, the face-to-face, and a retrievedsocio-cultural authenticity and continuity.9The BM arrived in Accra in the Gold Coast in the 1820s. Missionary

Andreas Riis, sent to the Danes in Accra because of his own unusual Danishancestry and background, went to Akuropon in 1835. Chiefship receivedhim in a friendly manner but was diffident about the work of conversion.Riis became discouraged. In 1839-1840 he travelled to Asante. There helearned that whatever its difficulties Akuapem was a more open and encour-aging place than Asante with its tightly controlled and monitored society.10Riis and his companion Widmann now decided to seed the conversion ofAkuapem by settling Christian families of emancipated West Indian slavesin Akuropon. These exemplars arrived in 1843.A great deal might be said about the BM in Akuapem, but comment here

is restricted to one vital strand of its project. While Riis busied himself inbuilding up the mission infrastructure, Widmann launched himself into the

8Compare here Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ThePilgrims Progress (Princeton NJ, 2004); and see Kristoni Akwantu, PilgrimsProgress, translated into the Tshee or Asante Language (Basel, 1885).9See Tom C. McCaskie, Perregaux Among the Akan, paper presented at a conferenceon Imperial Cultures in Countries Without Colonies (Basel, 2003).10Andreas R. Riis, Reise des Missionars in Akropong nach dem Aschantee-Lande imWinter 1839 bis 1840, Magazin fr die Neueste Geschichte der Evangelischen Mis-sions- und Bibel-Gesellschaften III (1840), 92-112 and 216-35.

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study of Twi. The BM thought that mastering and communicating in thelocal language was indispensable to preaching and conversion.This was also the entryway to reducing a local language to a written form

and so to literacy and indigenous production of texts by local people in alocal tongue. Widmann sketched out a scheme for a Twi dictionary andbegan teaching boys a Twi alphabet. By 1844 he was able to preach withoutan interpreter. In 1845 the first Twi primers were produced and many othersfollowed. By the end of the 1840s these were in daily use in the BMsAkuropon school and Teacher Training Institute.By 1847 only four people had been baptised but the BM school had

sixty-nine pupils. Education was attractive for two reasons. First, in the1840s Akuapem politics fell into a chaotically divided and violent conditioneven by its own historic standards. Second, the BM began to cultivate cof-fee and groundnut plantations, and to encourage the parents of theirAkuapem students to follow this profitable example. Educational and com-mercial improvement called forth a response in individuals and familiesdispirited by their past and present life chances in a turbulent and fracturedpolity.Wittingly or not, the BM played upon aspirations for an absent security,

opportunity and betterment. It was made plain that Christian conversionshould be the goal for those Akuapem people who wanted to participatefully in the emerging order. Chiefship had little to offer as counterweightand the balance of forces began to shift towards the BM in parallel with thelarger expansion of European influence in the Gold Coast. So much so thatby 1895, sixty years after the BMs arrival, Kwasi Akuffo, a pupil at theAkuropon Theological Seminary who was baptised as Frederick William,succeeded to the royal stool of Akuropon as Akuapemhene.

IV

The BM taught their Akuapem students but they nurtured their Christianconverts, and especially the earliest ones. In 1847 the first four baptisedAkuapem individuals were David Asante, Isaac Addo, Paul Keteku, andDavid Martin Bekoe. All four were Twi speakers. Asante was of mixedAkuapem royal and Asante paternal descent, and the others have Akan orAkanised - names, reflecting intermarriage, mixed descent and the fact thatmany subordinated Guan also spoke Twi. David Asante, who might be clas-sified as an elite but anomalous and so marginal figure, had a rich and well


documented BM career and clearly found purpose and fulfilment within theChristian dispensation.11Johann Christaller, the doyen of BM Gold Coast language scholars, and

the compiler of a still unsuperseded Twi grammar and dictionary, took theseyoung men in hand.12 He instilled in them the need for fluency between thelocal language (Twi), the mission language (German) and the colonial lan-guage (English). In turn they aided Christaller in collecting Akan Twiproverbs and in recording Akuapem oral traditions about history, customand belief. Christaller strongly encouraged them to talk with old people andwrite down their reminiscences so that these might not be lost to Akan cul-ture.13

It is known that Paul Keteku recorded detailed information on eighteenthand early nineteenth century Akuapem wars from one Sonko, an old resi-dent of Akuropon. Similarly, in 1863 Isaac Addo recorded rich material onconflict in the 1820s-1830s from one Aduobe of Obosomase. David Asantewas also involved in these researches which occupied the decade between1853-1863.14The end result was Papers in Tshi which was printed by the BM in 1863

for circulation in Akuapem. In 1913 this pamphlet was revised, enlargedand published by the BM as Twi Kasa mu Akuapem ne eho Aman Nsemanase Abasem (History of Gold Coast or Native Reports in Tshi). It isevident that the Ga-speaking BM pastor C.C. Reindorf read the original ver-sion of this work when he was researching his own History of the GoldCoast and Asante (1895).15

11See the insightful Sonia Abun-Nasr, Afrikaner und Missionar: Die Lebensgeschichtevon David Asante (Basel, 2003).12Johan G. Christaller, A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi(Basel, 1875); Johan G. Christaller, A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Languagecalled Tshi (Chwee, Twi) (Basel, 1881).13Johan G. Christaller, A Collection of 3600 Tshi Proverbs (Basel, 1879). Over the pastforty years BM archivists Paul Jenkins and Guy Thomas have assiduously catalogued theincredibly rich resource in their care. However, most of the BM archive still awaits schol-arly attention. To give some instances: BM, D-10 contains inter alia the following sub-stantial manuscripts; D-10, 2, 6, Gottesnamen der Tschi-Neger der Goldkste (n.d.: cata-logue notation probably from the 1920s); D-10, 4, 5, Die Verkehrung der gttlichenOffenbarung durch die Otschineger (n.d.: catalogue notation by A. Mader, no date, butprobably ca. 1850); D-10, 4, 13, Etwas ber die Geschichte der Goldkste; ber DavidAsante (n.d.: catalogue notation from the Martin family papers); D-10, 4, 3, Kultus-beschreibung der Bewohner der Goldkueste Westafrikas (n.d.: catalogue notation n.d.but probably ca. 1850, by J.G. Widmann?).14Consult Kwamena-Poh, Government and Politics, Appendix 1.15On Reindorf see Paul Jenkins (ed.), The Recovery of the West African Past: AfricanPastors and African History in the Nineteenth Century: C.C. Reindorf and Samuel John-

176 Tom C. McCaskie

All this was a start to the long tradition of Akuapem and then other AkanTwi converts recording and writing up local historico-cultural materials. Intime there was enough of this work to support BM periodicals in Twi devot-ed to Gold Coast matters. Both The Christian Messenger and Sika-MpoanoKristofo a Wokasa Twi no Senkekafo (The Christian Reporter for GoldCoast Natives Speaking the Tshi or Asante Language) printed numerouspieces by local Christians on historical as well as contemporary topics.In 1907, for example, the BM catechist B. Ntow published from his field

station in Asante Tweneboa Kodia a ote gyee Osante man ho asem, a longoral account from Kumawu of the Asante-Denkyira war that ended with theepochal battle of Feyiase (1701). Again, in 1893 J.P.B. of Akuropon pub-lished a detailed oral account of the akompi sa, the military standoffbetween the Asante and the Akyem (and British) in 1863. And again, onmatters of current concern then, but of inestimable value to historian now,the BM personnel C. Apeatu and H. Keteku of Akuapem published in 1907-1908 oral accounts of the aberewa (old woman) anti-witchcraft cult thenwidespread in the Gold Coast. It needs to be underlined that the threeinstances given here have been translated and severally used by myself. Intruth, there is much, much more that is unconsidered in these and otherunjustly neglected periodical journals.16This programme of research and writing outlasted the BM presence in

the Gold Coast, which ended during the first world war. In 1926 theprince or oheneba Samson Sakyi Djang, son of the Akuapem adon-tenhene from Aburi, wrote to British officials in Accra and Kumase on hisown headed notepaper. This read The Sunlight Publishers (Publishers ofall kinds of Historical Pamphlets, Periodicals, Almanacs, etc.) Djang, edu-cated by the BM in Akuapem, enclosed for the information of officialdom acopy of the latest issue of the Sunlight Magazine.17

son (Basel, 1998); Heinz Hauser-Renner, Examining Text Sediments Commenting ona Pioneer Historian as an African Herodotus: On the Making of the New AnnotatedEdition of C.C. Reindorfs History of the Gold Coast and Asante, History in Africa 35(2008), 231-99.16Tom C. McCaskie, and J.E. Wiafe, A Contemporary Account in Twi of the Akompi Saof 1863: a Document with Commentary, Asantesem: The Asante Collective BiographyBulletin 11 (1979), 72-78; Tom C. McCaskie, Sakrobundi ne Aberewa: Sie Kwaku theWitch-Finder in the Akan World, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana (NewSeries) 8 (2004), 82-135 (reprinted in Journal des Africanistes 75 [2005], 163-207).17PRAAD (Public Records and Archives Administration Department), Accra, ADM11/1/953, The Sunlight Magazine.


Djangs publication was entitled The Sunlight Magazine of History andProgress. It was issued quarterly and announced that it was about theGold Coast and Ashantee in general. It was in English, priced at 1/- percopy, compiled in Aburi and printed in Accra. In his communication withcolonial officialdom Djang promised to publish a local almanac in 1927. Inthe event this did not appear until 1936 when it was published as The Sun-light Reference Almanac. This too was in English and ran to one hundredand forty pages.As I write I have before me two issues of Djangs quarterly magazine,

the second (dated March-June 1925) and the third (undated). These are theonly issues of this periodical I have located. I also have a copy of the lessrare 1936 almanac. On the title page of the third issue there is a motto thatreads as follows: Be in direct contact with the history and customs of theGold Coast and Ashanti by reading the Sunlight Magazine regularly.Djang, writing in the now sovereign colonial language of English, but fol-lowing in the footsteps of his Akuapem Christian predecessors, was as goodas his word.Let us simply note here that the second issue of Djangs quarterly printed

accounts of Okomfo Anotchi, The waning of Denkyira and the comingof Ashanti, and a piece on Little Popo. In the third issue (continued fromthe first) was the second instalment of an article entitled Discussing theAkantamosu Problem. This was in the form of a dramatised conversationby participants about the Asante defeat by the British and their allies at thebattle of Katamanso in 1826. This odd presentation contains unique, con-vincing but unsourced oral historical details. The almanac was full of cultur-al retrievals of everything from stool lists and genealogies to items on drumlanguages and state oaths. Akuapem achievement took pride of place, andthe editorial comment included the following assertion about the origins ofthe dynasty that came to power there in 1733: Akyims who migrated toAkwapem were using the Mesee that is original Akan.

V

In the late 1960s I bought a series of pamphlet biographies of Gold CoastChristian notables in the Methodist bookshop in Cape Coast. These wereproduced by Waterville House, the Presbyterian Press in Accra, and wereinspiring homiletic lives of a standard Christian kind. I glanced throughthem and filed them away, for my interest was exclusively in precolonial

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history. Indeed, back then colonial Africans were seen as being somehowinauthentic, a foolish but surprisingly enduring prejudice.In 1977 I paid my first visit to the mission archive in Basel. It was not

the well organised collection it has since become. Serendipity played a partin the materials I located and copied. Among these were two files. The firstcontained lengthy annual reports for the years 1902-1910 from the Kumasemission station to the BMs Home Committee. These were in English andsigned by Rev. N.V. Asare. The second contained a hand written foolscapmanuscript of one hundred and thirty pages in Twi by this same man. Thetitle page read: Asante Abasem. Twi Kasamu, and beneath this History ofAshanti in Tshi. On the same page was a notation: Dedicated to the BaselMissionary Society on the occasion of their centenary 1915 by Rev. N.V.Asare, Gold Coast. It also said: Printed for the Basel Evang. MissionarySociety. Sold at the Basel Mission Book Depot Accra, Gold Coast.18The BM was founded in 1815, so the reference to its centenary in 1915

was correct. The text suggested that the manuscript history of Asante hadbeen printed and sold in Accra. However, there was no published version ofit. This puzzle was resolved by fugitive notes of unknown authorship filedalong with the text. Publication was the intention but the BM was in a diffi-cult position in the wartime Gold Coast, and it was finally expelled in 1917in a wave of anti-German sentiment. So in the event Asares text was notprinted.In the 1980s I translated parts of Asante Abasem (henceforth AA) with

the aid of native Twi speakers and dictionaries. Then I gave my photocopyof the whole text to Wilhelmina Donkoh from Kumase who translated itinto English in partial fulfilment of an M.Soc.Sc. degree that she was work-ing for under my supervision. A problem encountered by both supervisorand student was that Asares BM personnel file could not be located ineither Switzerland or Ghana. So, our knowledge of the author was fugitiveand thin.It turned out that this deficit was entirely my fault. Nearly a decade after

Donkohs degree was submitted I discovered quite by chance that Asarewas the subject of one of the pamphlet biographies I had bought in Cape

18For Asares annual reports: BM, D-1, 77 (1902), pp. 12, dd. 14 February 1903; D-1, 79(1903), pp. 20, dd. 20 February 1904; D-1, 82 (1904), pp. 22, dd. 14 February 1905; D-1,84 (1905), pp. 20, dd. 12 February 1906; D-1, 86 (1906), pp. 23, dd. 20 March 1907; D-1,88 (1907), pp. 25, dd. 29 February 1908; D-1, 90 (1908), pp. 23, dd. 22 February 1909;D-1, 93 (1909), pp. 14, dd. 18 February 1910; D-1, 95 (1910), pp. 24, dd. 24 February1911; and D-20, 4, 5, N.V. Asare, Asante Abasem. Twi Kasamu.


Coast in the 1960s. Not only that, but its author was a grandson of PaulKeteku who had worked for and with Christaller in the gathering of localtraditions in Akuapem. This pamphlet supplies biographical informationunavailable elsewhere and it makes sense of comments in other sources. Iproceeded on two fronts. AA was translated again as a control on the 1990version, and I began thinking about Asares temperament and his motivesfor recording and writing what he did. In the meantime, I made use of theinformation furnished by Asare in some of my publications.19

VI

Asare was born in 1849 at Nyeduase in Akuapem. His father belonged tothe Akan ruling elite descended from the Akyem Abuakwa incomers. Hisname was Otutu Ababio Aketewa. He was Akuapem nifahene resident inAdukrom. Asares mother Anobea was Guan and came from Awukugua.Asare incarnated some key historical anomalies of Akuapem society. Hisfather was a member of a governing class that reckoned descent through thefemale line. His mother belonged to the patrilineal Guan. Asare was a per-son with some status but this was qualified by the fact that he had onlyrestricted jural rights within both his parents kinship systems.This oddity may have been linked to another. Asares ascribed name was

Okrapa, a lucky soul, because in pregnancy his mother sought help andprotection from the fofie shrine in Awukugua, and in return she promisedher unborn baby to that shrine as a kra or dedicated servant. So as a childAsare attended shrine observances wearing ritual hyire or white clay. Henever ate goat or cocoyam for these foods were akyiwadee or forbidden toits servants by fofie.In 1863 events happened that were crucial in Asares life. Violence

flared up in Adukrom in the form of a pitched battle between Akan andGuan of the sort already described. In this affray Asare saw his father mur-dered, a traumatic happening that impelled him into the orbit of the BM

19Wilhelmina J. Donkoh, Rev. N.V. Asares A History of Asante in Tshi, M.Soc.Sc.dissertation, Centre of West African Studies, Birmingham University (1990); Rev. Her-mann J. Keteku, Biography of Rev. Nathanael Victor Asare (Accra, 1965); and see TomC. McCaskie, Konnurokusem: Kinship and Family in the History of the Oyoko KokooDynasty of Kumase, Journal of African History 36 (1995), 357-89; Tom C. McCaskie,The Golden Stool at the End of the Nineteenth Century: Setting the Record Straight,Ghana Studies 3 (2000), 61-96.

180 Tom C. McCaskie

teachers at Adukrom school. He was attracted by the novelty, in Ketekusterm, of making a life for himself beyond the one into which he had beenborn. It is clear too that he wanted to escape from shrine service. His motherfought tooth and nail to stop him, but Asare went to school and became lit-erate. Instruction and contemplation led him to Christian belief. In duecourse he was baptised by BM missionary Widmann as Nathanael VictorAsare.He was then sent to Akuropon to stay with missionary Mader and further

his studies. Upon his departure his mother made a final, violent but failedattempt to dissuade him. Asare progressed rapidly in Akuropon MiddleSchool where the headmaster was missionary Bellon, a considerable Twilinguist and scholar. Twi, German and English were taught, along with the-ology and some basic mathematics and Greek. In 1868 Asare entered theAkuropon Theological Seminary to be trained for service in the BM. Hegraduated and became a teacher and catechist in Akuropon and then Aburi.He married Sophia Koko who was Maders Christian housemaid. In timethe couple had four children.In 1882 Asare was ordained. Ten years later he was recalled to Akuropon

to replace David Asante who had died. Then in 1896 he found himself yetagain caught up in an outbreak of communal violence, this time betweenAwukugua and Akuropon. Asare tried to mediate, but the British stepped in,arrested the leaders of both sides and arraigned them in court. Colonialauthority found for Akuropon, and because of this Asare became personanon grata in his mothers town of Awukugua.He shrugged this off, but in a way that suggested he was greatly troubled

by the endemic disorder in Akuapem that had led to the confrontations of1863 and 1896: obarima ba nsuro tuo na otofo ba nso nnyin mmo akora, hesaid, meaning the child of one who dies a violent death must himselfexpect to have a short life. However, fatalism of this sort was paralleled byAsares growing interest in the common history of the Akan states and whyAsante had proved so successful while Akuapem had not. Sent from his tur-bulent homeland to Kyebi, capital of Akyem Abuakwa and his own fathersancestral home, he pondered the nature of the Akan polity.Then in 1902 he was sent to Kumase to assist missionary Ramseyer in

the resurrection of BM work in Asante. This had started after 1896, whenthe British deported asantehene Agyeman Prempe, and had been obliteratedin 1900-1901 by Asante insurgents during the yaa asantewaa uprisingagainst colonial rule. Asares Akuapem friends tried to stop him going toKumase because of its dread name and reputation. He had his own misgiv-


ings, but arrived with his family in Kumase on 22 March 1902 for what wasto be a stay of eight years. In the town the BM premises were destroyed.Asares family began their Kumase lives in thatched huts in Bantama thatflooded regularly. An inauspicious start to be sure, but in the course of hislengthy stay Asare acquired a subtle understanding of Asantes past and pre-sent. He was a native Twi speaker with a serious interest in history, and hewas the first such to do recognisable fieldwork in eliciting and recordingoral traditions. His own local Akuapem knowledge clearly struck a chordwith his Asante interlocutors and encouraged them to talk.Asare was an intelligent man with an inquiring mind. He was also adept

with languages. He was self-reflective, but it would seem unwavering in hisChristian faith and commitment. We cannot know the personal nature of theInnerlichkeit that led to his conversion, or the conversations he had withhimself along the road to that decision. What we do know is that the BM inAkuapems troubled society presented itself to many people there as ameans of escape, reformulation and advancement.One thing seems certain. Asare was not a prolific writer in the estab-

lished tradition of the BMs Akuapem converts until he went to Asante. Itseems almost as if the BM tradition of oral historical and cultural researchonly became available to Asare when he quit Akuapem and its disorders. Inhis view perhaps, and notwithstanding the parts of the Asante past he foundrepellent to his Christian sensibility, he sensed it was a model of what anAkan polity might be in its confident ease with its own achievements. It wascertainly not Akuapem. Asare wrote that the Asante do not respectAkuapem as an important nation, a verdict that saddened him but that hedid not wholly dissent from.20

VII

When Asare arrived in Kumase in 1902 it was in a very dilapidated statebecause of war, with a much reduced population. A newcomer from smalltowns in Akwamu (or even Kyebi in Akyem Abuakwa), Asare reacted toKumase like the wide-eyed villager (akuraaseni) of Asante folklore. Evenin its reduced state he thought Kumase large, populous and bustling, with allmanner of consumer goods for sale in its booming market.He soon struck up acquaintance with adumhene Asamoa Toto, an expert

on history and ritual because of his role as head of the royal executioners.

20Asare, Asante Abasem.

182 Tom C. McCaskie

Other Kumase chiefs appointed by the British were welcoming to Asare (ifnot to his Christian message), but he found the rulers of outlying towns likeEdweso, Mampon and especially Agona arrogantly hostile. He soon realisedthat this group of non-Kumase chiefs were parvenus installed by colonialfiat and hated for their presumption and greed, even by their own subjects.However, Asare was forcibly impressed by the sheer power and authority ofall Asante chiefs by comparison with their equivalents in the Gold CoastColony and especially Akuapem. He realised that their status and powerderived from the principles and laws that they had deployed over twohundred years to make Asante the pre-eminent Akan state.21Within a year of his arrival Asare had found his feet as a fieldworker. His

1903 report had very little on the halting progress of the mission. Instead, hebegan with a declaration of intent: I am going to acquaint the reader withthe story of the once powerful kingdom of Asante.22 The first eight pagesof his twenty page annual report gave a detailed account of the life andmiracles of Annokye the fetishman who lived about 1700. Asare wasespecially fascinated by Komfo Anokye because Asante informants toldhim the fabled priest was an Akuapem from Awukugua. Moreover, Asarelearned in Kumase that Akuapem had gone into permanent decline becauseits people had refused to follow Komfo Anokyes laws, which he laterintroduced into Asante.There followed the earliest known account of the Golden Stool itself; its

form, composition and ornamentation; a list of defeated kings and chiefswhose miniature cast gold likenesses hung from the stool; and a deal ofinformation concerning the history of the object itself. Asare did not givethe name of his main informant but hinted it was Asamoa Toto whose officemade him the trustworthy Chief responsible for the stool.23 From infor-mation supplied by this same man and others Asare went on to give anaccount of the rituals connected with the royal bantama mausoleum, and ahistorical explanation of the origins of ntam kese, the Asante great oath.In 1904 Asare turned to ethnography as well as history. He gave detailed

accounts of female nubility rites and funeral arrangements in Asante. In

21BM, D-1, 77 (1902); for context Tom C. McCaskie, The Consuming Passions ofKwame Boakye: an Essay on Agency and Identity in Asante History, Journal of AfricanCultural Studies 13 (2000), 43-62.22BM, D-1, 79 (1903).23Asamoa Toto was a key informant of Rattrays in the 1920s; see Tom C. McCaskie,R.S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal, History in Africa10 (1983), 187-206.


September of that year he travelled among the Akan Bron of Ahafo to thewest of Kumase. The centrepiece of his travelogue was a lengthy account ofworship and worshippers at the hugely influential Tano river shrine atTanoso.24 In the next year Asare was the first person to record the legend ofTula the fetish man, an infamously evil priest whose actions were heldup by the Asante as a historical and ethical counterpoint to those of the vir-tuous Komfo Anokye.25 He also gave an account of the removal of chiefKwame Tua from office in 1905. This is a major contribution to our under-standing of the political history of the Kumase gyaasewa, one of the mostrichly documented of all Asante offices.26After 1905 Asare was increasingly busy with mission work as the num-

ber of (mainly non-Asante) Christian converts grew and the BM schoolfilled up with pupils. He had also come to realise the deadly importance ofstool politics in Kumase. He was increasingly well informed but askedBasel to desist from publishing anything he wrote on this subject as long asI live in Kumase. He wrote valuable eyewitness accounts of the anti-witch-craft cult of aberewa, the old woman, which swept Asante until made ille-gal by the British in 1908.27Asares last great ethnographic setpiece was his 1910 description of the

politics and ritual surrounding the funeral custom of the late King MensaBonsu of Kumase who died 1900 at Praso.28 Asantehene Mensa Bonsu(1874-1883) was destooled for political and personal reasons. Asare gave atelling sketch of the kings character and reputation that was culled frommany who had known him and suffered at his hands. The British deportedMensa Bonsu from internal exile in Asante to the Gold Coast Colony. Onhis way south in 1900 the ex-king died in questionable circumstances on thePra river where he was buried. In 1910 his sons and other supporters disin-terred his remains and reburied them in Kumase with fitting royal pomp.Asare understood the nostalgia for a lost independence and power thatmarked this event.The shortest of Asares annual reports is for 1909. Its brevity arose from

the sudden death of Rev. A. Bauer, Asares closest associate amongst theBM personnel in Kumase. In an almost tangible sense this bereavement is

24BM, D-1, 82 (1904).25Tom C. McCaskie, Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in anAfrican Society, Journal of African History 27 (1986), 315-39.26BM, D-1, 84 (1905).27Ibid., D-1, 86 (1906), 88 (1907), 90 (1908).28Ibid., D-1, 95 (1910).

184 Tom C. McCaskie

present in Asares writing. Bauers shade stands over Asares recognitionthat his time in Asante had produced less than he hoped for in the way ofChristian progress. He left Kumase declaring that The Gospel seed hasbeen sown, but with a prayer that the Lord would water the seed in thedry and rocky place that was the Asante capital.29

VIII

Asare compiled AA after he left Asante and was put in charge of the BMstation at Mampon in Akuapem. He wrote in AA about the ways in which hewent about seeking information. His research methods and principles weregrounded in his existing familiarity with Akan society and above all in hisnative speakers command of Twi. Asare was curious about Asante and hisspirit of inquiry was coupled with a gregarious nature and a drive to findthings out. His biographer noted laconically that he made friends withsome Kumase chiefs and repeatedly visited them in their homes in hisspare moments.30The prefatory remarks in AA are startlingly sophisticated. Asare shows

he had absorbed the lessons of the BMs Akuapem oral research tradition infull and was determined to apply and refine them. He begins by assertingthat in a centrally controlled polity like Asante the kings and royals holdthe key to the past, for the bulk of its history revolves around monarchyand office holding. He goes on to say that it takes time and patience to getAsante people to confide information discreditable to their historical self-image (as true today as then). Referring to afisem, private information inthe house or affairs internal to a kin group, he observes that the Asante arereticent and so it is very difficult for secrets to be divulged. Asanteinformants, he asserts, are much concerned to pledge an interlocutor tosecrecy. Censored historical traditions are recounted to foreigners and it isonly time and trust that will break this reserve down.31Asare describes how he tackled these issues. He lived in Kumase for a

long time, which was necessary for research as it allowed him to makemany informed and influential friends. Once trust was established theseinformants imparted more and more of what they knew to Asare. This

29Ibid., D-1, 93 (1909); 95 (1910).30Keteku, Asare, 16.31All quotations in this section are taken from AA unless otherwise indicated.


was still not sufficient for the Akuapem historian. He understood that folkhad differing views and opinions of what they knew, so he cross-checkedwhat he was told. I was not informed by just one person, he declared in aquite strikingly modern methodological way, but to ensure authenticity Iapproached several well-informed and elderly people.Who were these people? One, already identified, was Kumase adumhene

Asamoa Toto. Others Asare mentioned were Kumase bantamahene OseiBonsu, adontenhene Kwame Frimpon (baptised John), and the not alwaysreliably garrulous gyaasewahene Kwame Tua. One is left with the feelinghowever that Asares key informant was a woman. In 1906 the new BMpremises at Dareboase in Kumase were officially opened. Asare attendedand there met a noble and friendly woman. A friendship developed sothat he often went to talk with her. The woman was Akua Afriyie, a royal asdaughter of asantehemaa Yaa Kyaa, and a uterine sister of asanteheneAgyeman Prempe. Following the exile of her mother and half-brother in1896 Akua Afriyie was the senior royal woman in Kumase. As such, shewas custodian of the royal lineages history and afisem, and it was clearlyher who supplied the unique information that went into AAs Chapter 18.32AA is a history largely from the point of view of Kumase, its royals and

its office holders. It is episodic rather than strictly chronological althoughthere is general adherence to a temporal sequence. Asare fashioned the oraltraditions he listened to into a sustained piece of narrative writing. This iswell and lucidly set down, always interesting and in some places com-pelling. At one level Asare set out not only to inform but also to tell readersthat Asante, hitherto that ferocious beast, was knowable on its own termsand once understood was recognisable as a leading member of the comity ofAkan polities. Throughout the text Asare invited his Akan Twi readers tocompare Asante with their own experience. It is notable that Christianmoralising takes second place to explicating history and culture in Asarestext. It is true Asantes eventual and inevitable embrace of Christianity fur-nishes the mise-en-scne of progress and enlightenment (anibue) in AA, butthis is redemption through mercy and grace and in no way is used todevalue the past.AAs prefatory remarks are followed by thirty-three chapters of variable

length, two appendices, and two reflections on the lives of missionariesBauer and Perregaux who both died in Kumase while Asare was livingthere. AA freely mixes together historical tradition with ethnographic and

32Boahen et al., History of Ashanti Kings, 137, 139, 203.

186 Tom C. McCaskie

cultural observation. Chapter 1 concerns the genesis of Akan kingdoms, asubject that plainly fascinated Asare. It traces Twi-speaking immigrantsfrom across the seas, but says too that the creator Odomankama made theworld in Adanse.33 Chapters 2-7 recount rich Asante traditions about theformation of their kingdom, the reigns of Obiri Yeboa and Osei Tutu, andthe complex politicking that led to the defeat of denkyirahene Ntim Gyakariat Feyiase in 1701. Parts of this, for example on Komfo Anokye, are drawnfrom the account Asare gave in his annual reports, but there is new materialhere too, for instance on kin relations between Obiri Yeboa and Osei Tutu,and on the roles played by named individuals in the war against Denkyira.Chapters 8-9 deal with Kumase as a town past and present. This includes

a testimony to Asares fieldworking tenacity, for it gives a unique listing byname and functional differentiation of all of the seventy-seven quarters(brono) of the historic Asante capital. Chapter 10 gives the genealogy of theroyal Oyoko dynasty of Kumase from Manu, the mother of Osei Tutu, to thepresent. This must have been supplied by Akua Afriyie, custodian of thisinformation in Kumase, and its data agree with the genealogy then being puttogether in their Seychelles Islands exile by her mother and her half-brother.34 Chapters 11-12 discuss the Golden Stool and Asante royal oaths,and are derived from but add material to Asares treatment of these topics inhis annual reports.Chapter 13 is devoted to Komfo Anokye and it expands on Asares earli-

er treatment of his life and miracles. Here Christian belief does obtrudefor Asare is clearly in two minds about his subject. On the one hand authori-al pride is taken in such a pivotal historical actor from Akuapem Awukugua.But he is also censured for following false gods and trafficking with thesupernatural. Overall Komfo Anokye is given the benefit of the doubt. He isrepresented as a great man tempted by the Devil, somewhat like SimonMagus (Acts, 8, 9-25 is invoked in support of this argument). Chapter 14, towhich Akua Afriyie, Asamoa Toto and others must have contributed, is animportant exegetical account of the layout of the precolonial palace or ahen-fie, the ritual and jural rounds followed by the king, and the royal retreats atManhyia and Breman.35

33Compare Tom C. McCaskie, Asante Origins, Egypt, and the Near East: An Idea andIts History, in: Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds.), Recasting the Past: His-tory Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens OH, 2009), 125-48.34Boahen et al., History of Ashanti Kings.35See Tom C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante (Cambridge, 1995).


Chapters 15-16 return the text to historical chronology. The first is a fulltreatment of the liberation war with Denkyira and recounts this in denseand vivid detail. The second is about the life and reign of the asanteheneOpoku Ware (c. 1720-1750). This has important oral information on mattersof division and exclusion in the royal lineage involving the still puzzlingissue of the disbarment of the asaaman kwaadane (significantly, theenslaved Asaaman) from succession to the Golden Stool. This item ofroyal afisem is still difficult to discuss in Kumase although it reappears inone oblique form or another whenever the Golden Stool falls vacant.36Chapter 17 is a recounting of the numerous oral traditions that deal with

the asantehene Osei Tutu Kwames war of 1818-1819 with the gyamanheneKwadwo Adinkra. This conflict is well covered by European sources aswell as by Asante and Abron traditions, and the war has been the subject ofa detailed reconstruction from the Gyaman viewpoint.37 However, AA sup-plies unique details. These revolve around the person of the Kumase royalservant (ahenkwaa) Sampanne, later adumhene Kwadwo Sanpanin and so apredecessor in office of Asamoa Toto. It is to be presumed that the lastnamed was the source of the information describing Sampannes behaviourand machinations to get Osei Tutu Kwame to commit to war. Apart from allelse this material is a magnificent illustration of the world and mentality ofthe precolonial royal ahenkwaa.Chapter 18 The Quarrel between the asantehene Kwaku Dua I and

His Family is revelatory. It is a uniquely detailed account of a sequenceof interpersonal events known as konnurokusem in the afisem of theKumase dynasty. This was a dispute in the 1850s-1860s that has repercus-sions today. Asares information must have been provided by Akua Afriyiewho was a close relative of the protagonists and knew some of them person-ally. This chapter filled puzzling lacunae in the record and it made possiblemy own reconstruction of the dispute.38Chapters 19-20 discuss the troubled reigns of brother asantehenes Kofi

Kakari (1867-1874) and Mensa Bonsu (1874-1883), and the dynastic warsof 1883-1888 that followed on the latters destoolment. There is already alarge amount of source material dealing with this period, but Asare con-tributes excellent circumstantial and anecdotal additions. This is hardly sur-

36Compare the argument in Grard Pescheux, Le royaume asante (Ghana): Parent,pouvoir, histoire: XVII-XX sicles (Paris, 2003).37Emmanuel Terray, Une histoire du royaume abron du Gyaman: Des origines la con-qute coloniale (Paris, 1995).38McCaskie, Konnurokusem.

188 Tom C. McCaskie

prising for most of his informants were partisan participants in the eventsthey recounted. The same eyewitness quality is apparent in chapters 21-22on the reign of asantehene Agyeman Prempe up until his arrest and exile in1896. There is included here a particularly detailed account of the Asantemilitary expedition to Nkoransa in 1894.Chapters 23-28 cover happenings from the arrest and exile of Agyeman

Prempe in 1896 to the rationalisation of colonial administration in Asante in1901-1902. The centrepiece is of course the 1900-1901 uprising and there isa great deal to interest the scholar of these events. Here Asares informantswere supplemented by a mass of participants who had lived through theconflict. Chapter 29 is a reworking of Asares detailed information on thedestoolment of gyaasewahene Kwame Tua that had appeared first in hisannual reports. Chapters 30-31 are really pendants to the main text. Theyrecount two mytho-historical tales. One describes Asantes overthrow of theseventeenth-century Akyereama warlord Gyenti; the other is undated andconcerns another Gyenti from Kumawu who met with an apparition ofdeath. Chapter 32 lists the rulers of Kumase, Kokofu, Dwaben, Nsuta,Mampon, Bekwai and Kumawu, together with an enumeration of Asantechiefs appointed by the British and an Akyem king list. Chapter 33 is a listof Important Anniversaries in Asante and Gold Coast history. Thisincludes a rather touching notice of Asares fathers death in 1863. The twoappendices provide excellent details on Asante drum and horn calls, and onthe practice of divination.

IX

I have little further to add for the purpose of this paper is simply to drawattention to Asare and his writings and to contextualise both historically.Those with considerably more knowledge of Twi locution than I have tellme that read out loud AA reveals its mixed origins in both oral and writtengenres.This reflects Asares own intellectual formation. In spoken Twi history

is abakosem, that is nsem a abo ko, a story of past things, or it is thereductive abasem, something that happened. More elegantly and indeedproverbially it is tete ka asom, old things that remain in the ears. This lastis glossed as tradition survives, a tribute paid by the present to the livinglegacy of the past.


History then is an oral performance (adeye), in the exact sense ofdoing things with speaking about the past. Speech of this sort is to bedelivered in a responsible way so as to enlighten the audience. It ordainsdry, that is to say fluent and unadorned, talk. No one should speak aboutthe past in public in bent speech, for talk of this kind (kasakoa) is inven-tive and metaphorical and appropriate to persuasion or the making of a case.The oral performance of history is hedged about with oaths and penaltiesfor free interpretation. Its intent resides in itself.All of these features are evident in AA. So too of course are the results of

Asares mission education and literacy. The division of the narrative intochapters and the general concern to provide a linear chronology are the mostobvious structural outcomes of this aspect of his formation. All this isunsurprising, for Asare wrote a history on the European model, but in Twifor an Akan readership. What is most striking about AA is that even withinthe conventions imposed by the written form the chapters are very muchtranscriptions or renderings of Asante oral discourse about the past. In thatsense AA is unlike the published version of Reindorfs History of the GoldCoast and Asante. This was published in 1895, but only after a series of edi-torial interventions and recastings by Christaller and others in Basel. It willbe interesting to see if Reindorfs Ga language manuscript text, when it ispublished, has as much of the oral historical formation of its author presentin it as does Asares AA.

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38.1.mccaskie

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