Euro-African Commerce and Social Chaos: Akan Societies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Akokɔ nto nto, aduasa - the chicken should lay-lay eggs, thirty [plenty]Akorɔma mfa mfa, aduasa - the hawk should take-take, thirty [plenty]Akokɔ, mato mato bi awura - chicken: I have laid-laid some eggs ownerAkorɔma mmεfa me na mabrε - the hawk should come and take me, I am tiredAkan drum text

Animguase mfata okaniba - disgrace does not befit the Akan child[i.e., Akan-born]

Akan proverb

I

In the drum text above, the chicken and the hawk parallel the symbiotic relationship between the "slave trade" and the period of "legitimate trade" between the Gold Coast and Britain. The former "trade" paved the way for and nourished the outcomes of the latter, and as the uneven power relations between West Africa and European nation-states become even more explicit in a globalizing economy, Europe or Britain ("the hawk") seized on the valued resources ("eggs") of a tiresome and ravaged Gold Coast. To halt the disgrace (animguase) of impending colonial incursion and protectionism, several Akan societies ("chickens") became hawk-like in domestic matters—for they had less control over international forces beyond their soil—and its internal conflicts had as much to do with their inner drive to maintain "order" in juxtaposition to the exigencies of their times. The key nineteenth-century relationship between Asante of the forest interior and Elmina of the coast provides a spatial parameter and a mnemonic for examining key transformations between those two boundaries as represented by the coastal Fante polities, forest-based Asante, and the Bono, who occupied the northern forest fringe. I argue that the conflicts between and within Akan societies of varying orders were the product of multilayered factors occurring at the same time and in different places, such as power struggles and tensions born of conservatism and Christianity, that ultimately transformed all in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the Akan share a composite culture, spiritual practice, calendrical system, socio-political structure, and ethos, the transformations in Asante society were not replicated among the Fante or Bono, although the Bono offer a comparative case that diverged from much of the nascent colonial shaping of Asante and Fante society. This essay suggests that Akan societies, beyond the almost exclusive focus on Asante, are better approached thematically than in spatial or chronological isolation, since the themes of social dissolution and conflicts were shared by all in a context of Euro-African commerce, Westernization, and Christian proselytization.

Akan internal responses within respective polities and toward European and Euro-African forces prompted those social orders to reconstitute some of their constructs of self, state, and sovereignty in what became the Gold Coast Colony and then the Republic of Ghana. An important setting for looking broadly at those transformations in and of Akan societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the issue of commerce and control of key trade routes, which invariably led to much conflict between Europeans, their Akan coastal allies, and the Asante of the forest interior. The trade routes that facilitated commerce between the forest interior and the coast remained contested, especially between Asante and Fante, and the conflicts associated with those routes endured. The nineteenth century began with a shift from the "slave trade" to "legitimate trade," international enslavement to forms of domestic servitude, and cultural fragmentation to social chaos and conflict within Akan settlements situated between the forest and the coast. The nineteenth century opened with Fante efforts to successfully resist Asante expeditions to the coast, in addition to similar incursions, and these encroachments on Fante territory would have been more disastrous if it were not for the help of Europeans established in their coastal forts.

The first nineteenth century Asante invasion of the Fante led to the destruction of the once prosperous town of Emperou as Asante marched toward the coast. Joseph Dupuis, the British consul to Kumase in 1820, suggests that this incident occurred in the forested hinterland and that the town had accepted an offer of military aid from neighboring Fante kinsmen. The Fante fled and the town was burned. The aim of...