The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (70 page)

Rattray’s knowledge of Twi allowed him to grasp the importance of the queen mother in Asante society. Why, he asked one Asante elder, do you suppose that we British never appreciated her role? “The white man,” he was told, “never asked us this; you have dealings with and recognize only the men; we supposed the European considered women of no account, and we know you do not recognize them as we have always done.”

Victorian society, Rattray now understood, was more sexist than Asante society—among other things.

Rattray became an advocate for the Asante. He argued for the rehabilitation of Asante queen mothers, kings, chiefs, “and all the wonderful household organization of an Ashanti court, now crumbling into poverty and decay.” He urged the Asante not to barter the wealth of their past, “metaphorically and not infrequently in reality, for a coat, a collar, or a tie.” The greatest hope for the Asante in the future, he felt, was “to follow and build upon lines with which the national
sunsum
or soul has been familiar since first they were a people.”

To be sure, Rattray was a civil servant and a product of Victorian England. Fortunately for historians and anthropologists, however, Rattray’s command of Twi and his feeling of common humanity with the Asante challenged him to understand how their society had operated before European interference.

Precolonial Asante Society

The supreme creator of the Asante cosmos was the Sky God. He had a special set of priests committed to him for life, and every residential compound had an altar where prayers could be offered to him. The Sky God was so remote, however, that most tasks were delegated to the
abosom,
a series of lesser supernatural spirits whose actions were more tangible. Many of these lesser spirits, such as Ta Kese and Ta Kora, had mud-walled temples dedicated to them.

There were also the
asamanfo,
or spirits of the ancestors, who protected Asante society and could be ritually contacted for help and advice. Ancestor ritual was pursued at the family or clan level. State-level religion was based on the premise that the collective soul of the Asante people was embodied in the golden stool, and the ghosts of past kings protected Asante society.

The ancestors were honored at ceremonies called
adae,
held every 42 days in the courtyard of the king’s residence. At these ceremonies the Asante propitiated the spirits of the departed leaders of their major clans. A dramatic feature of the adae was the oral recitation of Asante history by a specialist who had memorized it. What provided the drama was the fact that an
abrafo,
or executioner, stood behind the man doing the reciting; if the oral historian made a mistake, he was led away by the abrafo. And you think
you
have job-related stress.

The Oyoko clan, headed by the
ohema,
or queen mother, was the social segment from which the kings and nobles of Asante society came. The ohema, in consultation with other members of her clan, typically chose each king’s successor. Before the new ruler was allowed to sit on the golden stool, she publicly admonished and advised him. The queen mother also chose each new king’s senior wife. When a king left his court to wage war, the ohema served as regent in his absence. Even after his return, she sat next to him in court and served as a check on his power.

The queen mother’s personal wooden stool was considered senior to the king’s. Neither the king’s feet nor his personal wooden stool was allowed to touch the ground directly, as that might bring on famine. The king therefore wore sandals on his feet; he also carried a parasol for protection from the sun.

When a prominent king, queen mother, or provincial governor died, his or her personal wooden stool was blackened with soot and curated in a “stool house.” As for the golden stool of the Asante state, which transcended the king’s personal property, it was placed on an elephant hide to keep it from touching the ground.

Like the Bemba chief, the Asante king had a group of councillors who inherited their positions. The king was also advised by the Asante elders. His court included spokesmen, heralds, minstrels, and drummers.

Lower-ranking Asante were organized into
oman,
or clans. Each clan controlled its own farmland. The Asante were required to marry outside their clan and expressed preference for what anthropologists call “cross-cousin marriage.” For example, a man could marry his father’s sister’s daughter, since the groom had inherited his blood from his mother, and his bride had inherited her blood from the groom’s paternal aunt, who belonged to a different clan.

On the bottom rung of the Asante social ladder were slaves, usually war captives, who belonged to no clan and inherited nothing. Many slaves were kept alive only until they were needed for sacrifice in a major ritual. Other slaves were employed in gold mining, a dangerous activity in which death from cave-ins was always a possibility.

Of all the Asante crafts, goldworking has received the most attention. In the Polynesian terms used by Irving Goldman, goldworking was the ultimate Asante expression of tohunga, or expertise. Goldsmiths were organized into craft guilds or brotherhoods and were the only Asante commoners permitted to wear gold ornaments. Fathers were allowed to bequeath the tools and skills of goldworking to their sons, nephews, or clan mates. This special treatment of goldsmiths was a source of inequality among Asante commoners.

Gold was such an important Asante commodity that a standardized system of weights was created. Experts on the Gold Coast suspect that some units of weight were borrowed from the Portuguese and Arab traders who had been active in the Akan region for centuries. Many Asante weights were cast in bronze, often in geometric shapes or the images of animals. Unfortunately there was so much cheating that it spawned an Asante proverb: “A chief’s weights are not the same as a poor man’s.”

Another Asante skill was long-distance communication with “talking drums.” Only chiefs of a certain rank could own the drums, which were made from a hollow log and the membrane of an elephant’s ear. According to Rattray, drum communication depended on the fact that Twi is a tonal language, that is, one in which differences in tone are used to distinguish between syllables or short words that would otherwise sound alike. By varying the tone, Asante drummers created sounds that simulated Twi words. The messages frequently involved information about prominent citizens, reports of danger, or calls to war. Rattray devised a way to use English letters to indicate the various tones, allowing him to record messages.

Rattray used his knowledge of both Twi and drum language to give us our most detailed description of an important Asante ceremony, known as the
Odwira.
This ritual, whose name meant “purification,” was held each September to honor the Asante kings who had become ancestral spirits.

In its precolonial form Odwira involved the sacrifice of 12 men, usually condemned criminals who had been kept alive for the ceremony. Since the British government had by then banned human sacrifice, Rattray got his information from a senior Asante official who had witnessed the precolonial ritual.

Rattray was told that in the first stage of the ceremony the king and his court, preceded by officials carrying the famous golden stool and the blackened stools of the ancestors, marched to a nearby stream. Sprinkling the golden stool with sacred water, the king asked it to help him behead future enemies, just as his predecessors had done with the Denkyira, Akyem, Domaa, and so on. He prayed that the Asante would find gold to dig and added his hope that “I get some for the upkeep of my kingship.”

Some freshly harvested yams were placed on shrines to the abosom, or supernatural spirits; others were offered to royal and noble ancestors. Only after the gods and ghosts had been fed could the king and his people eat.

The procession then moved to the royal mausoleum at Bantama. There, with their arms tied behind them, the 12 men chosen for sacrifice were lined up before the great brass vessel.

The king entered the mausoleum and visited the skeletons of each Asante ruler in chronological order, beginning with Osei Tutu. Each sacrificial victim was assigned the task of serving one past asantehene in the afterlife. From a talking drum came the message, “Osei Tutu! Alas! Alas! Alas! Woe!” This was the signal for the executioner to cry, “Off with you to the land of the ghosts to serve Osei Tutu.” He then beheaded the first victim. The king next walked to the coffin of Opoku Ware, where the second victim was given his instructions for the afterlife and decapitated.

After all 12 victims had been sacrificed, their bodies were dragged to the forest behind Bantama. The Asante king then returned to his palace, where he was entertained with singers, drums, and reed pipes. This concert ended the precolonial Odwira.

“I was glad,” Rattray’s informant told him, “that I still had my head.”

Another precolonial context in which the Asante performed human sacrifice was the royal funeral. The venue for these funerals was the mausoleum at Bantama, a place where the royal skeletons and their sumptuary goods were guarded by 1,000 warriors. The funeral of an asantehene was similar to that of the Tattooed Serpent of the Natchez: many wives and members of his retinue expected, indeed, volunteered, to accompany him in the afterlife. Included among the sacrificial victims were the usual condemned criminals and prisoners of war.

As the king lay dying, he might whisper to the queen mother the names of the women he wanted to accompany him in the afterlife. The matriarch was allowed to choose additional women for this privilege; still others volunteered. All of these women dressed in white, the color of celebration, and put on their best gold ornaments. In a ritual reminiscent of chiefly Panamanian funerals, the women were stupefied with palm wine and strangled.

Young boys who had served the king as heralds, pages, or shooers of flies had their necks broken on a large elephant tusk; their bodies were smeared with white pipe clay as a sign of joy. Many noble officeholders, unable to bear the loss of their ruler, volunteered to be garroted. Some servants chose to flee into the forest, but there were always dozens of war captives available as substitutes.

No one dared speak of the asantehene as having died. Common euphemisms were “A mighty tree has been uprooted,” or “The king is absent elsewhere.” The royal corpse lay for 80 days and nights in a perforated coffin above a pit. As the liquids of decomposition dripped through the perforations and into the pit, a team of funeral attendants fanned away the flies.

By the 80th day, decomposition had reached the point where the king’s bones could be removed, cleaned, and rubbed with fat. In precolonial times this fat came from a forest subspecies of the African cape buffalo. Rattray reports, however, that one of the gifts sent by Queen Victoria to the ninth asantehene was a jar of pomade. From that point on this exotic pomade, referred to as “the queen’s fat,” was used on the royal bones.

Once the fat had been applied, all the king’s
suman,
or talismans, were attached to the appropriate bones. The major long bones were then rearticulated with gold wire. The partly reconstructed skeleton was placed in a hexagonal coffin, covered with black velvet, decorated with gold rosettes, and placed in the mausoleum.

A living woman from an important family was then chosen to bring food to the king’s remains for the rest of her life. Known as
saman yere,
“the wife of the ghost,” this woman dressed totally in white. Wives of the ghosts lived in a special harem, guarded by eunuchs to preserve their virtue for as long as they lived. When one of these women died, she was immediately replaced by another.

The Nature of Asante Inequality

Let us briefly compare the Asante with the Bemba of Zambia and ask this question: Was inequality actually greater under an Asante king than under a Bemba paramount chief?

To begin with, both societies shared what we now recognize as widespread African social institutions. Both retained the matrilineal clans of earlier societies. Both had male leaders whose legitimacy derived from the blood of highly ranked mothers. In both cases a chiefly woman or queen mother continued to supervise the ruler throughout his life. Rulers of both societies shared power with a body of hereditary councillors. Both societies used the public recitation of past leaders’ accomplishments as a form of oral history.

There were, however, differences in scale between the two societies. A Bemba chiefdom typically covered only 22,000 square miles, had no elaborate road system, and displayed a three-level administrative hierarchy. At its peak the Asante kingdom covered 100,000 square miles, displayed four administrative levels, and had a concentric pattern of inner and outer provinces linked by carefully maintained roads.

Although Bemba chiefs raided their neighbors for slaves and booty, their subjects were overwhelmingly Bemba by ethnicity. The Asante kingdom contained an empirelike assortment of subordinate ethnic groups such as the Domaa, Tafo, Amakom, Denkyira, Akwamu, Gonja, and so on. Military regiments from these groups were often incorporated into the Asante army.

While the Bemba were content with shrines and informed ritual specialists, the Asante built actual mud-walled temples dedicated to specific deities and staffed by full-time priests. They also had an official state religion, centered on a golden stool.

The Bemba chief had a retinue; the Asante king maintained an actual court, like that of the Denkyira kingdom visited by Osei Tutu. Both the chitimukulu of the Bemba and the asantehene of the Asante had the power of life and death over their subjects. The Bemba chief was often buried with sacrificial victims. Many more people—including wives, officials, servants, slaves, and condemned criminals—were killed at an Asante ruler’s funeral. The bones of the Asante king himself, however, were placed in a special coffin in a royal mausoleum, surrounded by the curated remains of earlier kings.

For the vast majority of commoners, inequality under an Asante king was probably only marginally greater than under a Bemba paramount chief. One interesting difference between the two societies lay in the Asante reverence for the golden stool. In 1896 the Asante revealed that they were more concerned with retaining their golden stool than their asantehene. The Asante king, for all his prestige, was not considered the equal of that item of sacred furniture.