[ Edited and Expanded] African Cognitive History: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Configurations of the Achievement of T. C. McCaskie : An Appreciative Note and Brief Selections from McCaskie's Work Complemented by the Art of Kofi and Nyornuwofia Agorsor
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
An Appreciative Note and Brief Selections from his Work
Complemented by the Art of Kofi and Nyornuwofia Agorsor
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Akan creation myth holds that the universe was created through the relationship between a wizard and a spiritually powerful woman he met in a forest, both of them subsequently transforming the trees in the forest into the first humans, a motif suggested by the sacerdotal majesty of this tableau of the Fa priest and visual and musical artist Kofi Agorsor and his wife, Nyornuwofia, priestess of the snake goddess, Ganti, Fa theologian, dancer and singer, an image resonating with the idea of complementary opposites as a structuring principle in Akan and the correlative Yoruba and Igbo thought worlds and the farther universes of Chinese and Kabbalistic cosmology, among others.
''Ashanti society is rooted in an awareness of a doubleness of life disclosed by maleness and femaleness, not as biological principles, but as ontological poles between which the world comes into being. All Ashanti beliefs and institutions embody this doubleness so that the everyday flow of life reveals an ultimate order.''
( R. D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight,1980, 63)
The intimacy between humanity and nature shimmers through Kofi Agorsor's sculptures, as his rapturous fascination with the female form issues in lyrical emergings from wood, feminine beauties seeming to flow out of immobile solidities, a balance of stability and dynamism reflected in the evocative poses of Kofi and Nyornuwofia, still but poised, bracketing the sculptural ensemble in a visual composition of vertical forms amplifying each other in a synergistic unity.
“The complex existence of this…God comes from intercourse between the masculine and the feminine, so that [ their ] plural web of beings would multiply and breed. [They stand] not alone, but on the grounds of other forces that came before [ them] and exist with [them ]. In essence, though [ they are ] a creative force, [their] work leans heavily on interdependence and a complex trajectory of mythological history and interactions.
…convenient terms for the universal—that multifaceted creative force, forming and ever forming around various permutations and combinations…''
Text in quotation marks slightly adapted from Gedeprensunpre
Agorsor's—Kofi and Nyornuwofia Agorsor’s son-Perception versus Interpretation. (Unpublished) quoted in Kofi Agorsor :Tudɛvie (Calling) Gallery 1957, by Robin Beth
Riskin.
Image from Kofi Agorsor's Facebook page
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
A thumbnail response to T.C. McCaskie's contribution to African cognitive history, the exploration of history in terms of how people make sense of existence, exemplified by his work on the Akan of Ghana, demonstrated by selections from three of his works and complemented by the sculptural and photographic art of the Ghanaian multi-expressive artists, spiritual figures and thinkers Kofi and Nyornuwofia Agorsor, art accompanied by commentary based on a mythic story created by myself but reinforced by texts related to Akan thought.
The essay came to my mind recently as something that could guide me in my exploration of the interpretive possibilities of Toyin Falola's account of his childhood mentor in Nigeria's Yorubaland, Iya Lekuleja, ''elderly venerable female dealer in assorted herbal and magical items'', as presented in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
The McCaskie essay proved unforgettable for me in its conceptual power and expressive force. It analyzed the image of Akan historical and culture hero Komfo Anokye as both historical personage and mythic figure, a flexible identity adaptable to various contexts depending on the intentions of the meaning constructor, the person shaping the image to suit particular ends, something similar to the inspirational power I see in the Leku depiction, as I work my way from its content to associations at different levels of proximity to that content.
''Could McCaskie be so inspiring in his other writings?'' I wondered.
I then read other essays of his dealing with individuals in Asante history, ''Telling the Tale of Osei Bonsu: An Essay in the Making of Asante Oral History'' and ''The Life and Afterlife of Yaa Asantewaa'', discovering these to be explorations along the lines of the essay on Anokye, also beautifully written, but without the added density of the author's grounding in Western, particularly Continental philosophy, specifically the Western hermeneutic tradition from its German luminaries to its later European developers, a thrilling dimension of discourse deftly integrated in the Anokye essay.
McCaskie's intimacy with Western philosophy gives way in his other writings to a greater engagement with the details of Akan thought and its expressions in Akan languages, as in other essays of his I read, ''Death and the Asantehene: A Historical Meditation'', ''Unspeakable Words, Unmasterable Feelings: Calamity and the Making of History in Asante'' and his book, Asante Identities, History and Modernity in an African Village, 1850-1950.
On entering some distance into that book, the sheer sweetness of idea/expression collocation compelled me to begin writing this small note of appreciation.
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The first thing the new creations did was to ponder the reason why they existed, but no immediate answers were forthcoming, since even the creators had forgotten why.
The evocative power of Agorsor's elongated female forms is amplified by the atmospherics of the room in which they are stationed, his paintings in the background projecting rich colour into the space, as strategically located lighting, bright in some areas, subdued in others, illuminates the room and its contents in a manner suggesting a contemplative chamber.
Image from Kofi Agorsor's Facebook page
Constellations Within and Beyond Akan Creativities
My earlier exposure to Akan thought and arts gradually coheres with the integrations guided by reading McCaskie. I now better appreciate these palpitations within the range of Akan experience as people reflect on their experiences and understanding, embodying them in symbols, these symbolic constructs themselves further shaping experience and generating greater knowledge.These symmetries also go beyond Akan cultures to constellate within the dynamisms of human thought across space and time.
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''Like an owl, Anawos can see beyond the night into the sun and perch gracefully here without a trace of sound. They, seeing beyond time and before time, move seamlessly between the mundane and the profane. We believe they are here with us now, guiding us. They are the invisible things we call 'faith,'' hope,' or 'connections.' ''
From Gedeprensunpre Agorsor, Perception versus Interpretation.
Source: Kofi Agorsor, Instagram
Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in an African Society
This paper deals with the role of Komfo Anokye in Asante thought and history. The source materials and historiography pertaining to Komfo Anokye are critically reviewed, but the principal focus of the paper is on issues of cognition, belief and philosophy.
Komfo Anokye's 'place' in Asante thought is analysed, and his meaning(s) identified with reference to Asante concerns about the nature of history, society and the human.
The paper tries to go beyond epistemology and a 'traditional' reading of Asante religion and its practices to a hermeneutical interpretation of Komfo Anokye and the sense-meaning of Asante history. Philosophical and psychological issues are addressed in a historical context. The larger object of the paper is, by the example of Komfo Anokye and Asante history, to attempt to indicate a way forward for the Africanist historical enterprise in the understanding of meaning.
Komfo Anokye and the stories surrounding him are familiar to all students of African history. He is situated as demiurge, sometimes in an ambiguously Gnostic way, in much scholarly and popular writing on Asante.
But his 'place ' in Asante history is that of an unexplored if ineluctable presence. In his legendary status as source and embodiment of fundamental constituents of Asante thought he remains an abstraction. He is devoid of explored historical intentionality, and as a metaphor interpreted as a series of philosophical meaning(s) he exists in the literature only in the most mechanical sense.
In this paper I am concerned with explaining and with rectifying this situation. I offer a number of readings of Komfo Anokye as nucleus of a series of open-ended or permeable semiotic codes having reference to the philosophical meanings of historic Asante society. My arguments are multiple and overlapping rather than unitary and monolithic. I try to locate Komfo Anokye within the relevant source material and ergo within Asante history and historiography. I essay explication of his meanings by enlarging upon our present exiguous comprehension of the matrices of Asante philosophy.
My goal is not bounded definition, but rather to bring into focus areas of cognitive sense-meaning. In several papers on Asante I have urged the case for and the conditions necessary to the realization of a truly cognitive history. Other Africanists are similarly engaged.
Establishing the historical existence per se of Komfo Anokye is intellectually not very interesting. His crucial significance is his cognitive 'necessity' as metaphor. To elaborate; what I mean by this is that throughout Asante history Komfo Anokye has existed as a matrix or force field within which the sanctioned definitions of ordered society can be located and fixed. The boundaries of this matrix have a high degree of flux, a permeability in time.
It can be asserted that the metaphorical existence of Komfo Anokye partakes of but embraces his nominal existence. If we reduce the matter to polarity we can say that Komfo Anokye exists in historical time as an individual, and in all/no time as a philosophical construct. This polarity does not imply a necessary separation of categories.
Komfo Anokye embraces cognitively all law and all history, and all belief. To put the matter another way; as the litmus of good (order) he enfolds the characteristics of evil (anxiety). Thus, succinctly, all religious practitioners - all ambiguous mediators between order and anxiety - are a unitary fasces of expressed order-anxiety articulations. Komfo Anokye, therefore, may be understood at one level as one polarity of the metaphorical spectrum that defines the unknowable. The other polarity also possesses its mythico-historical individuation.
Source: The Journal of African History, Vol. 27, No. 2, Special Issue in Honour of J.D.Fage (1986), pp. 315-339. Published by: Cambridge University Press
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/181138
Unspeakable Words, Unmasterable Feelings: Calamity and the Making of History in Asante
The making of history among the Asante, as with other peoples, is a complicated matter. Simply to mine indigenous oral texts for their usable empirical content – their historical ‘facts’ – is to overlook or otherwise to scant their status as calculated artefacts derived from and shaped by the normative values underpinning communication within Asante, or indeed any other self-aware historical culture.
It would benefit all historians of Africa if they were to look into the making of their sources – the why and the how of the matter – with as much assiduity as they devote to the extraction of discrete nuggets of information from them.
Recently, some historians and ethnographers have begun to look into the emotional, affective, performative, and other non-textual ways in which history is experienced in its making and in its later reiterations. Indeed, a number have taken matters so far as to call for an anthropology of history-making. Any such project, however, is in its infancy, and all due caution must be the watchword of those who attempt to advance it.
The reason is simple and can be readily explained. An authoritative overview of the recent and ever burgeoning literature on emotion and affect in historical contexts concludes that in trying to move beyond the old dichotomy of constructivism versus universalism as tools of understanding, historians must now try to familiarize themselves with a range of, to them at least, exotic disciplines – neuroscience, medicine, psychology, linguistics, and the rest – that are as pregnant with novel insights as they are with fierce contestation and contradiction.
In short, this
multidisciplinary venture is still finding its intellectual feet, and while some
of its arguments resonate with empirical materials presented below the latter
are foregrounded. Simply, this is an essay in the Asante understanding of
history-making. Let me turn now to the specific case.
Akan Twi-speaking academic linguists have written usefully and suggestively about the webs of custom and expression that are brought to bear by the Asante and related peoples in the making of historical memorials. They have highlighted the persuasion to be silent about (yϵ ma ϵyϵ komm) or otherwise to avoid or evade (kwae) certain historical subjects. It is argued that in some circumstances silence, avoidance, or evasion are employed in communication ‘when the topic is particularly delicate, a taboo, or when the situation is emotionally loaded and the speaker is “at a loss” for words’.
The same techniques are ‘used with regard to reverence, awe, bereavement and the expression of extreme emotions’. Most precisely, ‘certain past calamities’ are recalled and revisited by the Asante in ‘marked, or pronounced silences, indeed in acts of negation and avoidance’.
These ‘silences are not meant to suppress historical memory, or induce memory collapse or collective amnesia’, but instead ‘preserve the purity of institutions that drive state cohesion. Avoidances strengthen the potency of the judicial instrument, and help to perpetuate desirable social values.’ What is in play here appears rather like an affective historical variant of the Freudian uncanny (unheimlich), in which what is being confined to silence or otherwise avoided is not the strange and bafflingly inexplicable but rather the familiar and painfully repressed.
An avoidance in Asante Twi
is akyiwadeϵ (pl. nkyiwadeϵ) or sometimes akyide, understood as anything classified
as abominable and detestable, and so ‘a forbidden thing’ for all of society or
for particular segments within it. The term derives from the
verb kyi (lit. ‘to turn the back to’; cf. akyi, ‘the back’) + ade(ϵ) (lit. ‘a
thing, something or other’).
Anything that is akyiwadeϵ is viewed with fear as
well as abhorrence, and so the word is commonly translated as ‘taboo’. Of
course, ‘forbidden things’ range widely and variously across diverse areas of
Asante culture, but here I am concerned with the events and feelings that
impact most directly on the making and retelling of history. Past disasters and
their abidingly awful emotional resonances are a large component in this, as
too are historical memories of still opaque matters that associate the workings
of power (tumi) with a fearful metaphysical unknowing.
Supremely, the Asante ‘great oath’ (ntamkϵseϵ) that is understood to belong to the Asantehene alone is the locus of painful historical memories and of unresolved feelings from and concerning the past. The word ntamkϵseϵ itself is an instance of avoidance, for it is employed as an allusive reference to forbidden words that call up events in a directly nominal way. Moreover, ntamkϵseϵ is to be construed as a fasces or a bundle of oaths, with referents added to it over time. That said, the most potent and literally dreadful components in it are associated with the first two Asante rulers, the Asantehenes Osei Tutu and Opoku Ware .
Avoidance of mentioning ‘past
calamities’ is a signal feature of the apae, the praise or referential poems recited
by the Asantehene’s executioners (abrafoɔ) on certain prescribed
ritual occasions dedicated to the telling of history. On such formal occasions
the abrafoɔ chant to the accompaniment of the mpebi and nkrawiri drums,
each speaker giving way to another as he tires or is simply too overcome by
emotion to continue.
The apae are a legacy from the past, and their content is
passed down from a father to the son who will succeed him in office. Indeed,
youthful trainees who have demonstrated sufficient mastery sometimes take a
part in the recitations. In performance abrafoɔ speak
in stanzas, holding a sword in the right hand while the left hand is balled
into a fist and laid on the reverse of the ceremonial blade.
I have been privileged to attend the performance of apae on a number of occasions. Those present who are in any way familiar with the genre follow the content and cadences of utterance with rapt attention. Some are visibly moved to sorrow, and even to mournful wailing and tears, by fleetingly indirect allusions to past disasters that are never mentioned openly and publicly because they have a status as being nkyiwadeϵ. Here I draw attention to one such passage concerning the first Asantehene Osei Tutu.
Ͻno no!
Agya, nyane! Agya, nyane!
Agya, wonte se anwam resu?
Ͻse: Bui!
Sϵϵ abofra yi, woyϵ abofra pa.
Meseϵ wo sϵ anwam na ϵsu?
Ͻseϵ Tutu Bediako ntahera retwa amantamfi a, wo sϵ anwam na ϵe’esu!
Agya e! Agya e!
Wotwa asuo a, sɔ wo tuo mu oo.
[Behold the Great One!
Father, awake! Father, awake!
Father do you hear the cry of birds?
He says ‘Bui’!
You this child here, you, really, are a clever child.
Did I say to you it was birds crying?
It is the sound of the ntahera horns
Of the hornblowers of Osei Tutu, the Warrior
That you call the cry of birds.
Father! Father!
When you cross over a river, hold on to your gun.
Grasping meaning and
implication in this stanza is not easy. The identity of the father
of the child is ambiguously intertwined with that of the first Asantehene Osei
Tutu, the father of the nation. The child (nation) is alarmed at the loud
crying of birds, but the father (Osei Tutu) identifies these as the reassuring
sounds made by the king’s – his own – ntahera horns.
Led by the bɔaman horn, these instruments were first introduced by
Osei Tutu to advance before his army into battle. So, Osei Tutu is on his way
to war. In the last and crucial line – almost a form of peripeteia, in that it
signals a change and implies a turning point – the father (king) is advised to
be on guard when he has to cross a river. This is the historical and emotional
crux of the stanza, for it makes a delicately allusive and fleeting reference
to something that could never be talked about openly and in public on pain of death.
Simply, the reference denotes something that is
akyiwadeϵ, and profoundly and universally so, for it is the first and core
component in the Asantehenes’s ntamkϵseϵ. Osei Tutu is understood to have been
ambushed and killed in old age while fording a stream on his way to fight
against the Akyem Kotoku. I have never heard this line greeted with anything
but distress over the single greatest of catastrophes, the untimely and violent
death of an Asantehene
Asante individuals will
sometimes talk about such matters in private conversation, if somewhat diffidently,
and in the low nasal whispering tone that indicates a matter of great moment
that must never be mentioned in public. Thus, the circumstances of Osei Tutu’s death
have been known from such conversations since the time of the earliest European
residents in Kumase.
Bowdich was informed that Osei Tutu invaded ‘Atoa’ (Akyem
Kotoku), but the enemy forces ‘dexterously insinuated’ themselves along forest paths
to attack the rear of the Asante army. There, Osei Tutu was ‘following
leisurely’ after his troops ‘with a guard of a few hundred men’. The royal
entourage was surrounded and annihilated, and the Akyem Kotoku ‘shot the king
in his hammock’. Dupuis recorded more or
less the same (hi)story from talking with Muslim residents of Kumase as well as
Asante individuals, but he was apprised of more circumstantial detail.
In this retelling Akyem Kotoku allied itself with Denkyirahene Ntim Gyakari against the Asante, and after the defeat and death of the ruler of Denkyira Kumase determined upon ‘vengeance’ against his erstwhile ally. A tribute was imposed but the Akyem Kotoku prevaricated for years and then declined to pay it. An ‘impatient’ Asantehene, urged on by his ‘rapacious captains’, sent an army against them. Asantehene Osei Tutu himself remained in Kumase to complete his mandatory consultations at various shrines in preparation for the campaign, quitting his capital a day after his forces departed and following them ‘at a leisure pace’. The Asantehene and the royal escort were then ‘suddenly assailed’ by the Akyem Kotoku while fording the river Bosompra. ‘The first volley’, so Dupuis was informed, ‘wounded the sovereign in the side; but still vigorous, he threw himself out of the hammock, and rallied his men as best he could’.
However, ‘a second discharge from the forest killed him outright, and he fell with his face into the river’. The royal escort was butchered, ‘to the amount of two or three hundred persons, of whom sixty were women and children, either belonging to the monarch or his generals’. The body of Osei Tutu, Dupuis concluded, ‘was never recovered’. In Asante royal tradition the passing of Osei Tutu is said to have taken place at a hillock called kɔromante, overlooking the Bosompra, and is further said to have occurred on memeneda, one of six such days in the Asante adaduanan calendrical cycle and always equivalent to a Saturday in the Julian calendar. In consequence, kɔromante memeneda (‘Kɔromante and Saturday’) became the first component of the personal ‘great oath’ of the Asantehene. Like everything else that followed, it was always referred to indirectly as ntamkϵseϵ, for the words kɔromante memeneda were akyiwadeϵ and their use was totally prohibited throughout Asante.
The term ntamkϵseϵ itself comes from ntam (‘an oath’) + kϵseϵ (‘great, big’), and in turn the noun ntam most likely derives from the verb tam (‘to lift up’). The addition of the adjectival qualifier kϵseϵ supplies the sense of someone who is ‘grappling with an object that is heavy, burdensome, difficult to lift, etc., and this requires considerable effort and energy to execute’. The killing of Osei Tutu, then, is ‘very difficult for the mouth to lift’, for it references profound grief and shame, and it is forbidden on pain of death to mention it directly in public, ‘lest the spirit of dead ancestors should rise and take revenge, because their agonies and painful experiences have been recalled’.
The Asantehene had custody
of ntamkϵseϵ. It was his personal oath, and anyone who used it in public to
swear or to attest to the truth or falsehood of something was answerable to him
in the royal court of arbitration. Since ntamkϵseϵ carried the direct
consequences for those who misused it by being found in court to have sworn
falsely, we might expect that it was used by litigants only in the most serious
cases and as a last resort. However, appellants were known to use it heedlessly
when enraged or exasperated by their opponents.
Thus, after the ‘defeat and death of Sai Tootoo’ on a memeneda (Saturday) the day itself was deemed to be inauspicious (dabɔne). It marked ‘the national affliction’ and so ‘the day itself has been cast into the calendar among the list of ominous days stigmatized by the Ashantees as days which forebode evil’. As a result, no one undertook even ‘the most trivial enterprise’ on a memeneda, and it was devoted to ‘expiatory and propitiatory sacrifices’.
The ntamkϵseϵ tells us much that the Asante think and say, or do not say, about their understanding and making of history. Narratives cast in this mode are memorials of unspeakable events and unmasterable feelings. They condense such experiences to indirect recall, and in doing so they enable a historical pedagogy that is ever present but rarely voiced. We have seen the ways in which directly uttered reference to such things was built into a literal appeal to history, most significantly in the disruptive arena of serious contention and dispute.
One might argue that
the commemorations of the passing of Osei Tutu... are commentaries on the core but ineffable issue
of power (tumi) in Asante perception and society. In Asante,
power is held to possess an otherworldly dimension. This is what makes it
evanescent in human life, even as those who can access it try to control and to
direct its empowering fickleness.
All people
come into the world and eventually leave it, and between these two fixities
trafficking with power can lift up and cast down in all kinds of ways that may appear
arbitrary and opaque to understanding. Memory and amnesia take wing from events
and feelings as these happen, and they constitute the experiential clay out of which
historical perspective is moulded and promulgated. This clay is, however,
inert, and it is people who shape it into history. The Asante have a sharp
understanding of the ways in which factors of power and interest mould
historical understanding.
Much more needs to be done
on the priorities and protocols involved in the making of African histories, so
that we have a deeper understanding of what is in play and at stake in such
matters. Contestation over the past configured as (hi)story – simply, how the
past can be and is told as a tale – is a central concern of all self-aware
societies. Over the still very short life span of modern Africanist
historiography, much has been written and said about oral (and now often
written) indigenous texts, but the bias is still very much towards their etic
or extrinsic usefulness as data, rather than their emic or intrinsic significance
to their authors in the context of their own lived experience.
Finally, the
great French sinologist Marcel Granet was once asked about his methodology. He
is said to have replied that ‘la méthode, c’est le chemin après qu’on l’a
parcouru’ (‘Method is the path after one has already taken it.’). This is a
quip, but a deadly serious one.
Worrying away at methodology can become a
distracting substitute for the historian’s essential task of immersion over the
longest possible time in a given culture in all of its aspects, past and
present. It is only time and sustained commitment that can open the way to
framing the kinds of questions I have tried to ask and also to answer here
about the Asante.
Source: The Journal of African History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1989), pp. 417-444
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/182917
Telling the Tale of Osei Bonsu: An Essay on the Making of Asante Oral History
It is often said that the West African forest kingdom of Asante has the richest historical source materials in sub-Saharan Africa, and a contemporary culture with a vibrant interest in its own past. One result is that Asante has been ‘much scrutinized’ by historians.
However, basic work still remains to be done, and nowhere more so than in the area of oral and written historical texts in Twi produced by the Asante about and for themselves. In Barber’s review of textual production of this sort throughout Africa, she ends by saying that such material ‘cries out for a more integrated historical-anthropological account’.
This is an
essay in response to Barber’s plea. It deals with Asante apae, which Barber
herself discusses. Asante apae are praise
or referential poems about the lives of Asante kings. Their core subject is
achievement and its celebration, but the genre also permits the interweaving of
criticism with exaltation, and notably in the matter of behavioural foibles.
It
is also the case that recitation by experts allows for adjustments of meaning
through oral intonation. The narrative spine of apae is substantively constant,
but tonal or ‘bent’ articulation (koa mu) of particular words (nsemfua) can
suggest multiple interpretations to the listener. Punning is common, and
complicated by its promiscuous and prolonged extension through long passages of
metaphor. The genre is not transparent, nor is it meant to be.
At normal conversational
speed, the Asante dialect of Akan Twi is spoken almost twice as fast as its
analogues among the Akuapem and Fante. The result is that ‘words roll into each
other’ all of the time, and intermediate sounds are elided or omitted to
maintain a rapid flow of talk. At times this is complicated by the poetic
virtues attributed to the invention of compound words. All kings, Osei Bonsu
included, are lauded as pesemakoanya; that is, pe + sem + ako + anya (‘he who
looks for a pretext for war and finds it’). It is obviously difficult to hear
and interpret this in rapid oral performance, and more especially so when the
given stanzas of verse offer an avalanche of such compounds.
In Asante utterance, public performance demands clear speech (kasa duru) that is spoken in a low, nasalized tone to indicate supplicatory seriousness. Formal linguistic analysis of the speech rhythms in Asante apae show that the variable tempo and line length of the verse are shaped by an isochronous beat. Expert recitation is attained in a style that exploits changes in tempo and ellipsis so as to maintain oscillatory rhythmic beats at harmonic intervals. This rhythm remains constant throughout, even during silent rest phases and between individual poems. It need hardly be said that this adds another level of difficulty for the listener.
Asante apae are
chanted poems replete with esoteric archaisms, obscure metaphors and abrupt
topical and emphatic shifts. Combined with the mode of delivery just described,
these features render hearing and understanding what is being intoned difficult
and often impossible, even for native speakers of Asante Twi.
Many invited to
attend apae performances today surrender to the emotions produced in them by
the delivery of the verses, rather than struggling with what the words actually
mean. In the 1920s, Rattray described the intonation of apae as being like the ‘humming
of bees’ (Rattray 1923: 103). This ‘humming’ is part of a Gesamtkunstwerk, of sound, sight and occasion,
intended to inspire feelings appropriate to the recitation. Thus, I have been
present when listeners to apae, in spite of their difficulties with
comprehension, were brought to a heightened emotional state and even to tears
by the occasion itself. ‘It is our history’, I was told, ‘and we feel it in us.’
This manuscript reproduces passages of the apae, enlarges on them in narrative commentary, and discusses these further in the king’s correspondence with other committee members. Since passages of the apae speak in the continuous present tense, in which the deeds of all rulers are collapsed together into a single monarchical archetype (‘Osei’, the name of the first Asante king), this text and the allied correspondence about it have helped hugely in disentangling and assigning verses to individual Asantehenes. Most importantly, this text is in many ways an elaboration on the apae. The compressed mnemonics of the poems are keys to the long and detailed narratives that gave rise to them. In one sense, the apae may be understood as both summary and index of the oral (hi)stories told by the Asante about their past.
I have argued elsewhere that communicating by speaking and listening structures Asante reality and is at the heart of Asante cultural practice, and that this remains the case despite the advent of a widespread literacy ( Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850–1950). Speaking and hearing are the alpha and omega of Asante oral history making. Thus, tete ka asom – ‘ancient things remain in the ears’ (Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People, 1916, 190).
I have argued too that the archival historian can order only the surface of events, for the most part externally described, and not the wellsprings of motivated selfhood that reside within an orally constructed past rendered in the language(s) of its makers. It seems to me that most Africanist historians have too readily embraced the first option, and have abandoned the second as being – what? – too difficult, too time consuming, too unyielding in the laborious pursuit of historical meaning(s) embedded in indigenous languages.
Plainly and surely, historical work and other forms of scholarship about Africa should be about the recuperation and explication of African views of African pasts and presents. As noted at the beginning of this essay, Asante is often said to hold an especially privileged place as a subject for historical research. But I have come to wonder if that is indeed the case. Perhaps it is repeated more and more frequently, as the appetite for deep fieldwork over decades in any single African culture has fallen away towards a vanishing point.
If history and context are indispensable, as indeed they must be, then the languages in which Africans understand these fundamentals must take their rightful place at the centre of Africanist research, historical or otherwise.
Source : Africa / Volume 84 / Issue 03 / August 2014, pp 353 - 370