Witchcraft Statecraft

Both for Wilks on Asante and for Hopkins on West Africa … the long-term result of the ending of the
slave trade was a crisis of the

aristocracy or, as John Lonsdale commented, 'a crisis of monarchy. - Commoners & Private Ownership In Asante, 1807-96 - G. Austin
‘I cannot bring any specific charges’, Bantamahene

Osei Mampon reported from Kumase, ‘but those of
my people who have accepted the Fetish no longer
visit or salute me’.
Page | 1
Sakrabundi and Aberewa, 1889-1910
John Parker
‘The fetish is so much respected that some even call

it a king’, he observed. ‘When the priest is talking to
the people in the name of the fetish, he uses the
expression ‘‘ohene se ’’ (the king says)’.
STATECRAFT
WITCHCRAFT –
Asante – A Modern Empire
An Empire Because Of War & Trade
commonwealth in postmodern akan
accumulation of wealth and corruption,
modernism – the individual and the empire
as a soul eating mechanism
curated by
amma birago
Each Akan belongs to a consanguineal group called “abusua”.

An abusua is a unit of persons who trace their ancestry to a
common ancestress called Aberewa (old lady). It is the abusua
that imposes upon the individual identity of Akan citizenship.
The Akan of West Africa: Towards an African
Theological Anthropology C. Owusu-Gyamfi
... Asante belief and knowledge militated against the

ideological structurations of the Asante state because power
was diffuse by nature and immanent in the Asante cosmos.
Access to spiritual power was restricted by knowledge, but
Analysts of Asante society usually attribute the superiority of the Asantehene’s office to its “aura of mystical preeminence”, which is
derived from its connection to the Golden Stool. Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History - Akyeampong & Obeng
Both for Wilks on Asante and for Hopkins on West Africa … the long-term result of the ending of the slave trade was a crisis of the
Asante awareness of the existence and nature of spiritual

forces was general.
Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -
Akyeampong and Obeng
Outside All Reason: Page | 2

Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology
Bruce Kapferer
The Magic of Modernity: Fragmentations of Power Most recent
studies of magic and cultic practice, of sorcery and witchcraft,
powerfully insist that these practices are thoroughly modern.
The power of the king as sorcerer is in what he can force
together in spite of the socially differentiating and divisive
potencies that may fragment the king's order. Such potency is
not merely in the king's capacity to order, but in the way he
orders.
New Answers To Old Questions Tradition, Modernity, And Postcoloniality

Reconsidering Witchcraft: Postcolonial Analytic (Un)Certainties
Todd Sanders
African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static but are highly flexible and deeply of our contemporary
world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch meaning and merit of modernity
as experienced in different historical and cultural settings.
… African witchcraft may well be part of modernity, but by no means needs to about modernity.
Whether in state politics, legal institutions, the economy, or simply as everyday "public secrets" that permeate all
these arenas, witchcraft is all-pervasive in Africa today. By contextualizing witchcraft beliefs and practices, both
spatially and historically, this new wave of studies has endeavored to show the myriad of ways that witchcraft forms
an integral part of the African postcolonial experience (see Moore and Sanders 2001). To this end, a number of
contemporary Africanist scholars have implied-and some have insisted-that witchcraft discourses and practices
provide moralizing metacommentaries on the meaning of modernity as experienced in different localities. In this
sense African witchcraft has been seen not only as part of modernity but also as a locally inflected critique of it; as a
local lexicon, in other words, that points up and engages with modernity's latent and blatant immoralities.
… African witches, witchcraft, and the discourses about them have been seen as "a critique of the capitalist
economy which makes people exchange essential values of fertility, health and long life for material gains" (Meyer
1992:118, 1995); "a critical commentary on inequality and on the violence that underlay power" (Smith 2001:807);
potentially provoking "a self-critique of the capitalist West" (Austen 1993:105); "modernity's prototypical
malcontents" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993); a local discourse that "has allowed those who participate in its
reproduction to see the goods and technologies of modernity as both desirable and disruptive" (West 1997:693); and
"a metacommentary on the deeply ambivalent project of modernity" (Sanders 1999b:128).
… the underlying cost of all society is the violent death of some portion of its members. … Our deepest secret, the
collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the death of this sacrificial group at the hands of
the group itself. This is the totem principle concretized. … the group becomes a group by agreeing not to disagree
about the group-making principle.
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion
Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle
Page | 3
‘Aberewa e! Wukum a kum nea srade wom’,

the performers were said to sing at the god’s weekly, often all-
night, ceremonies taking place on the edges of towns and
villages across the forest zone:
‘Aberewa, listen!
If you kill, then kill one who is fat (i.e. rich)’.
John Parker
The primacy of politics (and later the economy) in Western ideology often deters our understanding of different
kinds of ideologies. As a result, in the classic anthropological studies of divine kingship, the divinity of the ruler and
the rituals he performed were often separated from the political sphere and seen as a part of a cultural superstructure
which only reflected the more fundamental social order (McKinnon 2000, 41- 42).
Peasants in 19th-Century Asante -
Kwame Arhin
Power is both oppressive and supportive,

but all Asante people are aware that in their own culture
there is little usable oxygen outside of its workings. ….

Power originated in the Asante cosmos and was accessible to all. … Chieftaincy and kingship were later
developments that introduced the coerciveness associated with Western definitions of power.
If the Asante universe was suffused with power, the potential

wielders of power at any given time could be limitless. A unique
feature of the Asante state was its willingness to incorporate
all forms of power, a conscious realization of the fact that
power could not be confined nor monopolized.
Page | 4
… Analysts of Asante society usually attribute the superiority of the

Asantehene’s office to its “aura of mystical preeminence”, which is
derived from its connection to the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi, lit.
‘Friday’s Golden Stool’) (Fortes 1969, 142).
The Golden Stool was "a shrine" embodying "the soul of the Ashanti people." … the survival of the Golden Stool
pointed the contrast between the noble Asante, "clinging tenaciously to an ideal," and "a somewhat materially-
minded" (and by implication, spiritually impoverished) "Western world." … Possession of the Golden Stool was a
weapon, an enabling tool; it assisted to the commanding heights of authority and it helped deliver into the
outstretched hand the reins of power and government. If it could elicit an objective obedience, then it might also
command an enforced allegiance. In point of fact, the Golden Stool is positively crusted with the mud of power
politics.
R.S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History
T. C. McCaskie
The distinction between "authority"

(political power) and tumi is pertinent to this discussion.
Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850-1950

T. C. McCaskie
There are two possible ways of approaching the distribution of power in Asante society. One can advocate a model
of state and civil society in which the state facilitated and coordinated the harmonious working of all forms of
power. The relationship between the asantehene and the various priests in Asante fits this model. The second
approach is to view state power as driving underground some forms of mystical power, such as witchcraft.
The primacy of politics (and later the economy) in Western ideology

often deters our understanding of different kinds of ideologies. As a
result, in the classic anthropological studies of divine kingship, the
divinity of the ruler and the rituals he performed were often separated
from the political sphere and seen as a part of a cultural superstructure
which only reflected the more fundamental social order (McKinnon

2000, 41- 42).
Peasants in 19th-Century Asante –
Kwame Arhin
Page | 5
A close reading of the archival record of twentieth-century witch-

finding movements suggests that both unconscious bayi and the
deliberate use of aduto were more often than not seen to be directed by
the ‘have-nots’ towards the ‘haves’ rather than the other way around.
The word in English that emerges most commonly from the sources as
a synonym of bayi is ‘envy’.
Witchcraft, Anti-Witchcraft and Trans-Regional Ritual Innovation
in Early Colonial Ghana: Sakrabundi and Aberewa, 1889-1910
John Parker
Pompous Trappings
These were the status symbols, the privileges of rank and wealth. propped up the egos of African kings, chiefs,
grandees, and rich helping to set them apart from the common folk. The roster of trappings would be long: from
white satin robes, brocaded silk mantles, trimmed French musketeers' hats, embroidered admirals' uniforms, flags,
multicolored umbrellas, silver-headed canes, silver tobacco watches and clocks, music boxes, hand organs,
kaleidoscopes, silverware, glassware and china, and damask napkins, to velvet-upholstered armchairs with gilt legs,
satin-upholstered couches, beds draped taffeta, Turkish carpets, sedan chairs, caparisoned horses, and stagecoaches.
Pompous trappings were generally not trade goods but presents to facilitate trade.
Umbrellas - Symbol, the umbrella goes back to at least 1200 B.C. in Egypt crossed the Sahara to the royal court
of Mali by the fourteenth idea seems to have reached the court of Benin by the 1480s; that, the implication of a big
umbrella that Benin oral historians still being among the first gifts from Jodo II to the Oba. By 1670 were bringing
large parasols to Ardra on the Slave Coast, and van Nyendael took a gift parasol from Elmina to Osei Tutu.
Eighteenth century umbrellas became symbols of rank, wealth, command on the Slave and Gold Coasts. Labarthe
observed that at Amoku on the Gold Coast chiefs alone had the right to have umbrellas carried by their slaves.
Witchcraft, Anti-Witchcraft
And Trans-Regional Ritual Innovation In Early Colonial Ghana:
Sakrabundi And Aberewa, 1889-1910
John Parker
The origins and dynamics of Aberewa, witchcraft movement that rose to prominence in the Akan forest region and
the Gold Coast … suggests that while the political, and economic changes of the early colonial period acted as a
catalyst for its spread expansion, Aberewa emerged from an earlier cult called Sakrabundi was already moving from
the savanna into the northern reaches of the empire by the 188os.
Aberewa or, in the Twi language the Akan peoples, 'The Old Woman'. Aberewa rose to prominence Asante
heartland in 1906, five years after the annexation of the great forest kingdom by the British, and from there spread
south to colonial territory of the Gold Coast. For two or three years it attracted numbers of adherents, but in 1908
was suppressed by the colonial adminis- tration and went into rapid decline. Aberewa was followed by Hwemeso Page | 6
('Watch Over Me'), which enjoyed a similarly widespread but short-efflorescence from 1920 to 1923 before it too
was outlawed. Hwemeso was succeeded by wave after wave of movements throughout the remainder of the inter-
war period.
Much of the early literature on the phenomenon was concerned to demonstrate that the cults were recent innovations
- that is, were specifically twentieth-century responses to the mounting anxieties brought about by colonial conquest
and rapid social change.
In common with witchcraft belief in much of West and Central Africa, bayi was perceived by the Akan peoples as a
destructive force projected either consciously or un- consciously from the mind of the bayifo that would consume
the inner essence or 'soul' of the victim, ultimately leading to the latter's death. In normative terms it was regarded as
distinct from the magical manipulation of physical 'poison' (aduto or aduru bone) or evil charms (ogbaniba sumail),
although in reality these actions were often subsumed under the concept of bayi. The etymology is unclear, but a
possible derivation is ba (child) +yi (to remove), the literal notion 'to take away a child' underscoring the close
association of witchcraft with issues of fertility, reproduction and infant mortality: T. C. McCaskie, State and
Society in Pre-colonial Asante (Cambridge, 1995)
John Parker
To what extent did the sudden expansion of Aberewa result from the imposition of colonial rule ? For Asante at
least, the timing is certainly suggestive. Aberewa swept through Asante ten years after the arrest and removal of
Asantehene Agye- man Prempeh by British forces in 1896 and just five years after the defeat of the Yaa Asantewaa
uprising and the formal annexation of the kingdom in 1901. On the supply side of the expanding trans-regional
commerce in ritual goods and knowledge, there can be little doubt that the imposition of colonial peace greatly
facilitated the movement of the cult across what had since 1874 been an armed frontier between 'rebel' Gyaman and
Asante. Shifting patterns of demand are more difficult to determine. The documentary record contains some
indications that the termination of Asante sovereignty did trigger a widespread sense of dispossession, anxiety and
apprehension - feelings of unease that were expressed in the established idioms of bayi.
'Formerly Prempeh was our protector', one resident of Kumase proclaimed in

1908, 'but as he is no more among us, a new and strong protector [has] been
give[n] to us in Aberewa'.
Interviewed in 1945, Akosua Pokuaa of the village of AdeFbeba near Kumase recalled how in the first century the
land seemed to be 'filling up with a rising Tauxier recorded similar fears on the other side of the border in French
Gyaman, where a perceived intensification in the nocturnal activities of witches in the immediate aftermath of
colonial conquest resulted in a further expansion of Sakrabundi and the other great anti-witchcraft deities.4 The
notion that the shock of colonial conquest triggered a generalized psychological dissonance works less well for the
Gold Coast Colony, where many African states and societies - especially those on the Atlantic seaboard -
experienced a prolonged, negotiated transition to British colonial rule stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century.
John Parker
Page | 7
Yet there can be little doubt that on the Gold Coast as well as in Asante, the sudden expansion of the colonial cash
economy fuelled by the take-off of cocoa exports in the 1900s served to deepen existing social tensions while at the
same time creating a whole raft of new problems and anxieties. Moreover, at the very moment that economic and
social change began to accelerate, the colonial state removed the power of indigenous rulers to detect and punish
offences concerning the practice of bayi.
The widespread desire to reconstruct a sense of community based on the well-enforced moral certainties of the past
emerges most explicitly in the ubiquitous lists of 'commandments' that Aberewa adherents were bound to observe -
on pain of death at the hands of the vigilant god. These typically extended from a strict prohibition on the use of bayi
and aduto through to injunctions against theft, extortion, adultery, excessive litigation, envy and quarrelling, and on
to the insistence that neighbours and family assist each other in trade and agricultural ventures. What is particularly
striking about these commandments is the way in which so many made explicit reference to moral issues arising
from the process of individual accumulation. To explain the spread of organized witch-finding from Gyaman,
however, we must look beyond the sociological background to the agency of individual historical actors.
John Parker
The relationship between Aberewa and money raises a number of complex issues. If wealthy individuals were
indeed targeted by accusations of bayi - and despite the obvious bias in the sources, this appears to have been the
case in at least some instances - was it simply the result of unscrupulous ritual entrepreneurs manipulating the
popular dread of witches as a mechanism of accumulation? Alternatively, were so-called 'bigmen' identified as
abayifo because their wealth was understood to have been illegitimate, accumulated at the expense of the
community? Similar questions have emerged in much of the recent anthropological research into the 'modernity' of
witchcraft in contemporary Africa. The tendency in this literature is to answer the second question in the
affirmative; to argue, in other words, that the idiom of witchcraft provides the most fluent means by which many
Africans perceive and articulate the uneven accumulation of wealth and power. With regard to Aberewa, it must be
emphasized that to make the same assumption does violence to the entire corpus of literature on the meanings of
wealth and accumulation in Akan culture.
In short, the emergence of the Akan forest kingdoms in their historic form was from the outset intimately bound up
with the large-scale accumulation of wealth on the part of aggressively acquisitive gold-mining and agricultural
entrepreneurs. Far from being perceived as anti-social, such wealth was celebrated.
A close reading of the archival record of twentieth-century witch-finding movements suggests that both unconscious
bayi and the deliberate use of aduto were more often than not seen to be directed by the 'have-nots' towards the
'haves' rather than the other way around. The word in English the sources as a synonym of bayi is 'envy'. of Akan
witchcraft and anti-witchcraft too complex and nuanced to be reduced economy.
‘When the priest is talking to the people
in the name of the fetish, he uses the expression

‘‘ohene se ’’ (the king says)’.
… there has been an extraordinary explosion of anthropological

literature over the past decade focused on the ‘modernity’ of witchcraft,
spirit possession and other forms of ritual practice in postcolonial Page | 8
Africa.
The word in English that emerges most commonly from

the sources as a synonym of bayi is ‘envy’.
John Parker
… "crude materialism," the simple pursuit of power

McCaskie’s study stands as a major achievement for Asante
historiography.
'State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante'
T. C. McCaskie - Reviewed by Sandra E. Greene
John Parker
There were also reports that many of these victims were wealthy individuals
deliberately targeted by the cult’s local practitioners, who claimed the right to
appropriate a portion of the movable property of the deceased.

the performers were said to sing at the god’s weekly, often all-night,
ceremonies taking place on the edges of towns and villages across the forest zone:
‘Aberewa, listen! If you kill, then kill one who is fat (i.e. rich)’
According to a variety of negotiated arrangements, the property of the deceased

was then divided up between their family, those who had established
themselves as Aberewa ‘priests’ and local office-holders.
Intellectually and in terms of belief, the 1880s and 1890s

were a period when the tensions engendered by cognitive
dissonance became insupportable. Page | 9
The Golden Stool in the 1950s could and did resurrect 'objective'
religiosity; it could not exhume the fiscal system that had existed under
Kwaku Dua Panin. So, in sociohistorical terms the akonkofo
represent the rise of a very confused 'individualism';
Accumulation: Wealth and Belief in Asante History

Part II - the Twentieth Century
T. C. McCaskie
What was left behind after the 1880s was, bluntly, a class without a place society. The great mass of nhenkwaa
without office were simply anomalous without the Asantehene. Hated by most Asante because of the 'nhenkwaa -
ambition, pride, greed, vanity, contemptuousness, criminality under royal tection - this was also a class severely in
danger. Moreover, the Golden Stool, guarantor of riches and power, had failed them; the driving ideology of
accumulation and social achievement no longer possessed rewards to distribute.
Asantes who in numbers in the 1880s and 1890s repudiated the authority Golden Stool because of the fiscal
exactions and illicit brutalities of the state fled as refugees into the Gold Coast Colony. Much has been recorded
concerning these refugees. … their entrepreneurial individualism, a development typically fuelled their removal of
gold from Asante. ... Such men were one of the 'leading edges' in nineteenth-century transformation of attitudes
towards accumulation, wealth belief.
.
… power does not emanate from a single source and social formations
are composed of centers and epicenters of power in dynamic
relationship with one another.
Creativity of Power -
Cosmology and Action in African Societies
- Arens and Karp
Possession of the Golden Stool was a weapon, an enabling tool; it assisted to the commanding heights of authority
and it helped deliver into the outstretched hand the reins of power and government. If it could elicit an objective
obedience, then it might also command an enforced allegiance. In point of fact, the Golden Stool is positively
crusted with the mud of power politics.
T. C. McCaskie

A closer look at the distribution of power in Asante society may promote

a deeper understanding of domankama. If the Asante universe was suffused
with power, the potential wielders of power at any given time could be limitless.
A unique feature of the Asante state was its willingness to incorporate all forms
of power, a conscious realization of the fact that power could not be confined
nor monopolized.
Page | 10
Gareth Austin, 'No elders were present':

Commoners and private ownership in Asante, 1807-96
'In this vast country, Gold alone is king. If any get that wealth he is king.
We are all free aborigines of this country.'

Kwame Arhin
First, there was the Kumasi state, administered like any other Asante state by the Asantehene and his council
members. Second, Kumasi, together with the neighbouring Asante-Twi-speaking states, formed the Asante Union,
with a council consisting of the Asantehene, some members of the Kumasi state council, and the heads of the other
Asante states. Third, there were the "provinces," consisting of the other Twi-speaking peoples north and south of
Asante. Fourth, there were the non-Twi-speaking protectorate and tributary states southeast and north of the Twi-
speaking peoples. The provincial, protectorate, and tributary states were either conquered or in some other way
brought into subordination to the Asantehene between about 1700 and 1807.
Captives from the wars of conquest were sold into slavery, and the conquered were made to pay war indemnities and
tribute in cash (gold nuggets or gold dust) or in natural or craft products such as human beings, livestock, gold,
cotton, threads, and lime. The distinction between provinces and tributaries, from the fiscal point of view, was that
the former were subject to taxes and levies similar to those paid by the peoples of the Asante Union, while the
protectorates and tributaries were subject to set annual payments (Bowdich 1819: 319-21; Arhin 1967b; Wilks 1975:
64-71; Terray 1975: 1 19).
Throughout the 18th century and the early 19th, conquered peoples revolted and thus invited punitive expeditions,
the victims of which were sold to European slavers, but it is a mistake to state, as Howard does, that the subjects of
the empire were periodically raided and the captives sold into slavery. The provinces, protectorates, and tributaries
contributed a good deal towards the maintenance of the court and of Asante military domination of the region. Their
contributions were paralleled, however, by those of the producers within the union, who paid funeral, installation,
ritual, and war taxes and levies on game and on gold. Visitors to the Asantehene and his officials passing through
the villages of the union were billeted on the village heads, who demanded contributions from the villagers for their
upkeep (Bowdich 1819, Dupuis 1824, Freeman 1844, Ramseyer and Kuhne 1874). …Traders in gold or slaves were
taxed in gold at the borders. The seller in the Kumasi market was taxed by the toll collectors (dwa beresofo). Gold
dust dropped in the course of transactions in the marketplace had to be left untouched to be gathered and cleansed
for the state at the end of the year through communal labour (Bowdich 1819: 320). The king's palace attendants
(nhenkwa) were permitted raids on the market goods for their upkeep (Bowdich 1819: 291). Finally, the state seized
part of the movable property of deceased entrepreneurs, mainly sub ordinate power holders who had collected
commissions on tributes and been permitted to trade on their own behalf and that of the state (Bowdich 1819: 319;
Rattray 1929: 107-9).
In sum, the state heavily extracted surpluses from all producers for its upkeep and for the purpose of military and
political expansion (Arhin 1982). It is clear that in this framework one can indeed speak of a "peasantry," unless one
insists on distinguishing between the extraction of surpluses by the state and that by "international capitalism."

Kwame Arhin
Page | 11
'In this vast country, Gold alone is king. If any get that wealth he is king.
We are all free aborigines of this country.'

The asantehene was, among other things, okomfo panyin
(chief priest) of Asante: in periods of interregnum, spirit
possession ceased until a new asantehene was installed.
Among the Zulu, the supreme sorcerer is the king (Gluckman 1954)
Sorcery as the Imaginary Face of Power
... sorcery is that imaginary formation of force and power that is
to be expected in social circumstances that are disjunctive
or in some sense dis continuous.
Outside All Reason: Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology
Bruce Kapferer
In mediaeval Sri Lanka, only the king was able to exercise the magical potencies of sorcery (Peiris 1956). Among
the Zulu, the supreme sorcerer is the king (Gluckman 1954). That this is so indicates the nature of the power of the
king, who creates or recreates the social order (as in the annual rites of kingship in Asia, Polynesia and Africa) and
does so through fearful acts of exclusion and inclusion.
In Asanteman ("Asante nation") the Asantehene managed the Kumase central

government of key officeholders and main constituents of the polity. …
Euro-African Commerce And Social Chaos:
Akan Societies In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries
Kwasi Konadu

Kwame Arhin
Bowdich as follows: The King is heir to the gold of every subject,
from the highest to the lowest ... …
Traders in gold or slaves were taxed in gold at the borders.
The seller in the Kumasi market was taxed by the toll collectors. Page | 12
Gold dust dropped in the course of transactions in the marketplace
had to be left untouched to be gathered and cleansed for the state
at the end of the year through communal labour.
The Great Ancestors - In Asante Thought

Customarily, he had the right to levy a wide range of taxes and mobilize his subjects for
war or communal tasks. Kurankyi-Taylor (1951, 18) called the Asante lineage a perpetual
corporation, meaning that it consisted not only of its living members but also of the dead
and unborn. In this scheme of things, the office of the chief held a nodal position since it
stood between the living who were considered the guardians of “the fortunes and affairs
of the whole body corporate” (ibid., 172) and the ancestors (asamanfoɔ) who had
absolute power over the former.
Divine Rulers in a Secular State
Timo Kallinen
Order and Conflict in the Asante Empire: A Study in Interest Group Relations
Agnes A. Aidoo
The Asante were and are acutely aware that their culture, in the most literal sense, was hacked out of nature. And
this understanding … engendered the abiding fear that, without unremitting application and effort, the fragile
defensible place called culture would simply be overwhelmed or reclaimed by an irruptive and anarchic nature. …
The successes achieved in the battle to hack culture out of nature are mirrored in reports by European travelers who
visited Asante. They discovered a country with an elaborate infrastructure and a sophisticated bureaucratic system.
Asante's capital Kumasi, which had expanded throughout the eighteenth century, was well connected with other
towns within the federation by means of wide roads.

Kwame Arhin
Kumasi was the political, administrative, religious, and cultural capital of the Asante Union and of Greater Asante.
In the 19th century, the culture of Kumasi, with its heterogeneous population including peoples drawn from all over
the territories under the Asantehene, Muslims from as far afield as the Maghreb and Mecca, and European visitors
from the coast, took a shape distinct from that of the surrounding villages (Bowdich 1819, Freeman 1967 [1898]).
Tarnishing the Golden Stool

Fenna Maximiliane Wächter
Kumasi was the center of the federation, and despite the similarities of the political structure, it was different from
other towns. While other towns in Asante served as large trading centers or centers of production, Kumasi was a
“government town” and McCaskie has suggested that it was filled with office holders and those who were hoping to Page | 13
become office holders themselves one day. Bonnat, who lived in Kumasi as a prisoner for a while, recalled:
The tremendous importance of the king of Achanty draws to Coomassie a large number of young men, belonging to
the best families of the kingdom … they are drawn above all by the hope of coming to the attention of the king, and
they neglect no opportunity of pleasing him … one sees them continually following in his footsteps, soliciting his
favours and his smiles.
Some Chiefs Are “More Under” Than Others

This corresponds with the conventional view of religion and politics on the part of modern, secularist social science
which is that in the ancient past the political, that is, secular, ambitions of men gave birth to oppressive superstitions
(Asad 2003, 192–193) and the task of the analyst is to reveal the political underneath the religious veneer. However,
we should realize that in the Asante ideology such layering did not exist and the political was ordered by the
religious. … the foundation of the Asante kingdom and the distribution of rights and privileges to the different chiefs
was a ritual process: a direct consequence of sacrificial exchanges. This will also help us to grasp the enormous
difference between the pre-colonial and colonial conceptions of chieftaincy and kingship in Asante.
Sacralizing political structures? Analysts of Asante society usually attribute the superiority of the Asantehene’s
office to its “aura of mystical preeminence”, which is derived from its connection to the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa
Kofi, lit. ‘Friday’s Golden Stool’) (Fortes 1969, 142). The histories concerning the birth of the kingdom and
emergence of the stool are widely known and they may be summarized as follows. The chiefdom of Kwaman (later
renamed Kumasi) was held as a tributary state by the kingdom of Denkyira, a southern neighbour of Asante.
Timo Kallinen
Gold is the king, Gold is the ruler. At the same time, the
proverb may well suggest that those who have gold will be elevated to
the position of a ruler themselves. Other proverbs support that
argument: “the rich man is the elder” is one example, suggesting in
addition to the fact that wealth comes with power and it also comes
with wisdom.
The importance of gold in Asante is evidenced by a great number of proverbs dealing with its role in society. One of
them establishes that “gold is king”. This can be interpreted on two levels: the first and obvious one is referring to
gold and its position in society; just as the king and the paramount chiefs it had a considerable amount of influence
and judicial power.
At the same time, the proverb may well suggest that those who have gold will be
elevated to the position of a ruler themselves. Other proverbs support that
argument: “the rich man is the elder” is one example, suggesting in addition to
the fact that wealth comes with power and it also comes with wisdom.
The accumulation of wealth was a crucial civic duty in Asante.

As the state became more centralized in Asante, Asante kings sought to promote the perception that power emanated
from a central source by placing themselves at the nexus of relations between the natural, social, and supernatural Page | 14
worlds. The idea was to make kingship appear indispensable to the functioning of the social order. It is important to
remember that in the acquisition and distribution of power, which are always uneven, the users of power operate
from different perspectives.

Timo Kallinen
Customarily, he had the right to levy a wide range of taxes and mobilize his subjects for war or communal tasks.
Kurankyi-Taylor (1951, 18) called the Asante lineage a perpetual corporation, meaning that it consisted not only of
its living members but also of the dead and unborn. In this scheme of things, the office of the chief held a nodal
position since it stood between the living who were considered the guardians of “the fortunes and affairs of the
whole body corporate” (ibid., 172) and the ancestors (asamanfoɔ) who had absolute power over the former.
… the ancestors were considered to be benevolent towards their successors, but shameful deeds by the living that
disgraced the ancestors invited punishment (ibid., 191–192). Hence, the kinship relation between the ancestors and
the living was not severed by death and the descendants of the dead chiefs were perceived as the most appropriate
persons among the living to approach the ancestral spirits with offerings and petitions (Busia 1968).
As Fortes (1963, 59) put it, the Asante matrilineages were committed to being “of pure freeborn descent” because
“their entire social existence hinges on their prerogatives of hereditary office and rank; and these would be
jeopardized if the established laws of kinship, descent, inheritance and succession were set aside in the slightest
particular”.
That is, throughout much of its eighteenth and nineteenth-century history, Asante was a highly centralised state with
the locus of government firmly rooted in Kumase. … And the Asante of the early colonial period was in itself a
"peculiar institution." Briefly, and I have explored the matter elsewhere, from the reign of Opoku Ware (ca. 1720-
1750) to that of Kwaku Dua Panin (1834-1867), the political history of Asante is that of the systematic
aggrandisement of Kumase and its office-holders at the expense of the territorial divisions and provinces. However,
this centralizing tendency was sharply reversed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century; …. Consequently,
the Kumase observed by Rattray was a rump structure, leaderless and severely (and rapidly) weakened in the course
of a generation.
R.S. Rattray and the Construction of Asante History: An Appraisal
T. C. McCaskie

If in fact, one left Asante in order to evade taxes, for example,

one was committing a crime. ... If an Asante returned from a journey outside
the kingdom’s borders with tattoos on his body, indicating another identity
or allegiance, he could be executed by the king. … he had stolen himself
from the Asante state, a deeply antisocial act.
Despite the importance placed on people, a small group of slaves was viewed as consumables. These slaves were Page | 15
referred to as nkyere (sg.akyere). They were destined to be sacrificed for ritual purposes. Whole villages in Asante
served as homes to these nkyere where they could live for years before being summoned to be sacrificed at an event
such as Odwira, to provide servants in the afterlife.
Nkoa and slaves alike belonged to a particular stool or stool holder, who in turn belonged to the highest stool, the
Golden Stool, or the highest office holder, the Asantehene. The importance assigned to all groups of people within
Asante and the obligations put on them also had implications for their freedom to leave the state. If in fact, one left
Asante in order to evade taxes, for example, one was committing a crime. The high value placed on people in Asante
meant that they were assets of the state. If an Asante returned from a journey outside the kingdom’s borders with
tattoos on his body, indicating another identity or allegiance, he could be executed by the king. By changing his
identity and choosing not to be Asante any longer, he had stolen himself from the Asante state, a deeply antisocial
act.
‘Developmental’ Divergences And Continuities Between Colonial

And Pre-Colonial Regimes: The Case Of Asante, Ghana, 1701-1957
Gareth Austin
The states’ authority, resources and aims
It is well established that the distribution of power and authority within the Asante kingdom became gradually more
centralized during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When it was formed, to defeat an unwelcome
overlord, the Asanteman (Asante state) was a confederacy of major (‘paramount’) chieftaincies led by the largest,
Kumasi, which supplied the ruler (the Asantehene). As Asante’s conquests continued, the lion’s share of the territory
and tribute accrued to the Asantehene and lesser Kumasi chiefs, though the provincial paramountcies were not left
out. The Asantehene established central authority that went far beyond ‘first among equals’, if indeed that was the
original model. An important symbol of this was the Asantehene’s reservation to himself of the power to carry out
capital punishment (Wilks 1975).
The nature of state authority:
bureaucracy, patrimonialism, and indirect rule
In his pioneering studies of the Asante state, Ivor Wilks argued very strongly that in this process of centralizing
authority at the expense of the provincial chiefs the monarchy established a genuinely ‘bureaucratic’ administrative
structure, with recruitment and promotion by merit (Wilks [esp.] 1966, 1975). Critics have maintained that another
Weberian term, ‘patrimonial’, i.e. personal rule, better describes the system (Arhin 1986, Yarak 1990; compare
McCaskie 1995 and Wilks’s responses in Wilks 1989, 1993). The debate has focussed on what Wilks calls the
‘service stools’, whose occupants performed specific roles in the central government (a ‘stool’ is the chiefly
equivalent of a European throne). These stools were created by the Asantehene, and their non-traditional character
was highlighted by the fact that they were inherited patrilineally rather than matrilineally, in contrast to established
Asante stools. …. most accurately seen both as offices and as chieftaincies. The fact that they were hereditary is
hard to reconcile with a bureaucratic model. This does not mean, however, that this system could not offer ‘careers
open to talent’. The aim was evidently to make the central government more effective administratively as well as to
secure its loyalty to the person - and office, as Wilks would rightly emphasise - of the monarch. There seems no
doubt that the latter was perceived as an extremely powerful, indeed fearful figure, within Asante and beyond until
1874 at least.
Kumase grew in power at the expense of the union states,

pitting the Kumase chiefs (nsafohene) - appointees of the Asantehene -
against the amanhene (paramount chiefs of the union states), who inherited
their positions. Asante politics remained fluid, "and the great officers of Page | 16
the kingdom, even the king himself, were subject to rapid changes of fortune."
The accumulation of wealth was a crucial civic duty

in Asante.
Gold is the king, Gold is the ruler. At the same time, the proverb may well suggest that those who
have gold will be elevated to the position of a ruler themselves.
He argues that the ethic of "achievement by accumulation" embodied in the hierarchical relationship of the Golden
Stool to the Golden Elephant Tail was transformed in the mid-19th century in part by the appearance of an alternative
model of social and economic development. This was associated with the British occupation of the southern Gold
Coast, but was probably seen in context not as foreign but as another African view having revolutionary
consequences [the subject of the second as yet unpublished part of his analysis.
Colonial Encounters, European Kettles, and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth
and Early Seventeenth Century Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes
Meghan C. Howey
'In this vast country, Gold alone is king. If any get that
wealth he is king. We are all free aborigines of this country.'
In the last quarter of the century, the commoner merchants became 'gold-takers', that is, brokers in the gold trade on
the coast, and also turned to rubber production and exchange, principally in the Brong-Ahafo districts.
… Firstly, the individual accumulator of surplus or 'big man' (Obiremon; pl., Abirenpon); secondly, the phenomenon
of aggrandised and territorially competitive petty chiefships (the consolidation and institutionalisation through ritual
of the most successful abirenpon); and thirdly, the unitary state presided over by the Asantehene (construed in this
aspect as the superordinate Obironmon). The developments summarised above spanned some two hundred
years - from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries - and in their gestation they imparted to the Asante
social formation some of its most basic ethical imperatives, its most enduring grundnorms.
These are, firstly, the Asante construction of the nature process (the indivisibility of the continuum of ancestors-
living-unborn). Within the foregoing intellectualist framework, the ultimate meaning of accumulation and of wealth Page | 17
was construed as being social rather than individual. That is, all accumulation constituted an act of societal rather
than individual increase - an obligatory aggrandisement or enlargement of the stock of human (Asan te) capital,
undertaken in conscious discharge of duties towards the achievement of the ancestors and of responsibilities towards
the 'historic' future represented by the unborn. Thus, at its most fundamental, the accumulation of wealth was
basically about the amplification of cultural space over historical time.
Accumulation, Wealth and Belief in Asante History
to the Close of the Nineteenth Century.
T. C. McCaskie
Aspects of Precolonial Akan Economy

K. Y. Daaku
Unlike many other states, however, the Akan, whose political organization was but an enlargement of the nuclear
family, saw in the state the fulfillment of the aspirations of all its members. From the fifteenth century trade had
proved the best source of wealth. It was therefore open to all. Through trade rather than con-quest the states were
able to regularly incorporate other sources of capital, such as goods and slaves, to sustain their economy. The
openness of the society in which outsiders were so easily integrated enabled the Akan polities to survive.
H. Hymer has suggested that the egalitarian nature of the Akan land tenure militated against the emergence of a
landowning class, which would have capitalized on the land and turned the states into modern capitalist societies.
As indicated, during his lifetime the individual accumulator of wealth received public or social acknowledgement of
his achievement on behalf of society - ultimately and at the highest level by being invested with the title of
obiremopon. However, at his death, his accumulated wealth- the evidence of his capacity for and his skill at
increase, the benchmark of his social responsibility - passed from his individual purview into culture; it belonged to
the nation (Asanteman) in the symbolic personage of the Asantehene, the custodian of the Golden Stool - which, in
turn, was the quintessential embodiment of the continuity of historic culture (sunsum).

T. C. McCaskie
In line with Asante practice, the agents of the state were the principal beneficiaries of these developments; but, at
this time, large numbers of lesser functionaries and a host of private individuals had their horizons lifted to the
vision of the man of wealth. Thus, at the very moment when the state was applying the death penalty in order to
practise and to facilitate quite illegitimate levels of appropriation, there were rapidly increasing numbers of people in
Asante with something significant to lose.
K. Y. Daaku
Outside All Reason:

Bruce Kapferer
studies of magic and cultic practice, of sorcery and witchcraft, Page | 18
orders.
Power is both oppressive and supportive,

but all Asante people are aware that in their own culture
there is little usable oxygen outside of its workings. ….

Power originated in the Asante cosmos and was accessible to all. … Chieftaincy and kingship were later
developments that introduced the coerciveness associated with Western definitions of power.
If the Asante universe was suffused with power, the potential

wielders of power at any given time could be limitless. A unique
feature of the Asante state was its willingness to incorporate
all forms of power, a conscious realization of the fact that
power could not be confined nor monopolized.
… But there is no indication that this fundamentally positive view of individual accumulation shifted with the
widening of economic opportunities under the new colonial dispensation. A close reading of the archival record of
twentieth-century witch-finding movements suggests that both unconscious bayi and the deliberate use of aduto
were more often than not seen to be directed by the ‘have-nots’ towards the ‘haves’ rather than the other way
around. The word in English that emerges most commonly from the sources as a synonym of bayi is ‘envy’.
Witchcraft, Anti-Witchcraft and Trans-Regional Ritual Innovation in Early Colonial Ghana:
John Parker
… the term Asante evolved from the agglutination of the Akan Twi language
radixes Asa or Esa (war) and Nti (reason or because), which suggests that the
vassal states became integrated because of a war to liberate themselves.
Disobedient Asante shall die, but Okomfo Anokye will live forever!
Agyeman and Botchway
The main reason for the early union among the states was their shared desire, as vassals, to overcome the imperial
hegemony of Denkyera (or Denkyira) - a powerful chiefdom in pre-colonial Ghana. Thus, the term Asante evolved
from the agglutination of the Akan Twi language radixes Asa or Esa (war) and Nti (reason or because), which
suggests that the vassal states became integrated because of a war to liberate themselves. The victorious confederacy Page | 19
assimilated other communities, grew in size to become Asanteman, and flouted the conventional understanding that
alliances collapse when their common enemy is overpowered. The Asante realm used diplomacy, intimidation,
coercion and straightforward conquest to dominate its neighbours during the first century of the Union. Its leaders
helped her to engineer a national and cultural ideology, identity and image, and a complex way of life, which
emanated intricate sociopolitical aspects and useful features. By the end of the eighteenth century, Asante had
become a supreme chiefdom in West Africa. By the late nineteenth century, Asante had developed a sophisticated
bureaucratic government, tiered in structure, and in an imperial mould. The nation had developed its political
traditions.
Disobedient Asante shall die, but Okomfo Anokye will live forever!
Agyeman and Botchway
Accumulation, Wealth And Belief In Asante History:

Part II The Twentieth Century
T. C. McCaskie
… how Akan-Asante society and polity came into being between the 15th and 17th centuries. In 'Wangara, Akan,
and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries' Wilks explores the inter-national competition for the trade
of the Akan goldfields between Western Sudanic and European merchants. This suggestive reconstruction is
followed by the superb 'Land, Labor, Gold, and the Forest Kingdom of Asante', a piece in which Wilks' forensic
skill draws explanations of the embedding of matriliny, the rise of the accumulating 'big man' [obirempon] and the
mythico-historical origins of the Kumase dynasty from the most implacable of source materials. Lastly in 'Founding
the Political Kingdom: The Nature of the Akan State' he provides a chrono-logical framework for and a detailed
account of the founding of the Asanteman by Osei Tutu and Komfo Anokye in the later 17th century. The next four
essays deal with wealth, with the spatial and temporal dimensions of Asante history and with the vexed issue of
'human sacrifice'. 'The Golden Stool and the Elephant Tail' is an analysis of the importance of wealth in Asante
society and of the ways in which the precolonial state reified its meanings, mediated access to it and rewarded its
accumulation. 'Dissidence in Asante Politics' furnishes an illustration of the ways in which the state's control over
wealth was challenged in the late 19th century.'
Accumulation, Wealth And Belief In Asante History
T. C. McCaskie
Power originated in the Asante cosmos and was accessible to all. … The
proverbs: "A woman gave birth to the king" and "An old man was in the world
before a chief was born" stress the antiquity of matriliny and gerontocracy in
Asante (Akan) society. Chieftaincy and kingship were later developments that
introduced the coerciveness associated with Western definitions of power.
If the Asante universe was suffused with power, the potential wielders of power at any given time could be limitless.
A unique feature of the Asante state was its willingness to incorporate all forms of power, a conscious realization of
the fact that power could not be confined nor monopolized. The office of nsumankwahene ("chief of medicines")
coordinated the workings of these varied forms of power. The asantehene was, among other things, okomfo panyin
(chief priest) of Asante: in periods of interregnum, even spirit possession ceased until a new asantehene was
installed and all akomfo in the nation swore allegiance to the new king.
Page | 20
Power is both oppressive and supportive, but all Asante people are
aware that in their own culture there is little usable oxygen outside of
its workings. …. the web forged by three centuries of tumi and all of its
ramified manifestations still defines, structures, and binds Asante
culture.
Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850-1950

T. C. McCaskie
that the crucial articulation in Asante society was the exercise of power (tumi) in all its diverse combinations of
imposition and benefaction. Like it or not, more a question for ethicists than historians, unequal reciprocities lie at
the core of Asante culture. Power is both oppressive and supportive, but all Asante people are aware that in their
own culture there is little usable oxygen outside of its workings. … the web forged by three centuries of tumi and all
of its ramified manifestations still defines, structures, and binds Asante culture. “Joining power” remains a sure path
to self-realisation and success in Asante society, and the door to the career open to talent - best smoothed, of course,
by connections - has been held ajar, but carefully policed, throughout Asante history. One commanding reason why
chieftainship continues to survive is that so many people want to join its ranks, or otherwise associate themselves
with its status and influence.
that key studies on Asante have reduced the history of this state to the study of its
political elite. Local belief systems and the particular patterns of Asante thought are
ignored. The active elements within the state and society are reduced in these studies …
"crude materialism," the simple pursuit of power McCaskie’s study stands as a major
achievement for Asante historiography.

McCaskie attributed to "weak thought" the Asante state's inability to restructure the "foundations and origins" of
Asante belief -the nature of God, life after death, immortality, predestination. But in actuality, the state was limited
by the shared, fundamental tenets of Asante belief, ... Asante belief and knowledge militated against the ideological
structurations of the Asante state because power was diffuse by nature and immanent in the Asante cosmos. Access
to spiritual power was restricted by knowledge, but Asante awareness of the existence and nature of spiritual forces
was general. The historical script, in spite of the state's rewriting of the macro-text, still revealed that wielders of
tumi (those able to bring about change) were numerous and not limited to state personnel. This "shared history" was
subject to the state's ideological structuration, but also confined the state's structurations.
The distinction between "authority" (political power) and tumi is pertinent to this discussion. There are two possible
ways of approaching the distribution of power in Asante society. One can advocate a model of state and civil society
in which the state facilitated and coordinated the harmonious working of all forms of power. The relationship
between the asantehene and the various priests in Asante fits this model. The second approach is to view state power Page | 21
as driving underground some forms of mystical power, such as witchcraft. These submerged powers reasserted
themselves when state power was compromised, weakened or nonexistent. Both are relevant views of the
distribution of power, and their coexistence sheds light on the complex nature and exercise of power in Asante, as
well as the distinction between authority and power.
The first view highlights the state's authority and its overwhelming agency in the realm of power relations. That was
the state's ideal. The second, in our view, incorporates the actual dramatization of power relations on the ground. In
this sphere, the wielders of power were numerous. The reality, as Arens and Karp point out, is that "power does not
emanate from a single source and social formations are composed of centers and epicenters of power in dynamic
relationship with one another."
As the state became more centralized in Asante, Asante kings sought to promote the perception that power emanated
from a central source by placing themselves at the nexus of relations between the natural, social, and supernatural
worlds. The idea was to make kingship appear indispensable to the functioning of the social order. It is important to
remember that in the acquisition and distribution of power, which are always uneven, the users of power operate
from different perspectives.

The Golden Stool, for instance, symbolises the connection of Akan people with the beings of their spiritual realm.
The stool is believed to have come down from the sky in 1701 and to consist of divine power that the Asante Kings
(Asantehenes) needed to rule their kingdom. Akom performances are also an example of Akan expressions of their
relationship with their spiritual beings. For a full understanding of the meaning of ‘identity’ its relation to
Indigenous Religions should therefore not be left out.
A closer look at the distribution of power in Asante society may promote a deeper understanding of domankama. If
the Asante universe was suffused with power, the potential wielders of power at any given time could be limitless. A
unique feature of the Asante state was its willingness to incorporate all forms of power, a conscious realization of
the fact that power could not be confined nor monopolized. The office of nsumankwahene ("chief of medicines")
coordinated the workings of these varied forms of power. The asantehene was, among other things, okomfo panyin
(chief priest) of Asante: in periods of interregnum, even spirit possession ceased until a new asantehene was
installed and all akomfo in the nation swore allegiance to the new king.
The "highest distinction in Asante ... [became] distinction in war." As war was a manly occupation, women
gradually slipped into the background on the stage of Asante politics. But at a deeper level, war involved death, and
women as providers of life were prevented? from going to war. Asante's victory over nature and other cultures were
easily expressed in the titles of the asantehene: kurotwia mansa ("the leopard- seen as "king of the forest"),
kwaebibirim hene ("king of the deep forest"), osahene ("king of war"), and otumfuo ("holder of power”). The
subordination of Asante women was more difficult to achieve and express.

In short, the emergence of the Akan forest kingdoms in their historic form was from the outset intimately bound up
with the large-scale accumulation of wealth on the part of aggressively acquisitive gold-mining and agricultural
entrepreneurs. Far from being perceived as anti-social, such wealth was celebrated. It is the case that excessive or
punitive taxation by the state could be perceived as illegitimate … But there is no indication that this fundamentally
positive view of individual accumulation shifted with the widening of economic opportunities under the new Page | 22
colonial dispensation. A close reading of the archival record of twentieth-century witch-finding movements suggests
that both unconscious bayi and the deliberate use of aduto were more often than not seen to be directed by the ‘have-
nots’ towards the ‘haves’ rather than the other way around. The word in English that emerges most commonly from
the sources as a synonym of bayi is ‘envy’.
John Parker

T. C. McCaskie
Intellectually and in terms of belief, the 1880s and 1890s were a period when the tensions engendered by cognitive
dissonance became insupportable. And in this context it is highly significant that the majority of Asante who forged
a new intellectual framework and belief structure for their lives did so as refugees in the Gold Coast Colony. The
future in fact lay with such people, …
The individual had absolute right to all that accrued to him as a result of his labor on the land, but all that was
beneath the 'land belonged to the community. As a member of a state every citizen had a right to mine gold, with
only minor restrictions. By custom he was expected to, give two-thirds of all gold nuggets and all treasure troves to
the chief, who was also entitled to, part of the ivory captured.
This egalitarian system of land tenure opened up trade for all. The individual in his trading
efforts was unlimited and completely responsible, and rulers were at best to provide a peaceful
framework within which trade could operate.
K. Y. Daaku
The notion that the shock of colonial conquest triggered a generalized psychological dissonance works less well for
the Gold Coast Colony, where many African states and societies – especially those on the Atlantic seaboard –
Witchcraft, Anti-Witchcraft And Trans-Regional Ritual Innovation In Early Colonial Ghana:
Sakrabundi And Aberewa, 1889 –1910
John Parker
'No Elders Were Present':

Commoners And Private Ownership In Asante, 1807-96
Gareth Austin
Page | 23
Indeed, the state gave privileges to state traders which ensured them of a 'virtual monopoly' of trade above 'the local
retail market level' before 1835, and again 'all but total protection from any form of competition'. from c. 1840-80.
Moreover, much of the self-acquired wealth passed to the state the lifetime of its accumulator: voluntarily through
gifts in exchange public honours, or compulsorily by the imposition of punitive fines, if necessary on arbitrary
charges. Should a personal fortune survive the man who made it, confiscatory rates of inheritance tax ensured that it
was unlikely that much of it would be available for private inheritance. The concept of far-reaching state domination
has received support and elaboration in a variety of important works by other scholars.
Indeed, Wilks identified the reign of Asantehene Osei Bonsu, 1800-23, during which the Atlantic slave market
began to close for Asante suppliers, as precisely the time when, with the active support of the Asantehene, the state
traders began to develop 'an organization ... capable in time of challenging the dominant position which the private
traders had hitherto enjoyed', culminating by 1820 in the above-mentioned 'virtual monopoly.
Both for Wilks on Asante and for Hopkins on West Africa generally the long-term result of the ending of the slave
trade was a crisis of the aristocracy or, as John Lonsdale commented, 'a crisis of monarchy'.
In the case of gold, which was by far the larger of the two in terms of the value of output, he conceded that the
private sector was 'probably' the 'major' part of the industry. However, he maintained that the state share was large,
while private production was limited in unit size because it used only family labour. Wilks went on to argue that 'no
significant accumulation of wealth occurred' at the level of the village or the ordinary lineage. Rather, the value
produced by that family labour was 'appropriated through a system of unequal exchange'.
'No Elders Were Present':
Commoners And Private Ownership In Asante, 1807-96
Gareth Austin
Outside All Reason:

Bruce Kapferer
The cosmic states. the state as a centralised, differentiating and bounded entity - a dreadful force.
In this sense, sorcery is a thoroughgoing force of the social and the political. It is there in what is excluded, in
remainders, in what is cast out, in dirt, in what social and cultural energies generate as disgust, as the terrible
infraction of moral code and personal conduct. They are forces acutely generated in the social and political
conditions of the state - the state as a centralised, differentiating and bounded entity - and represent its dreadful
force. This is very apparent in cosmic states.
In mediaeval Sri Lanka, only the king was able to exercise the magical potencies of sorcery (Peiris 1956). Among
the Zulu, the supreme sorcerer is the king (Gluckman 1954). That this is so indicates the nature of the power of the
king, who creates or recreates the social order (as in the annual rites of kingship in Asia, Polynesia and Africa) and
does so through fearful acts of exclusion and inclusion.
This suggestive reconstruction is followed by the superb 'Land, Labor, Gold, and the Forest Kingdom of Asante', a
piece in which Wilks' forensic skill draws explanations of the embedding of matriliny, the rise of the accumulating
'big man' [obirempon] and the mythico-historical origins of the Kumase dynasty from the most implacable of source
materials. Lastly in 'Founding the Political Kingdom: The Nature of the Akan State' he provides a chronological Page | 24
framework for and a detailed account of the founding of the Asanteman by Osei Tutu and Komfo Anokye in the
later 17th century.
T. C. McCaskie
Access to spiritual power was restricted by knowledge, but

Asante awareness of the existence and nature of spiritual
forces was general. …
… in actuality, the state was limited by the shared, fundamental tenets of Asante belief, ... Asante belief and
knowledge militated against the ideological structurations of the Asante state because power was diffuse by nature
and immanent in the Asante cosmos. Access to spiritual power was restricted by knowledge, but Asante awareness
of the existence and nature of spiritual forces was general. … The distinction between "authority" (political power)
and tumi is pertinent to this discussion. There are two possible ways of approaching the distribution of power in
Asante society. One can advocate a model of state and civil society in which the state facilitated and coordinated the
harmonious working of all forms of power. The relationship between the asantehene and the various priests in
Asante fits this model. The second approach is to view state power as driving underground some forms of mystical
power, such as witchcraft. These submerged powers reasserted themselves when state power was compromised,
weakened or nonexistent.

T. C. McCaskie
One can advocate a model of state and civil society in which the state facilitated and
coordinated the harmonious working of all forms of power. The relationship between the
asantehene and the various priests in Asante fits this model. The second approach is to
view state power as driving underground some forms of mystical power, such as
witchcraft.
approach is to view state power as driving underground some forms of mystical power, such as witchcraft. These
submerged powers reasserted themselves when state power was compromised, weakened or nonexistent. Both are
relevant views of the distribution of power, and their coexistence sheds light on the complex nature and exercise of
power in Asante, as well as the distinction between authority and power.
… "crude materialism," the simple pursuit of power

McCaskie’s study stands as a major achievement for Asante historiography.

The Golden Stool was "a shrine" embodying "the soul of the Ashanti people." … the survival of the Golden Stool Page | 25
minded" (and by implication, spiritually impoverished) "Western world." … Certainly, the Golden Stool was (and
is) a sacred object, but its sacrality is part of a dualism, an ambiguity. If the sacrality of the Golden Stool encouraged
and coaxed an adoring, passive consensuality, then the historical record reveals that it also propagated and fertilized
dreams of power. Possession of the Golden Stool was a weapon, an enabling tool; it assisted to the commanding
heights of authority and it helped deliver into the outstretched hand the reins of power and government. If it could
elicit an objective obedience, then it might also command an enforced allegiance. In point of fact, the Golden Stool
is positively crusted with the mud of power politics.
T. C. McCaskie
Possession of the Golden Stool was a weapon, an enabling tool; it assisted to the
commanding heights of authority and it helped deliver into the outstretched hand
the reins of power and government. If it could elicit an objective obedience, then
it might also command an enforced allegiance.

A significant consequence of this development that, in retrospect, the politicians and policies of the 1880s and early
1890s curiously irrelevant at both the social and intellectual levels. The 'conservatives' - most notably the
Akyempemhene oheneba Owusu Koko - were attempting (ultimately and desperately through violence) to turn the
clock back to that was fatally compromised and beyond restitution.
By contrast, 'modernisers' - notably the English-educated aheneba Owusu Ansa and sons - were trying to build a
brave new world from a European blueprint being eclectic and makeshift, commanded only the most limited
understanding and support throughout Asante society. Socially and practically, the majority of Asante in this period
were much more concerned with physical survival than with the machinations of the state and its office indeed, one
might argue with considerable justification that the Asante inflicted more violence on its own citizenry in the 1880s
than ever the state did in the annexation of the 1890s (or, indeed, in the war of 1900-Intellectually and in terms of
belief, the 1880s and 1890s were a period the tensions engendered by cognitive dissonance became insupportable.
this context it is highly significant that the majority of Asante who forged intellectual framework and belief structure
for their lives did so as refugees the Gold Coast Colony. The future in fact lay with such people, …
By contrast, 'modernisers' - notably the English-educated

Oheneba Owusu Ansa and sons - were trying to build a brave new world
from a European blueprint being eclectic and makeshift, commanded
only the most limited understanding and support throughout Asante society.
But from the late nineteenth century onwards - although, it should be emphasised, only among a very small
minority- attitudes began subtly to shift with respect to the conceptualisation of the indispensable socio-cultural role
of the Golden Stool. The earliest sustained questioning came from asikafo in the Gold Coast Colony, but the crux of
the drama was to be played out in Asante itself in the early colonial period. And attitudes altered as well with respect
to the understanding and definition of the role of the obirempon.
The colonial period would not by any means everywhere cut the ground from under their feet.
As indicated, during his lifetime the individual accumulator of wealth received public or social acknowledgement of
his achievement on behalf of society - ultimately and at the highest level by being invested with the title of Page | 26
obiremopon.
… the process of accumulation, principally from trading, in Asante before colonial rule. ... In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, long-distance traders who operated on the coast and had obtained a different view of what would
today be called political economy rejected the Asante tradition of communalism, and welcomed those aspects of
colonial rule that removed the constraints placed by the Asante state on the pursuit of wealth.
…. the termination of Asante sovereignty did trigger a widespread sense of dispossession,

anxiety and apprehension – feelings of unease that were expressed in the established
idioms of bayi. ‘Formerly Prempeh was our protector’, one resident of Kumase
proclaimed in 1908, ‘but as he is no more among us, a new and strong protector [has]
been give[n] to us in Aberewa’.
Witchcraft, Anti-Witchcraft and Trans-Regional Ritual Innovation in Early Colonial Ghana:

John Parker
Interviewed in 1945, Akosua Pokuaa of the village of Adeebeba near Kumase recalled how in the first years of the
new century the land seemed to be ‘filling up with a rising tide of witches’.
Tauxier recorded similar fears on the other side of the border in French Gyaman, where a perceived intensification
in the nocturnal activities of witches in the immediate aftermath of colonial conquest resulted in a further
expansion of Sakrabundi and the other great anti-witchcraft deities.
Asantes who in numbers in the 1880s and 1890s repudiated the authority Golden
Stool because of the fiscal exactions and illicit brutalities of the state fled as
refugees into the Gold Coast Colony. Much has been recorded concerning these
refugees. … their entrepreneurial individualism, a development typically fuelled
their removal of gold from Asante. ... Such men were one of the 'leading edges'
in nineteenth-century transformation of attitudes towards accumulation, wealth
belief.
Part II - the Twentieth Century
T. C. McCaskie
accumulation and social achievement no longer possessed rewards to distribute.
The fortunate entered royal service as nhenkwaa. And there developed, in the nineteenth century, an ambiguous set
of class relations that I might term the 'nhenkwaa ethic'. Royal nhenkwaa, recruited for ability and intelligence, were
ultimately answerable only to the Asantehene - and they knew it. They affected a swaggering style and refused to Page | 27
perform manual work of any sort - one, taking refuge with the Ramseyers for a crime he had committed, adamantly
refused to his food or clean his laundry (Ramseyer Mss.). They indulged in insult and ual intrigue. Clearly they
despised the ahiafo, their failed counterparts, and nhenkwaa - those members of stool families who had little or no
chance of achieving office. Predictably too, they despised their own village origins, bullying, stealing from and
lording it over the rural dwellers. … The nhenkwaa, often royal favourites, were empowered to fine and try small
cases in the Asantehene's name. But royal nhenkwaa must have preserved an especial ambiguity - envy and enmity -
for the office holders and abirempan of Kumase. Here was the class that nhenkwaa aspired to join through
promotion. Here was participation in the underwritten by the Golden Stool. Here lay access to wealth, women, land,
jects and making a 'great name'. Here was the model of success.
accumulation and social achievement no longer possessed rewards to distribute. We well imagine why such men - in
a mood of fear, dissolved belief and revengeful cynicism - turned so eagerly to the British (the new 'Asantehene', the
new Stool') and were duly rewarded with the offices that they had failed to under the old dispensation.
…an unfettered exaggeration of the 'nhenkwaa ethic'.
… the underlying cost of all society is the violent death of

some portion of its members. … Our deepest secret, the
collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends
on the death of this sacrificial group at the hands of the group
itself. This is the totem principle concretized. … the group
becomes a group by agreeing not to disagree about the group-
making principle.

the performers were said to sing at the god’s weekly, often all-
night, ceremonies taking place on the edges of towns and
villages across the forest zone:
‘Aberewa, listen!
If you kill, then kill one who is fat (i.e. rich)’.
John Parker
A close reading of the archival record of twentieth-century witch-finding movements suggests that both unconscious
bayi and the deliberate use of aduto were more often than not seen to be directed by the ‘have-nots’ towards the Page | 28
‘haves’ rather than the other way around. The word in English that emerges most commonly from the sources as a
synonym of bayi is ‘envy’.
John Parker
… the foundation of the Asante kingdom and the distribution of rights and privileges to the different chiefs was a
ritual process: a direct consequence of sacrificial exchanges. …to grasp the enormous difference between the pre-
colonial and colonial conceptions of chieftaincy and kingship in Asante. … Analysts of Asante society usually
attribute the superiority of the Asantehene’s office to its “aura of mystical preeminence”, which is derived from its
connection to the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi, lit. ‘Friday’s Golden Stool’) (Fortes 1969, 142).
Outside All Reason:

Bruce Kapferer
studies of magic and cultic practice, of sorcery and witchcraft,

orders.
Kumase grew in power at the expense of the union states,

pitting the Kumase chiefs (nsafohene) - appointees of the
Asantehene - against the amanhene (paramount chiefs of the
union states), who inherited their positions. Asante politics
remained fluid, "and the great officers of the kingdom, even

the king himself, were subject to rapid changes of fortune."
Page | 29
The primacy of politics (and later the economy) in Western ideology often deters our understanding of different
kinds of ideologies. As a result, in the classic anthropological studies of divine kingship, the divinity of the ruler and
the rituals he performed were often separated from the political sphere and seen as a part of a cultural superstructure
which only reflected the more fundamental social order (McKinnon 2000, 41- 42).
Kwame Arhin
A close reading of the archival record of twentieth-century witch-

finding movements suggests that both unconscious bayi and the
deliberate use of aduto were more often than not seen to be directed by
the ‘have-nots’ towards the ‘haves’ rather than the other way around.
The word in English that emerges most commonly from the sources as
a synonym of bayi is ‘envy’.
John Parker
What Africans Got For Their Slaves:

A Master List Of European Trade Goods
Stanley B. Alpern
A great deal has been written in recent decades about the Atlantic slave trade, including the mechanics and terms of
purchase, but relatively little about what Africans received in return for the slaves and other exports such as gold and
ivory. And yet, if one is trying to reconstruct the material culture of, say, the Guinea Coast of West Africa during the
slave-trade period, the vast European input cannot be ignored. The written evidence consists of many thousands of
surviving bills of lading, cargo manifests, port records, logbooks, invoices, quittances, trading- post inventories,
account books, shipping recommendations, and orders from African traders. English customs records of commerce
with Africa during the eighteenth century, when the slave trade peaked, alone contain hundreds of thousands of
facts.
… an annotated master list of European trade goods sold on a portion of the Guinea Coast from Portuguese times to
the mid-nineteenth century. The geographic focus is the shoreline from Liberia to Nigeria; from it more slaves left
for the New World than from any comparable stretch of the African coast… "Kwaland" for the Kwa language
family to which nearly all the indigenous peoples belong. The list has obvious defects. It does not attempt to assign
relative or absolute weights or values beyond indicating which were the more important commodities.
an idea of the variety of the European material input, the perceived

needs of African consumers, the ways in which European imports were Page | 30
used, how Kwaland became enmeshed in the world economy, and the
things exchanged for the ancestors of New World blacks.
Pompous Trappings
These were the status symbols, the privileges of rank and wealth. propped up the egos of African kings, chiefs,
grandees, and rich helping to set them apart from the common folk. The roster of trappings would be long: from
white satin robes, brocaded silk mantles, trimmed French musketeers' hats, embroidered admirals' uniforms, flags,
multicolored umbrellas, silver-headed canes, silver tobacco watches and clocks, music boxes, hand organs,
kaleidoscopes, silverware, glassware and china, and damask napkins, to velvet-upholstered armchairs with gilt legs,
satin-upholstered couches, beds draped taffeta, Turkish carpets, sedan chairs, caparisoned horses, and stagecoaches.
Pompous trappings were generally not trade goods but presents to facilitate trade.
Umbrellas - Symbol, the umbrella goes back to at least 1200 B.C. in Egypt crossed the Sahara to the royal court
of Mali by the fourteenth idea seems to have reached the court of Benin by the 1480s; that, the implication of a big
umbrella that Benin oral historians still being among the first gifts from Jodo II to the Oba. By 1670 were bringing
large parasols to Ardra on the Slave Coast, and van Nyendael took a gift parasol from Elmina to Osei Tutu.
Eighteenth century umbrellas became symbols of rank, wealth, command on the Slave and Gold Coasts. Labarthe
observed that at Amoku on the Gold Coast chiefs alone had the right to have umbrellas carried by their slaves.

Kumasi was the center of the federation, and despite the similarities of the political structure, it was different from
other towns. While other towns in Asante served as large trading centers or centers of production, Kumasi was a
“government town” and McCaskie has suggested that it was filled with office holders and those who were hoping to
become office holders themselves one day. Bonnat, who lived in Kumasi as a prisoner for a while, recalled:
The tremendous importance of the king of Achanty draws to Coomassie a large number of young men, belonging to
the best families of the kingdom … they are drawn above all by the hope of coming to the attention of the king, and
they neglect no opportunity of pleasing him … one sees them continually following in his footsteps, soliciting his
favours and his smiles.
Kumasi did not produce its own food or goods and its small marketplace was dominated by luxury goods imported
from Europe. The officials residing in Kumasi sent followers to farms surrounding the capital in order to produce
food, but also so that they would not have to provide for their costly upkeep within the town. Allman argues that the
culture of Kumasi was not simply “Asante culture”, particularly because several different ethnic groups came
together there to do business. Kumasi culture “differed from the purely indigenous culture but progressively
influenced it”.
… the underlying cost of all society is the violent death of Page | 31

some portion of its members. … Our deepest secret, the
collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends
on the death of this sacrificial group at the hands of the group
itself. This is the totem principle concretized. … the group
becomes a group by agreeing not to disagree about the group-
making principle.
The distinction between "authority"

(political power) and tumi is pertinent to this discussion.
Asante Identities:
History and Modernity in an African Village 1850-1950
T. C. McCaskie
approach is to view state power as driving underground some forms of mystical power, such as witchcraft.
But in actuality, the state was limited by the shared, fundamental tenets of Asante belief, ... Asante belief and
knowledge militated against the ideological structurations of the Asante state because power was diffuse by nature
and immanent in the Asante cosmos. …. . The distinction between "authority" (political power) and tumi is pertinent
to this discussion.
… As the state became more centralized in Asante, Asante kings sought to promote the perception that power
emanated from a central source by placing themselves at the nexus of relations between the natural, social, and
supernatural worlds. The idea was to make kingship appear indispensable to the functioning of the social order. It is
important to remember that in the acquisition and distribution of power, which are always uneven, the users of
power operate from different perspectives.
Page | 32

Reconsidering Witchcraft
… African witches, witchcraft, and the discourses about them have been seen as "a critique of the capitalist
economy which makes people exchange essential values of fertility, health and long life for material gains" (Meyer
1992:118, 1995); "a critical commentary on inequality and on the violence that underlay power" (Smith 2001:807);
potentially provoking "a self-critique of the capitalist West" (Austen 1993:105); "modernity's prototypical
malcontents" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993); a local discourse that "has allowed those who participate in its
reproduction to see the goods and technologies of modernity as both desirable and disruptive" (West 1997:693); and
"a metacommentary on the deeply ambivalent project of modernity" (Sanders 1999b:128).
Todd Sanders
Reverend Asare provides key insights into Aberewa’s

emerging threat to established chiefly authority.
‘The fetish is so much respected that some even call it a king’,
he observed. ‘When the priest is talking to the people
in the name of the fetish, he uses the expression
‘‘ohene se ’’ (the king says)’.

John Parker

The Golden Stool was "a shrine" embodying "the soul of the Ashanti people." … the survival of the Golden Stool
minded" (and by implication, spiritually impoverished) "Western world." … Certainly, the Golden Stool was (and
is) a sacred object, but its sacrality is part of a dualism, an ambiguity. If the sacrality of the Golden Stool encouraged
and coaxed an adoring, passive consensuality, then the historical record reveals that it also propagated and fertilized
dreams of power. Possession of the Golden Stool was a weapon, an enabling tool; it assisted to the commanding
heights of authority and it helped deliver into the outstretched hand the reins of power and government. If it could
elicit an objective obedience, then it might also command an enforced allegiance. In point of fact, the Golden Stool
is positively crusted with the mud of power politics.
T. C. McCaskie
Much of the early literature on the phenomenon was concerned to demonstrate that the
cults were recent innovations – that is, were specifically twentieth-century responses to
the mounting anxieties brought about by colonial conquest and rapid social change. … Page | 33
the transformations wrought by colonialism had led to a perceived increase in the practice
of witchcraft (Twi: bayi).
John Parker

Todd Sanders
African notions of witchcraft are neither archaic nor static but are highly flexible and deeply of our contemporary
world. Many anthropologists have recently argued that notions of the African witch meaning and merit of modernity
as experienced in different historical and cultural settings.
… African witchcraft may well be part of modernity, but by no means needs to about modernity.
Whether in state politics, legal institutions, the economy, or simply as everyday "public secrets" that permeate all
these arenas, witchcraft is all-pervasive in Africa today. By contextualizing witchcraft beliefs and practices, both
spatially and historically, this new wave of studies has endeavored to show the myriad of ways that witchcraft forms
an integral part of the African postcolonial experience (see Moore and Sanders 2001). To this end, a number of
contemporary Africanist scholars have implied-and some have insisted-that witchcraft discourses and practices
provide moralizing metacommentaries on the meaning of modernity as experienced in different localities. In this
sense African witchcraft has been seen not only as part of modernity but also as a locally inflected critique of it; as a
local lexicon, in other words, that points up and engages with modernity's latent and blatant immoralities. It would
be extremely difficult to overstate the popularity of this position.
African witches and witchcraft, anthropologists have suggested, have "become a symptom of the ways in which the
values attributed to capitalist accumulation and the possession of material goods generate friction in the local moral
economy"; "express people's worries about globalization's threatening encroachment on intimate spheres of life";
and thus suggest that "people do not easily surrender control over the material and symbolic production and
reproduction of their lives". Furthermore, African witches, witchcraft, and the discourses about them have been seen
as "a critique of the capitalist economy which makes people exchange essential values of fertility, health and long
life for material gains" (Meyer 1992:118, 1995); "a critical commentary on inequality and on the violence that
underlay power" (Smith 2001:807); potentially provoking "a self-critique of the capitalist West" (Austen 1993:105);
"modernity's prototypical malcontents" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993); a local discourse that "has allowed those
who participate in its reproduction to see the goods and technologies of modernity as both desirable and disruptive"
(West 1997:693); and "a metacommentary on the deeply ambivalent project of modernity" (Sanders 1999b:128).
There were also reports that many of these victims were wealthy individuals
deliberately targeted by the cult’s local practitioners, who claimed the right to
appropriate a portion of the movable property of the deceased.

the performers were said to sing at the god’s weekly, often all-night,
ceremonies taking place on the edges of towns and villages across the forest zone:
‘Aberewa, listen! If you kill, then kill one who is fat (i.e. rich)’
Page | 34
According to a variety of negotiated arrangements, the property of the deceased
was then divided up between their family, those who had established
themselves as Aberewa ‘priests’ and local office-holders.
John Parker
The notion that the shock of colonial conquest triggered a generalized psychological dissonance works less well for
the Gold Coast Colony, where many African states and societies – especially those on the Atlantic seaboard –
Witchcraft, Anti-Witchcraft And Trans-Regional Ritual Innovation In Early Colonial Ghana:

Sakrabundi And Aberewa, 1889 –1910
John Parker
When combined with the advent of colonial peace and an increase in physical mobility, this perception resulted in
the development of a thriving cross-cultural trade in ritual commodities.
… there has been an extraordinary explosion of anthropological

literature over the past decade focused on the ‘modernity’ of witchcraft,
spirit possession and other forms of ritual practice in postcolonial
Africa.

… in sociohistorical terms the akonkofo represent the rise of a very confused 'individualism';
an embedding in Asante society of a sense of capitalist enterprise, and of a 'business' or petit-bourgeois element.
The Golden Stool in the 1950s could and did resurrect 'objective' religiosity; it could not exhume the fiscal system
that had existed under Kwaku Dua Panin. So, in sociohistorical terms the akonkofo represent the rise of a very
confused 'individualism'; an embedding in Asante society of a sense of capitalist enterprise, and of a 'business' or
petit-bourgeois element. But is this the entire explanation? At this level of interpretation analysis breaks down. We
return to the 'conjectural' in terms of what men actually thought. How did they convey their confusions?
Part II - the Twentieth Century Page | 35
T. C. McCaskie

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Both for Wilks on Asante and for Hopkins on West Africa … the long-term result of the ending of the

slave trade was a crisis of the

‘I cannot bring any specific charges’, Bantamahene

‘The fetish is so much respected that some even call

Each Akan belongs to a consanguineal group called “abusua”.

... Asante belief and knowledge militated against the

Asante awareness of the existence and nature of spiritual

Outside All Reason: Page | 2

New Answers To Old Questions Tradition, Modernity, And Postcoloniality

‘Aberewa e! Wukum a kum nea srade wom’,

Power is both oppressive and supportive,

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

If the Asante universe was suffused with power, the potential

… Analysts of Asante society usually attribute the superiority of the

The distinction between "authority"

Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850-1950

The primacy of politics (and later the economy) in Western ideology

which only reflected the more fundamental social order (McKinnon

A close reading of the archival record of twentieth-century witch-

'Formerly Prempeh was our protector', one resident of Kumase proclaimed in

‘When the priest is talking to the people

in the name of the fetish, he uses the expression

… there has been an extraordinary explosion of anthropological

The word in English that emerges most commonly from

… "crude materialism," the simple pursuit of power

‘Aberewa e! Wukum a kum nea srade wom’,

According to a variety of negotiated arrangements, the property of the deceased

Intellectually and in terms of belief, the 1880s and 1890s

Accumulation: Wealth and Belief in Asante History

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

A closer look at the distribution of power in Asante society may promote

Gareth Austin, 'No elders were present':

Peasants in 19th-Century Asante -

Peasants in 19th-Century Asante -

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

In Asanteman ("Asante nation") the Asantehene managed the Kumase central

Peasants in 19th-Century Asante -

The Great Ancestors - In Asante Thought

Peasants in 19th-Century Asante -

Tarnishing the Golden Stool

Some Chiefs Are “More Under” Than Others

Tarnishing the Golden Stool

Some Chiefs Are “More Under” Than Others

Tarnishing the Golden Stool

If in fact, one left Asante in order to evade taxes, for example,

‘Developmental’ Divergences And Continuities Between Colonial

Kumase grew in power at the expense of the union states,

The accumulation of wealth was a crucial civic duty

Aspects of Precolonial Akan Economy

Accumulation, Wealth and Belief in Asante History

Outside All Reason:

Power is both oppressive and supportive,

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

If the Asante universe was suffused with power, the potential

Accumulation, Wealth And Belief In Asante History:

Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850-1950

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Asante History -

Accumulation, Wealth and Belief in Asante History

'No Elders Were Present':

Outside All Reason:

Access to spiritual power was restricted by knowledge, but

Accumulation, Wealth And Belief In Asante History:

… "crude materialism," the simple pursuit of power

'State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante'