The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana

Notes

Notes Preface 1. While it is impossible to offer a complete listing of works on precolonial Asante, a representative sample might include Kwame Arhin, "Rank and Class Among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century," Africa 53:1 (1983), 2-22; idem, "Peasants in Nineteenth Century /\sante," Current Anthropology 24:4 (1983), 471-80; Thomas Lewin, Asante Before the British: The Prempean Years, 1875-1900 (Lawrence, Kansas: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978); Thomas C. McCaskie, ''Accumulation, Wealth and Belief in Asante History. I: To the Close of the Nineteenth Century," Africa 53:1 (1983), 23-43; idem, "Accumulation, Wealth and Beliefin Asante History. II: The Twentieth Century," Africa 56:1 (1986), 3-22; idem, "Ahyiamu- 'A Place of Meeting': An Essay on Process and Event in the History of the Asante State," Journal of African History 25:2 (1984), 169-88; and idem, "Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in an African Society," Journal of African History 27:2/3 (1986), 315-39; Robert S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929); Enid Schildkrout, ed., The Golden Stool: Studies ofthe Asante Center and Periphery, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 65:1 (New York, 1987); William Tordoff, Ashanti Under the Pre1npehs, 1888-1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); idenl, "Dissidence in Asante Politics: Two Tracts from the Late Nineteenth Century," in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., African Themes: Northwestern University Studies in Honor ofGtvendolyn Carter (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975), 47-63, and idem, "The Golden Stool and the Elephant Tail: An Essay on Wealth in Asante," in George Dalton, ed., Research in Econolnic Anthropology, vol. 2 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1979), 1-36; Larry Yarak, Asante and the Dutch, 1744-1873 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). See also Ivor Wilks and Thomas McCaskie, eds., Asantesem: Bulletin of the Asante Collective Biography Project 1-11 (1975-9). 2. For examples of scholarship focusing on British imperial policy and the transfer of power, see the following essays in Prosser Gifford and W. R. Louis, 195 196 Notes to Pages x-5 eds., The Transfer of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982): Dennis Austin, "The British Point of No Return," 225-48; John D. Hargreaves, "Toward the Transfer of Power in British West Africa," 117-40; A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ''A Historiographical Perspective on the Transfer of Power in British Colonial Africa," 567--602. See also Richard Rathbone, "The Transfer of Power in Ghana, 1954-1957," (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1968). For a critique of the trend toward emphasizing the imperial variable in African history, see Richard Crook, "Decolonization, the Colonial State, and Chieftancy in the Gold Coast," African Affairs 85:338 (1986), 77-8 and passim. Chapter I. "Leaving the Dead Some Room to Dance" 1. See McCaskie, ''Accumulation,'' II: 3 and 19. This article represents one of the first attempts to bring the weight of Asante's precolonial history to bear on the twentieth century. 2. See, for example, the works cited in note 1 of the preface. Asanteman is translated as the ''Asante state." 3. In this bibliographical discussion, I limit my focus to those works which explicitly address the Asante National Liberation Movement. They are, of course, representative of broader currents in African studies, but the density of the literature precludes a full, comparative discussion here. For useful historiographical overviews of the extensive literature on nationalism, ethnicity and the state and the paradigms which have marked various trends over the years, see John Lonsdale , "States and Social Processes in Africa: A Historiographical Survey," African Studies Review 24:2/3 (1981), 139-225, and M. Crawford Young, "Nationalism, Ethnicity and Class in Africa: A Retrospective," Cahiers D'Etudes Africaines 103:26:3 (1986),421-95. 4. Young, "Nationalism, Ethnicity and Class," 429. See also Anthony D. Smith, State and Nation in the Third World: The Western State and African Nationalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983) for a general critique of modernization theory. Smith writes ofmodernization theorists that "their functional approach ... to the role of ideology, with nationalism often being viewed as a form of 'political religion,' has tended to inhibit a more historical-causal analysis ofthe rise ofnationalist movements and ideologies within the framework ofcolonial territories; with the result that current political and social structures assume the status of 'givens' of historically necessary outcomes-as they appeared...