The Asante World provides fresh perspectives on the Asante, the largest Akan group in Southern Ghana, and what new scholars are thinking and writing about the "world the Asante made."
By employing a thematic approach, the volume interrogates several dimensions of Asante history including state formation, Asante-Ahafo and Bassari-Dagomba relations in the context of Asante northward expansion, and the expansion to the south. It examines the role of Islam which, although extremely intense for just a short time, had important ramifications. Together the essays excavate key aspects of Asante political economy and culture, exemplified in kola nut production, the kente/adinkra cloth types and their associated symbols, proverbs, and drum language. The Asante World explores the Asante origins of Jamaican maroons, Asante secular government, contemporary politics of progress, governance through the institution of Ahemaa or Queenmothers, epidemiology and disease, and education in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Featuring innovative and insightful contributions from leading historians of the Asante world, this volume is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars concerned with African Studies, African diaspora history, the history of Ghana and the Gold Coast, the history of Islam in Africa, and Asante history.
1. Introduction
Edmund Abaka and Kwame Osei Kwarteng
Part 1
2. The Ahafo–Asante Relations, 1712-1935
Kwame Osei Kwarteng and Kwame Adum-Kyeremeh
3. The Asante Factor in the Political Re-Orientation of Northern Ghana: A Historical Evaluation of the Bassari-Dagomba Relations, 1745-1876
Limpu I. Digbun
4. Asante Imperium Expansion: Imperial Outlook and Construction of Empire
Eugenia Anderson
5. Contending Empires: Asante and Britain From the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries
Ezekiel Walker
Part 2
6. Historical Reconstruction of an Asante Ancillary State: Origin, Migration and Settlement of Sekyere
Kwamang Osei Prempeh
7. Dupuis’ Discourse on Asante in the 19th Century: An Evaluation of the Islamic Themes in the Journal of Residence in Ashantee (1824)
Jibrail Bin Yusuf
8. Why Islam Did Not Make a Significant Impact on Asante During the 18th and 19th Centuries
Jibrail Bin Yusuf and Victoria Agyare-Appiah
Part 3
9. Red Gold: Kola Nuts, the Kola Nut Trade and the Political Economy of Asante
Edmund Abaka
10. An Indigenous Innovative Touch: Origin and Significance of the Kente Cloth in Asante Culture
Frimpong Nana Asamoah
11. Adinkra Symbols and Proverbs as Tools for Elucidating Indigenous Asante Political Thought
Alex J. Wilson
12. The Tropology of Akan Drum Language: Sounds and Meanings From the Mamponghene’s Drum Appellation
Peter Arthur, Philomena Yeboah and Darko Baffour
Part 4
13. A Political Architecture of Leadership Crisis of the Kumasi Central Mosque From 1970 to 2013
Douglas Frimpong-Nnuroh and Mariam Afumwaa Osei
14. Claiming Asante: The Akan Origins of Jamaican Maroons
Mario Nisbett
Part 5
15. Secular Government and the Court of the Asante Ahemaa in the 21st Century: An Ethnographic Account of Ejisu and Juaben Traditional Areas
Lydia Amoah and Charles Prempeh
16. Epidemiology and Local Responses to Diseases in Asante: A Focus on Kumase Since the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Wilhemina Joselyn Donkoh and Dennis Baffour Awuah
17. Girl Child Education in Asante, 1901-1957
Victor Asante Angbah
Biography
Edmund Abaka is Associate Professor of History and International Studies, University of Miami. His publications include Kola is God’s Gift: Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives & the Kola Industry of Asante & the Gold Coast (2005); House of Slaves and "Door of No Return": Gold Coast/Ghana Slave Forts, Castles and Dungeons and the Atlantic Slave Trade (2012).
Kwame Osei Kwarteng is a Professor of History, former Head of the Department of History, and currently Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He is the author of A History of Ahafo 1719-1958: Ahafo from dependence to independence (2011) and A History of the Elephant in Ghana in the Twentieth Century (2011).
