Akokɔ nto nto, aduasa – the chicken should lay-lay eggs, thirty [plenty]
Akorɔma mfa mfa, aduasa – the hawk should take-take, thirty [plenty]
Akokɔ, mato mato bi awura – chicken: I have laid-laid some eggs owner
Akorɔma mmεfa me na mabrε – the hawk should come and take me, I am tired
Akan drum text
Animguase mfata okaniba – disgrace does not befit the Akan child
[i.e., Akan-born]
Akan proverb
In the drum text above, the chicken and the hawk parallel the symbiotic relationship between the “slave trade” and the period of “legitimate trade” between the Gold Coast and Britain. The former “trade” paved the way for and nourished the outcomes of the latter, and as the uneven power relations between West Africa and European nation-states become even more explicit in a globalizing economy, Europe or Britain (“the hawk”) seized on the valued resources (“eggs”) of a tiresome and ravaged Gold Coast. To halt the disgrace (animguase) of impending colonial incursion and protectionism, several Akan societies (“chickens”) became hawk-like in domestic matters—for they had less control over international forces beyond their soil—and its internal conflicts had as much to do with their inner drive to maintain “order” in juxtaposition to the exigencies of their times. The key nineteenth-century relationship between Asante of the forest interior and Elmina of the coast provides a spatial parameter and a mnemonic for examining key transformations between those two boundaries as represented by the coastal Fante polities, forest-based Asante, and the Bono, who occupied the northern forest fringe. I argue that the conflicts between and within Akan societies of varying orders were the product of multilayered factors occurring at the same time and in different places, such as power struggles and tensions born of conservatism and Christianity, that ultimately transformed all in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the Akan share a composite culture, spiritual practice, calendrical system, socio-political structure, and ethos, the transformations in Asante society were not replicated among the Fante or Bono, although the Bono offer a comparative case that diverged from much of the nascent colonial shaping of Asante and Fante society. This essay suggests that Akan societies, beyond the almost exclusive focus on Asante, are better approached thematically than in spatial or chronological isolation, since the themes of social dissolution and conflicts were shared by all in a context of Euro-African commerce, Westernization, and Christian proselytization.