Book Description

Asante, Africa's celebrated "kingdom of gold," offers to the scholar and interested reader alike the most richly documented of all of Africa's historic societies. This history is embedded in and amplified by a vibrant oral tradition maintained by the Asante of today. The essays in this book, fifty in number, cover diverse aspects of the Asante experience from the creation of the kingdom in the later seventeenth century to the status of Asante in today's Ghana. In addition, these essays range over and discuss a variety of crucial aspects of Asante social and cultural life - kinship, witchcraft, community, selfhood, gender, death, warfare, and the rest. These essays span nearly half a century of the author's engagement with Asante and its people. The result is scholarship that is acknowledged to be at the cutting edge of the recuperation of Africa's long and still neglected past. More than that, however, this book offers much to the large international constituency of general readers who are fascinated by the story of the greatest and most enduring of African kingdoms, and to those among them who identify with Asante and its people, and draw sustenance and inspiration from their story. Glossy photo insert included.