THE ASHANTI AND THE AKAN PEOPLES

Robert July says that Africa is shaped like a ham bone. It is wide at the top but narrows at the waist. This great bulge is West Africa. In the years 1402 to 1406 Pierre Bontier and Jean Le Verreir wrote a book called The Canarian. It described the conquest of the Canary Islands, off the western coast of Africa, by the Spaniards. These French authors said that if one sailed down the west coast of Africa one encoutnered the country of the Moors (Morocco). But further south one encountered "Guinoye." This French word Guinoye was a garbling or corruption of the Arabic "Ganah" (see Scott Malcomson, One Drop of Blood, p. 147). The French "Guinea" is a variation of "Ganah" or "Ghana." The body of water west of the "waist" of Africa came to be called, by the Europeans, the Gulf of Guinea, or the Guinea coast. The people from there were called Guineans or even Guineas (pronounced gyn-nees). Today, below the savanna are countries such as Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria.

In the region now called Ghana [it took the name Ghana when it became independent of Britain in 1957] (which the British and Europeans for centuries after 1500 called "the Gold Coast") the Akan people lived. There were many clans or lineage groups of the Akan, but they all speak various dialects of a language called Twi. In the fullness of time the Asante group emerged as the dominant group among the Akan. Asante is pronounced as if it were spelled Ashanti. Since the 1000s A.D. the trade routes at Djenne on the Bani River had in turn linked up with the trading town of Begho on the Volta River, in the Akan region. Begho was a link between the gold of the interior and the Atlantic coast. Moroccan goods and the ubiquitous Chinese porcelain pottery turn up at Begho as well (1600s) [Time-Life, p. 96].

By 1650 the chiefs of the town of Kumasi rose to power and the ruler of Kumasi came to be recognized as the hereditary chief of a number of other village-states. The traditional lesser chiefs become commanders in the army of the king of Kumasi. This commander-in-chief and head of the federation came to be called the asantehene. Osei Tutu (r. 1670-1717) was one of these centralizing Ashanti monarchs. The symbol of the unity of the Ashanti was a seat or sitting stool made of gold. The Ashanti did have writing. Their sacred writing is called Adinkra, and initially knowledge of the ideograms was reserved for the king and people around the king. In the 19th century the Adinkra ideograms were printed onto cotton cloth and a form of textile emerged. Western scholars knew very little about the Adinkra and therefore ignorant textbooks for generations have alleged that sub-Saharan Africans produced NO WRITING. For more info on the Adinkra ideograms, see The Akan World of Gold Weights,  by B. Niangoran-Bouah

Opaku Ware (1717-1750) continued the process of consolidation, and in 1744 he won the coastal city of Accra. Today it is the capital of Ghana. But as savanna states such as Songhai expired, states closer to the Atlantic, and tied commercially to Europe, rose. Ashanti became a powerful state in West Africa, but the British supported the rival Fante Federation closer to the coast. The Ashanti  held off the British colonizers in a series of ferocious wars. The First Ashanti War took place in 1873-74. In 1896 the British occupied Kumasi and deposed the asantehene. In 1900 the Ashanti revolted against British rule. In 1901 the British fought the Second Ashanti War.

NOK

Today we know that one of the very first African people south of the Sahara to develop the use of iron were the Nok culture, of northern Nigeria. They developed terra cotta sculpture. This word terra cotta means hard clay. The clay is placed in an oven or kiln and heated, and becomes quite durable. But the people of Nok smelted iron. Slag and iron nozzles have been found, dating from 600 B.C. Furthermore, necklaces of quartz beads have been found. The holes in the beads were drilled with iron bits or drill heads. The artistic style of Nok is believed to be ancestral to the Yoruba and Benin, and bears similarity to the Igbo or Ibo as well. No writing from the Nok culture survives. We do not know what the people called themselves. In 1928 an artifact was found near a tin mine at the town on Nok, in northern Nigeria. Therefore similar artifacts are named after the town where the first one was found. In 1943 the British archaeologist Bernard Fagg began systematic excavation using stratigraphy. Radiocrabon dating shows that the Nok culture existed between 500 BC and 200 AD, over  a wide area of the Bauchi Plateau in northern Nigeria, in the vicinity of modern-day Jos, Katsina, and Sokoto. The artifacts have been found over an area of 3,000 square miles, and some are on display in the National Museum in Lagos, Nigeria.

THE YORUBA

Another ethnic group in West Africa, in Nigeria, are the Yoruba. From 1000 A.D. they developed a number of city-states. They are famous for their religion, and their artwork. The great spiritual center of the Yoruba people was the city of Ile-Ife. Later, in the 1300s, Oyo (Owo) emerged as an important center. Perhaps the most prominent deity in the Yoruba religion is Olokun, sometimes described as the god of the sea and of wealth. There are other lesser deities, and spirits, and veneration of the ancestors. The ancestors are dead, but they live on as spirits ansd have power to influence human affairs for good or for ill.

The city of Ile Ife was the spiritual center of the Yoruba people. Its ruler was called the oni. According to legend, Ife was founded by Oduduwa, who is sometimes regarded as the son of the supreme god. The West knows very little about the history of the Yoruba before the arrival of the Europeans in the 1600s. However Europeans were amazed by the beauty of the Yoruba bronze and terra cotta sculpture. The Yoruba artwork is highly prized, and some of it dates from as early as the 1300s.

THE BINI OR EDO (LANGUAGE): KINGDOM OF BENIN

Another ethnic group in southwestern Nigeria were the Edo people. They are also called the Bini. Their kingdom, dating from the 1300s, is called Benin. According to one legend, the first ruler of the Kingdom of Benin was Oranmiyan, the son of a prince of Ife (Krieger, p. 106). He introduced primogeniture. The Bini are culturally close to the Yoruba. The traditional king of Benin was a sacred ruler, called the oba. Thus there were the obas of Benin. The oba Ewuare (c. 1440-1473) built walls around the city and made Benin into a powerful military state. Europeans (the Portuguese) first visisted Benin City in 1485. Benin is also famous for its artwork, especially its bronze work.

Visuals

Treasures of Ancient Nigeria

p. 66 and 68: this roped water pot is made from leaded bronze. It is from the town of Igbi-Isaiah, and dated at the 9th or 10th century.

p. 129 one of the single most famous sculptures from
West African art; it is the Queen Mother
head, depicting the head of the Queen Mother;
It is from Benin. This is thought to be the mother of Oba or King Esigie, who reigned until 1550. The statue dates from the early 1500s.

p. 136-138 some of the famous Benin bronzes. All are of bronze. They date from the 1500 and 1600s. They are now in the National Museum of Nigeria, at Lagos.

The Igbo, Ibibio, Efik and Annang ethnic groups in southeastern Nigeria developed a writing system called Nsibidi. The Nsibidi script is independent of any external influence. We in the West do not know exactly when it was developed, because originally it was used by members of a secret society and only persons who had been initiated into the society knew it.  However enslaved Africans in the Caribbean (Haiti and Cuba) carried it with them in the 1700s, and so it must have existed by that time or prior to it. The Nsibidi script appears on tombstones, costumes, headdresses, textiles and even body painting. One of the first Europeans to describe the Nsibidi was T.D. Maxwell, in 1904. For more info, see Robert Farris Thompson, The Flash of the Spirit, p. 228; and Louis Nnamdi Oraka, The Foundations of Igbo Studies (Onitsha: University Publishing Co., 1983).

Contrary to Breasted and Seligman and Kilpatrick and the ideology of white supremacy for 400 years, the black sub-Saharan people and the black people of Nubia and Ethiopia did have a history. They did have trade and civilization. They did have towns and cities and agriculture and the knowledge and use of iron. And they produced a glorious art. Today the rich history of Africa is becoming better known. But sadly the old myths of African barbarism and inferiority still persist. As students at Rutgers you have now been exposed to information about pre-colonial Africa. But the challenge is to get this information out of the classroom and out of the university into K-12. Only one-fourth of Americans go to college. What are the other 3/4ths learning? And only 1 in 8 African Americans go to college. What are the other 7/8ths learning about their ancestral cultural heritage? Knowledge is power. Information is power. And armed with information, each one of you now becomes one of a thousand points of light.