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An account of the life of a Ghanaian village during a century of tumultuous change, this study is also a richly textured microhistory and an exploration of the meanings of history and modernity in an African context. The years 1850-1950 witnessed several momentous and transformative developments in Asante history, including British annexation and colonial overrule. In Asante Identities, T. C. McCaskie provides a nuanced study of this era 'from below,' focusing on the everyday lives of commoners in Adeebeba, an independent village that was engulfed by the expansion of the city of Kumase in the 20th century. He tells this story through the words of the villagers themselves, drawing on life histories collected by the Ashanti Social Survey in the 1940s. McCaskie provides a deep cultural reading that ranges over issues of selfhood and community and their impact on the colonial experience. His discussion touches on questions of identity, belief, power, money, rights, obligations, gender, sexuality, and much more. The result is a book compelling in both its historical detail and its analytic sophistication.
A detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante.
This is a key text for understanding the history of the great West African kingdom of Asante (now in Ghana). It is perhaps the earliest example of history writing in English by an African ruler. The result is an indispensably detailed account of the Asante monarchy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Context is provided by the inclusion of other writings by or about Agyeman Prempeh, together with four introductory essays by the world's leading scholars of Asante history.
The study of intellectual history in Africa is in its infancy. We know very little about what Africa’s thinkers made of their times. Recasting the Past brings one field of intellectual endeavor into view. The book takes its place alongside a small but growing literature that highlights how, in autobiographies, historical writing, fiction, and other literary genres, African writers intervened creatively in their political world. The past has already been worked over by the African interpreters that the present volume brings into view. African brokers—pastors, journalists, kingmakers, religious dissidents, politicians, entrepreneurs all—have been doing research, conducting interviews, re...
Betr. den für die Basler Mission tätigen Euro-Afrikaner Carl Christian Reindorf und die Geschichte der Basler Mission an der Goldküste im 19. Jahrhundert.
"Why do people die and where do they go when they are dead? How should the dead be buried and mourned in order to ensure that they continue to work for the benefit of the living? How have perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life changed over the centuries? In My Time of Dying considers these questions from the perspective of African history. In what is the first history of death in Africa, John Parker examines mortuary culture and the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead over a four-hundred year period. Focusing anecdotally on West Africa but with a comparative awareness of comparable practices throughout the continent, Parker highlights how Africans developed the world's most vibrant and recognizable cultures of death"--
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...
A selection of papers first delivered at the conference on Africa's Urban Past, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996.
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 ...
Landscapes, 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...