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For 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.
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.
This authoritative military history chronicles the significant but overlooked colonial wars between the British and the Asante of West Africa. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain fought three major wars, and two minor ones, with the Asante people of West Africa. Like the Zulus, the Asante were a warrior nation who offered a tough adversary for the British regulars. And yet these wars are rarely studied and little understood. In this insightful and vividly detailed volume, Stephen Manning sheds much-needed light on the history of this neglected colonial conflict. In the war of 1823–6, the British endured a defeat so absolute that the British governor’s head was severed and taken to the Asante king. Fifty years later, Sir Garnet Wolseley overcame many of the challenges British expeditionary forces faced in the jungle region known as ‘The White Man’s Grave’. Finally, the 1900 campaign culminated in the epic defeat of the Asante at the British fort in Kumasi. Stephen Manning’s account, which is based on Asante as well as British sources, offers a fascinating view from both sides of one of the most remarkable and protracted struggles of the colonial era.
Asante, 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.
Engaging 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.
A historical rationale and the proper translations and usage of African names from the four comers of the continent
“A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.”—Maya Angelou “In America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generation’s story.”—NPR A coming-of-age story about navigating the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family, Buck shares the story of a generation through one original and riveting voice. MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: his mother a dancer, his father a revered professor. But as a teenager, MK was alone on the streets of North Philadelphia, swept up in a world of drugs, sex, and violence. MK’s memoir is an unforgettable tale of how one precocious, confused kid educated himself through gangs, rap, mystic cults, ghetto philosophy, and, eventually, books. It is an inspiring tribute to the power of literature to heal and redeem us.
In It's Bigger Than Hip Hop, M. K. Asante, Jr. looks at the rise of a generation that sees beyond the smoke and mirrors of corporate-manufactured hip hop and is building a movement that will change not only the face of pop culture, but the world. Asante, a young firebrand poet, professor, filmmaker, and activist who represents this movement, uses hip hop as a springboard for a larger discussion about the urgent social and political issues affecting the post-hip-hop generation, a new wave of youth searching for an understanding of itself outside the self-destructive, corporate hip-hop monopoly. Through insightful anecdotes, scholarship, personal encounters, and conversations with youth across the globe as well as icons such as Chuck D and Maya Angelou, Asante illuminates a shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in post-Katrina New Orleans, seen in the rise of youth-led organizations committed to social justice, and heard around the world chanting "It's bigger than hip hop."
Collects almost five hundred entries that cover the African response to spirituality, taboos, ethics, sacred space, and objects.
Presents the history of the mighty West African people.