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Author: T. C. McCaskie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-10-30
Total Pages: 518
ISBN-13: 9780521894326
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante.
Author: Ivor Wilks
Publisher:
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKForests of Gold is a collection of essays on the peoples of Ghana with particular reference to the most powerful of all their kingdoms: Asante. Beginning with the global and local conditions under which Akan society assumed its historic form between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, these essays go on to explore various aspects of Asante culture: conceptions of wealth, of time and motion, and the relationship between the unborn, the living, and the dead. The final section is focused upon individuals and includes studies of generals, of civil administrators, and of one remarkable woman who, in 1831, successfully negotiated peace treaties with the British and the Danes on the Gold Coast. The author argues that contemporary developments can only be fully understood against the background of long-term trajectories of change in Ghana.
Author: Robert B. Edgerton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-06-15
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 1451603738
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor the first time, anthropologist Robert Edgerton tells the story of the Hundred-Year War—from 1807 to 1900, between the British Empire and the Asante Kingdom—from the Asante point of view. In 1817, the first British envoy to meet the king of the Asante of West Africa was dazzled by his reception. A group of 5,000 Asante soldiers, many wearing immense caps topped with three foot eagle feathers and gold ram's horns, engulfed him with a "zeal bordering on phrensy," shooting muskets into the air. The envoy was escorted, as no fewer than 100 bands played, to the Asante king's palace and greeted by a tremendous throng of 30,000 noblemen and soldiers, bedecked with so much gold that his party had to avert their eyes to avoid the blinding glare. Some Asante elders wore gold ornaments so massive they had to be supported by attendants. But a criminal being lead to his execution - hands tied, ears severed, knives thrust through his cheeks and shoulder blades - was also paraded before them as a warning of what would befall malefactors. This first encounter set the stage for one of the longest and fiercest wars in all the European conquest of Africa. At its height, the Asante empire, on the Gold Coast of Africa in present-day Ghana, comprised three million people and had its own highly sophisticated social, political, and military institutions. Armed with European firearms, the tenacious and disciplined Asante army inflicted heavy casualties on advancing British troops, in some cases defeating them. They won the respect and admiration of British commanders, and displayed a unique willingness to adapt their traditional military tactics to counter superior British technology. Even well after a British fort had been established in Kumase, the Asante capital, the indigenous culture stubbornly resisted Europeanization, as long as the "golden stool," the sacred repository of royal power, remained in Asante hands. It was only after an entire century of fighting that resistance ultimately ceased.
Author: Jean Marie Allman
Publisher: James Currey Publishers
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780325070001
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis long awaited and definitive work on gender in Asante during the early twentieth century provides a needed balance to emphasis on chiefship and external relations evident thus far in the historical scholarship on colonial and pre-colonial Asante. I am certainly looking forward to using this book in every possible African studies course I teach. - Gracia Clark, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University By bringing women into the mainstream of Asante historiography, the authors move us towards that singularly elusive goal: the realization of a comprehensive Asante social history. - Ivor Wilks Professor Emeritus, African History Northwestern University In an admirable collaborative effort, Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian focus on commodity production, family labor and reproduction in colonial Asante. The authors demonstrate how broader social and economic forces - cash cropping, trade, monetization of the economy, British rule, and Christian missions - recast the terms of domestic struggle in Asante and how ordinary men and women negotiated that ever shifting landscape. By centering their analysis on women, Allman and Tashjian recover the broader history of a society whose past has largely been understood in terms of the state, political evolution, trade, and the careers of political elites. Based on the recollections of Asante women and men born during the years 1900 to 1925 and on rich archival sources, I Will Not Eat Stone captures the resilience and tenacity of a generation of Asante women and their struggles in defense of social and economic autonomy.
Author: Kwasi Ampene
Publisher: Maize Books
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781607853664
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEngaging Modernity is the definitive history of Asante royal regalia and music ensembles. This second edition includes an ethnographical account of the 2014 Asanteman Grand Adae festival that prominently features the complex heritage of the visual and the performing arts in motion. Ampene's contextual account illuminates the historical narratives the regalia objects render as they move through space and time, as well as the metalanguage embodied in the objects and the symbolic language they convey in Akanland. The book combines text with over three hundred color photographs to construct subtle and nuanced views of the material culture associated with Asante royal court in the twenty-first century. Engaging Modernity is an essential and a vast transdisciplinary resource for the humanities and beyond.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2018-08-13
Total Pages: 537
ISBN-13: 9004380183
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLandscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources in Latin America relating to pan-Atlantic histories; and the continuing analysis of oral histories. The volume is dedicated to Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, whose work inspired the intellectual reorientations discussed in its chapters and stands as the clearest formulation of the book’s central focus on the relationship between political conjunctures and the production of sources. Contributors are: Benjamin Acloque, Karin Barber, Seydou Camara, Mamadou Diawara, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Nikolas Gestrich, Toby Green, Bruce Hall, Jan Jansen, Shamil Jeppie, Daouda Keita, Murray Last, Robin Law, Camille Lefebvre, Paul Lovejoy, Ghislaine Lydon, Carlos Magnavita, Sonja Magnavita, Kevin MacDonald, Thomas McCaskie, Ann McDougall, Daniela Moreau, Mauro Nobili, Insa Nolte, Abel-Wedoud Ould-Cheikh, Benedetta Rossi, Charles Stewart.
Author: T. C. McCaskie
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781611635928
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAsante, Africa's celebrated "kingdom of gold," offers to the scholar and interested reader alike the most richly documented of all of Africa's historic societies. This history is embedded in and amplified by a vibrant oral tradition maintained by the Asante of today. The essays in this book, fifty in number, cover diverse aspects of the Asante experience from the creation of the kingdom in the later seventeenth century to the status of Asante in today's Ghana. In addition, these essays range over and discuss a variety of crucial aspects of Asante social and cultural life - kinship, witchcraft, community, selfhood, gender, death, warfare, and the rest. These essays span nearly half a century of the author's engagement with Asante and its people. The result is scholarship that is acknowledged to be at the cutting edge of the recuperation of Africa's long and still neglected past. More than that, however, this book offers much to the large international constituency of general readers who are fascinated by the story of the greatest and most enduring of African kingdoms, and to those among them who identify with Asante and its people, and draw sustenance and inspiration from their story. Glossy photo insert included.
Author: George Ayittey
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2006-09-01
Total Pages: 600
ISBN-13: 904744003X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGeorge Ayittey’s Indigenous African Institutions presents a detailed and convincing picture of pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa - its cultures, traditions, and indigenous institutions, including participatory democracy.
Author: NA NA
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-04-30
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1349623377
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlthough African ethnicity has become a highly fertile field of enquiry in recent years, most of the research is concentrated on southern and central Africa, and has passed Ghana by. This volume extends many of the distilled insights, but also modifies them in the light of the Ghanaian evidence. The collection is multidisciplinary in scope and spans the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts. A central contention of the volume is that, while there were significant regional variations, ethnicity was not purely a colonial `invention'. The boundaries of `we-groups' have constantly mutated from pre-colonial times, while European categorization owed much to indigenous ways of seeing. The contributors explore the role of European administrators and recruitment officers as well as African cultural brokers in shaping new identities. The interaction of gender and ethnic consciousness is explicitly addressed. The volume also examines the formulation of the national question in Ghana today - in debates over language policy and conflicts over land and chieftaincy.
Author: Frank Kwesi Adams
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2011-06-01
Total Pages: 243
ISBN-13: 1610974395
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe study of the Odwira festival is the key to the understanding of Asante religious and political life in Ghana. The book explores the nature of the Odwira festival longitudinally--in pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence Ghana--and examines the Odwira ideology and its implications for understanding the Asante self-identity. The book also discusses how some elements of faith portrayed in the Odwira festival could provide a framework for Christianity to engage with Asante culture at a greater depth. Theological themes in Asante belief that have emerged from this study include the theology of sacrament, ecclesiology, eschatology, Christology and a complex concept of time. The author argues that Asante cultural identity lies at the heart of the process by which the Asante Christian faith is carried forward.
