The starting point of this article is what I see as the contrasting contemporary Asante and Fante views about the admirable man. The Asante say of such a man that ‘ose ohene’, lit. ‘he is like a chief’; the Fante say of him that ‘oye krache dodo’, lit. ‘he is extremely well educated’. For the Asante the ‘ohene’ remains the model of social achievement, while for the Fante it is the apparently well educated who lives and behaves like a ‘gentleman’ who is the model of social excellence.

These statements about what may be called the ‘ideal’ man among the two Akan sub-groups express the actual social position of traditional rulers and educated persons among them (Sarbah, 1897,1906; Casely-Hayfordj 1903; Manoukian, 1950: 9). The Asante respect a traditional ruler, known as nana, of any rank, more than an educated person, whatever his degree of education. For the Fante it is the reverse. An Asante, however well educated or rich, aims at some kind of chiefship as the supreme index of social achievement. The Fante aims at the acquisition of repute as a highly educated man.

The present article is intended as the first of two contributions to the economic and social– but above all to the intellectual– history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante or Ashanti (now located in the Republic of Ghana). Both papers will attempt to pull together and to situate in a ‘mentalist’ framework a number of recent and confessedly disparate research findings concerning a cluster of concepts, ideas and beliefs that, merely for the sake of brevity at this point, I will assign simply to the embracing ‘neutral’ rubric of general transformations in the ideology (or ideologies) of wealth. The first article will be concerned with developments in Asante society up to the close of the nineteenth century (defined here interpretatively rather than in strictly chronological terms); its successor will concentrate on a highly detailed examination of a sequence of crucially telling events in the early colonial period, and upon selected developments thereafter in the twentieth century. The articles are designed and intended to be read sequentially; the first, it is hoped, will assist in making sense of the significantly denser context (and more detailed content) of the second.

On sait que beaucoup de sociétés africaines associent une position sociale originate à la pratique d'un art quelconque: musiciens ici, devins ou guérisseurs ailleurs, sont placés hors du commun. Dans ce domaine des rapports entre occupations et status le sort de la métallurgie est remarquable par l'élaboration symbolique qui partout s'y attache et par la place réservée à ceux qui travaillent le fer: parias ou aristocrates, les forgerons sont des êtres à part. Ces phénomenès attestés partout sur le continent prennent des formes très variables, et de nombreux auteurs se sont attachés à concilier ces deux aspects: l'extrême généralité de l'existence d'un symbolisme du fer et d'un status spécial des forgerons, d'une part, et l'extrême variété des configurations observées, d'autre part.

Major factors which influence the pace of change in rural districts of Kenya relate to the nature of the local environment and traditional economy, population density and the degree of integration with the national economy and polity. In general change takes place more rapidly in the better watered high potential areas than in the semi-arid or arid areas. Kitui is a district in the semi-arid zone of the Eastern Province, Kenya. Traditionally its residents – the Kitui Akamba – were agro-pastoralists. With the establishment of British rule they expanded cultivation into former rangelands, and grazed their animals‘cattle and small stock – in areas once the preserve of wild life. This generated a resurgence in the local economy mirrored in the fact that the young men adamantly resisted administrative pressure to induce them to become labour migrants.