I

The making of history among the Asante, as with other peoples, is a complicated matter.Footnote ¹ 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.Footnote ² Indeed, a number have taken matters so far as to call for an anthropology of history-making.Footnote ³ 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.Footnote ⁴ 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.

II

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’.Footnote ⁵ 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.’Footnote ⁶ 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.Footnote ⁷ 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 (d. 1717) and Opoku Ware (d. 1750).

III

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.Footnote ⁸ 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.Footnote ⁹ 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.

IV

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. In 1817, 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’. In 1820, 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 in 1701 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’. It might be added that the death of Osei Tutu was noted without any further comment by the Dutch at Elmina in late 1717.Footnote ¹⁰

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 of 42 named days, and always equivalent to a Saturday in the Julian calendar.Footnote ¹¹ 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. A certain level of confusion arises in some of our external sources, because the deaths of two Kumase royals from smallpox in the course of the Fante war of 1807 also took place on a memeneda, and this event too is akyiwadeε but was added to ntamkεseε a century after Osei Tutu's death.Footnote ¹² 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’.Footnote ¹³

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 direst 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. Indeed, it might even be sworn ‘from indiscretion in the heat of argument, where the sum contended for may not exceed the value of five shillings’.Footnote ¹⁴ In this behaviour we see the manifestation of a well-documented Asante characteristic. This was mpoatwa, the prideful act of both defying and condescending to an antagonist in public by raising the stakes even when – or even especially when – a cause seemed to be lost. Be all that as it may, convention ordained that oaths were calibrated in terms of their seriousness. They were ‘progressive’, and ‘by Cormantee and Saturday’ was ‘seldom ventured’, but when this most dread of declarations was sworn in court it was met with ‘a gloomy silence’.Footnote ¹⁵

The reason was simple. To swear by ntamkεseε in a public forum before the Asantehene was to stake one's own life, and possibly that of one's kin, on a positive verdict and an acquittal. If the person sworn against responded in kind with the same oath then both lives were in peril, and the party found against by the Asantehene would be executed or even tortured to death, and the heirs and successors might be severely fined. Much hinged on the mood of the Asantehene, for this was his personal oath. If he felt that it had been used falsely, inappropriately or frivolously, then his response might be coloured by emotional upset and angry displeasure that extended beyond the contesting litigants before him. Dupuis witnessed one sworn exchange of ntamkεseε before Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame and recorded the result. ‘The effect of these expressions’, he observed, ‘clouds every brow with woe, from the king to the slave who stands behind his chair; many fly from the presence, – such, for instance, who are not men of influence at court, or who may be involved in litigious palavers, the issue of which is uncertain, and may be dangerously prejudiced when anger clouds the brow of Majesty.’ Others present hastened to ‘cover their faces with both hands, uttering at the time a charm or invocation to the patron Gods to shield them from the ominous import of these words, and the effects of the king's wrath or sorrow’.Footnote ¹⁶ At one point Bowdich told Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame that the English common law made a distinction between swearing to a falsehood and making an honest mistake. The Asantehene replied that this was irrelevant, for ‘the truth was not spoken in either case’ and so ‘it was the same thing’. Asante judicial custom ‘did not consider the motive but only the fact’, and no such fact was of more grave import than that ntamkεseε was sworn in support of an argument that proved to be wrongful for whatever reason.Footnote ¹⁷

The ‘great oath’ was an exact and exacting judicial instrument, but it should be noted that the death of Asantehene Osei Tutu was recalled and commemorated in other ways across Asante society. Thus, after the ‘defeat and death of Sai Tootoo’ on a memeneda (Saturday) the day itself was deemed to be inauspicious (dabɔne).Footnote ¹⁸ 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 enterprize’ on a memeneda, and it was devoted to ‘expiatory and propitiary sacrifices’.Footnote ¹⁹

V

As is well known, Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh (1888–1931) passed 28 years in British detention, most of them (1900–24) on the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean. There, in 1907, he and his mother Yaa Kyaa began to compile an oral memoir of the Kumase royal dynasty, and recruited one of the king's now literate sons to write it down in English. This indigenous royal manuscript, the first of its kind, recounted the history of the Oyoko dynasty of Kumase (and Asante) from its beginnings down to the end of the reign of Asantehene Osei Tutu. Unsurprisingly, in view of what has already been argued, Agyeman Prempeh offers no account of the circumstances of the death of Osei Tutu, and neither does he make any mention of ntamkεseε. That he did this deliberately is borne out by the fact that he very skilfully introduces Opoku Ware and Boa Akwatia, who contested to become Asantehene in succession to Osei Tutu, but he simply omits any mention at all of Osei Tutu's death.Footnote ²⁰

In 1930, six years after Agyeman Prempeh's repatriation, the British approved the rebuilding of the royal mausoleum (baamu) at Bantama in Kumase, which they had razed to the ground, and the construction of a new royal cemetery at Bampanase to hold the remains of those who had died in exile in the Seychelles. One issue in all of this deeply troubled Agyeman Prempeh. This was the continuing absence of ‘the Big Brass Pan’ (aya kεseε), which had been laid before the old Bantama mausoleum, but had been looted and taken to London. Chief Commissioner Newlands asked Agyeman Prempeh for a history of this object, for the British believed ‘the Big Brass Pan’ played some part in the immolation of human victims. Agyeman Prempeh duly complied, but his five-page account of the aya kεseε is notably opaque in that it never really explains the basic significance of the object. The British took this as indirect confirmation that it had been used in sacrifices, and so they refused to give it back. Agyeman Prempeh persisted in his pleading, but to no avail. However, there are clues in the texts written by Agyeman Prempeh that point to the significance of aya kεseε, albeit ones that were akyiwadeε because they were entwined in the history of the death of Osei Tutu and the formulation of ntamkεseε. Thus, ‘when King Osei Tutu took up the Stool’, Agyeman Prempeh remarked, ‘he said that the Brass Pan was a very great thing for the Asantiman [Asanteman, “Asante nation”]; and therefore same should be placed where he was to be buried and also at the late Asante Kings [sic] burial place i.e. Bantama, and the Pan was accordingly placed at the place aforesaid’.Footnote ²¹ Dupuis recounted that Osei Tutu had gone to ‘the sepulchre of Bantama’ so as ‘to invoke the necessary aid of his tutelary deities’ before following after his army in the invasion of Akyem Kotoku where he was killed.Footnote ²²

It seemed that this diffidence masked thoughts and the feelings underlying them that were very difficult to talk about. Armed with these fragments, I sought clarification. What was needed was to secure testimonies from people in private in a milieu of trust where they might be confident enough to allow their thoughts and feelings – as a European medievalist put it – to swell up and to spill over into verbalization.Footnote ²³ In 2004, at my request, a meeting was arranged with three of the royal barimfoɔ (mausoleum attendants, ‘sextons’) by Yaw Andoh, the Private Secretary to the Asantehene, at his private dwelling house at Dekyemso in Kumase. He told me that these informants would not talk with me anywhere within the Manhyia palace precinct, and that they insisted on anonymity. The exchange that ensued was one of the most haltingly awkward I have had in fifty years of working in Kumase. My interest was explained, and the three officials made it very clear, courteously but firmly, that there could be no talk about ‘the fall of a great tree’ (the passing of an Asantehene). What I did learn was that Osei Tutu had ‘sanctified’ the mausoleum at Bantama, and then decreed that he and all of his successors should be ‘memorialized’ there. Without taking personal responsibility for what they were saying, and without any elaboration, my interlocutors told me that ‘some people’ thought that the aya kεseε was like a mirror (ahwehwε), but one that only an Asantehene might look into, for it reflected the pasts and futures of members of the Kumase royal dynasty. The clear but unvoiced implication was that Osei Tutu might have looked into the brass pan and seen the circumstances of his own death. This was an indirect and unattributable allusion to an event that was akyiwadeε, and so I could not pursue it further with those who had agreed (under pressure?) to talk with me.

Osei Agyeman Prempeh II (1931–70), the Asantehene who followed Agyeman Prempeh, presided over the compilation and transcription of an ambitious manuscript ‘History of Ashanti’ (1937–46). This was over four hundred pages long, compared with the eighty-nine pages of Agyeman Prempeh's dynastic memoir, and it covered the entire history of the kingdom from its foundation to the present.Footnote ²⁴ The two rulers were different men with divergent purposes. Agyeman Prempeh was a political exile who memorialized his family's history in the belief that he might never see Kumase again. Osei Agyeman Prempeh II was born in 1892 and never knew the era before colonial overrule. Matrilineally royal, he was also acutely conscious of his exalted patrilineal descent in the line (or ‘house’) of the first Asantehene Osei Tutu, and he looked askance at his immediate predecessor as something of an upstart who belonged to the patrilineal line of the ninth Asantehene Kwaku Dua (1834–67). The immediate spur for the creation of the ‘History of Ashanti’ was that Osei Agyeman Prempeh II endured a painful and humiliating attempt by some of his subjects to remove him from office in 1935–6. After this he determined to reassert his patrician authority by setting down on paper an authorized version of the past to show that the Asantehene always had been and still remained ‘king over all’. To aid him in this endeavour he convened and chaired a committee of his closest intimates – including, most prominently, his royal cousin and Private Secretary Kwadwo Owusu Ansah; Isaac Kwadwo Agyeman, a patrilineal descendant of Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame; James Appiah, a headmaster and sometime royal administrator, father of the Ghanaian politician Joe Appiah and paternal grandfather of the philosopher and public intellectual Kwame Appiah; Charles Osei, who was married into the royal dynasty; and Alex Kyerematen, then a youthful royal servant who acted as the committee's secretary and later became the founding director of the Cultural Centre in Kumase. Like the Asantehene himself, these men were colonially educated literates, trained to emulate the evidential and other canons of nineteenth-century English history-making. One of these protocols was source-based narrative disclosure. Unlike his predecessor, then, Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II felt obliged, one way or another, to include, describe and explain events like the passing of Asantehene Osei Tutu.Footnote ²⁵

There could be no question of laying bare the calamitous circumstances that were akyiwadeε and had given rise to ntamkεseε. Instead, Osei Agyeman Prempeh II made use of a narrative gloss that was a part of the afisεm (‘secret household talk’) of the royal dynasty, and that had been offered as a public explanation of Osei Tutu's death since at least the mid-nineteenth century. One version of this was supplied to Reindorf by his Asante informants, and included in the long delayed history that he published in 1895. The Ga historian described the killing of Osei Tutu in an ambush by the Akyem Kotoku, but added that this was ‘refuted by the Asantes’. His Asante informants – among others the Kumase royal Yaw Twereboanna, and Asantehene Osei Yaw's daughter Yaa Hom – told him that the aged Osei Tutu was ‘infirm and not in a good health’ when he set off on campaign. The war was successful, but in camp ‘the king very unfortunately died a natural death’. The corpse was placed in a coffin and brought back to Kumase for the obsequies and the eventual deposit of appropriate remains in the mausoleum at Bantama. So, Osei Tutu died naturally and peacefully, was repatriated, and given a royal funeral. However, ‘even the natural death of an Asante monarch is a great national calamity’, and it was this mournful event that gave rise to ntamkεseε, ‘the most binding and dreadful of Asante oaths’.Footnote ²⁶

Osei Agyeman Prempeh II elaborated this version. In the process, he supplied it with a metaphysical underpinning that redounded to the credit of the royal dynasty by amplifying the selfless integrity of Osei Tutu in the cause of Asante and its people. When Osei Tutu was in advanced age, he was told by his adviser Komfo Anokye that he would die soon, but that if he passed away at home then ‘the string that bound the kingdom would break’, and everything that he and his priest (ɔkɔmfɔ) Anokye had accomplished to ensure ‘the power and glory’ of Asante would wither away. So, Osei Tutu ‘must go to die in a foreign country’, and Komfo Anokye revealed ‘certain signs’ to the Asantehene that would tell him when ‘his last days were nigh’. In due course Osei Tutu saw these signs (which are nowhere specified in the text), and so he announced that he was going to Akyem Kotoku to make war on its people. His office holders reminded him of ‘his great age’ and advised him against the campaign. Osei Tutu insisted on his course of action but said he could not ‘lay bare’ the reasons. No one failed to notice that in the days before he left for the war the Asantehene ‘played round all the streets in Kumase, singing many doleful and convincing valedictory songs’.

Before the army quit Kumase, Osei Tutu told his confidential servant Nantwi ‘point blank’ that he would die before the fighting started, and instructed him on what steps must be taken when that happened.Footnote ²⁷ The Asantehene's body was to be put into a coffin and carried before his army ‘until seven bullets would hit the coffin before it should be sent to the rear’. These bullets would be ‘a sure sign’ of an Asante victory. Osei Tutu expired in his war camp before there was any fighting, and his corpse in its coffin was duly borne before his troops and struck by seven bullets.Footnote ²⁸ The coffin was removed to the rear, and the mournfully enraged Asante then attacked and overcame the Akyem Kotoku. Opoku Ware, Osei Tutu's successor as Asantehene, escorted the remains to Kumase where they were solemnly interred. Osei Agyeman Prempeh II concluded his narrative (in words that echo Reindorf's text) by saying that the death of a great man like Osei Tutu was such ‘a national calamity’ that it was a forbidden thing (akyiwadeε) to talk about it in public. He went on to provide a variant origin for the term kɔromante. His text says that the returned Asante warriors, when asked about the death of Osei Tutu, replied ‘wɔ koreε no mante’, meaning ‘I was there but I did not hear about it.’ This phrase later became a standard response from those asked about something they knew about that was akyiwadeε, and it was a formulaic way of telling the questioner that the matter must be dropped immediately. Whatever its precise reference, the word kɔromante was joined with memeneda – the day of Osei Tutu's passing – to make the ntamkεseε.Footnote ²⁹

It is interesting, if predictable, that Osei Agyeman Prempeh II made use of the figure of Komfo Anokye to anchor and to sustain his narrative. The famous priest is trans-historical, in one sense because his words and deeds can always be imported into a historical tradition to furnish connectivity to a sequence of causes and effects, and in another sense because his traffic with the metaphysical confers an unassailable authority on even the most gnomic of his actions and directives.Footnote ³⁰ Be that as it may, his employment in the text just discussed enabled Osei Agyeman Prempeh II to shape his narrative to fit his ideological aim. Simply, Osei Tutu voluntarily embraced death – in itself ‘a national calamity’ – so as to guarantee the future of his kingdom and of the people in it.

VI

As was noted by Bowdich, oaths in Asante were many, various, and graduated (‘progressive’) in terms of their seriousness. Although oral informants can differ over details of the matter, there is a general consensus that one other oath that was added to ntamkεseε was treated with the same dread level of avoidance and silence that was accorded to that associated with Osei Tutu. This is ntamkεseε mmiεnsa (‘the great oath of three’) that was instituted by Osei Tutu's successor the Asantehene Opoku Ware. This too was the property of the Asantehene, and it was used in the manner already described in judicial proceedings, and with the same dire penalties attaching to its misuse. It is reported that the origin of Opoku Ware's oath ‘is shrouded in a great mystery’, for it is ‘very difficult to get the Ashantis to recount the actual incident(s) that led to its creation’. The same commentator adds that ntamkεseε mmiεnsa ‘is alleged to have originated from the mysteries and deaths surrounding the pregnancy and birth of Opoku Ware’. It is also recounted that there was a prophecy that Opoku Ware would grow up to become an Asantehene, and that when he did so ‘he used the mystical circumstances surrounding his birth as reported by his parents and family members’ to create this additional oath.Footnote ³¹ Certainly, this is a most obtuse matter to disentangle, for we are dealing here with an oath that was created by the man whose life and experiences it memorializes. Furthermore, all available evidence points to the conclusion that Opoku Ware was in many ways a singular individual. It has already been seen from the case of Osei Tutu that matters of this sort that are supremely nkyiwadeε continue to be very difficult to discuss in Asante. Thus, the arguments that follow below cannot be conclusive, although they are constructed from all evidence accumulated by me after fifty years of research among Asante people.

All Asante oral traditions, royal and otherwise, foreground the sheer physical presence of Opoku Ware. Clearly, he was a striking and even anomalous figure. Because of his great height, Opoku was nicknamed oware and tεntεn (both meaning ‘the tall’). His skin was unusually reddened (kɔkoɔ), thought in Asante to be a mark of aristocratic distinction, in contrast to the black (tumtum) of most of his subjects. His feet and hands were very large and elongated. Indirect confirmation of this traditional portrait comes from European records. After the Asante war against Akyem Abuakwa in 1742, the Danes at Christiansborg fort in Accra sent one of their local Ga employees as an emissary to Kumase to parley with and report on Asantehene Opoku Ware. This messenger, who was called ‘Noi’, in fact travelled at least twice to Kumase, and some time after the event he unburdened himself in Christiansborg to the Danish West India and Guinea Company employee Ludewig Rømer about his experiences in Asante. Rømer spent a decade on the Gold Coast (1739–49), acquired some fluency in both Ga and Akan Twi, and interested himself in the local historical records in the Danish, Dutch, and English trading forts on the Gold Coast. Returned to Copenhagen, he wrote a memoir of his time in West Africa.Footnote ³²

Rømer was told that Asantehene Opoku Ware's appearance was so unusually odd that it was ‘almost that of a monster’. ‘He was taller than any of his own people’, reported ‘Noi’, and ‘quite red instead of black, and this the Negroes consider to be the most beautiful colour. His body was very thin, almost like a Black with consumption. In proportion to his body, his hands and feet were twice as long as they should have been.’ People could not look upon this apparition ‘without fear’. It seems that Opoku Ware also exaggerated his visual impact to impress and to awe those who met him. Smeared all over with gold dust sprinkled on tallow rubbed into his skin, he sat in state surrounded by dazzling gold objects, and habitually wore a medley of Asante and European dress, including a hat with lace embroidery and a large feather in it. At the close of his life he asked the Dutch to send him a European coffin with glass sides so that ‘majesty’ might be looked upon even in death.Footnote ³³

In Asante tradition Opoku Ware is ‘the one who ate gold’ (di sika), and his desire to accumulate this metal lies at the core of tales told about him. Osei Agyeman Prempeh II recorded the widely known tradition that Opoku Ware once ordered ‘a large and thin sheet of gold’ to be beaten into a form that he might wear like a cloth. This was done, but he found the garment ‘noisy and inconvenient’, and so he had it broken up and used the pieces to ‘wrap’ (nnuraho) the stool that was said to have been conjured from the skies by Komfo Anokye for Osei Tutu as the ultimate symbol of an Asante ruler's sovereign authority.Footnote ³⁴ The message of this tradition is exact. The Asante concept of nnuraho is used in the precise sense of adding to something to reinforce and to augment its already existing significance. This is why the stool referred to is sika dwa, ‘the Golden Stool’, and Opoku Ware's contribution to it is recognized in its personalized naming. It is Osei ne Opoku dwa, the stool created for Osei Tutu, but brought to a perfected completion by Opoku Ware.Footnote ³⁵ That is, like his predecessor, Opoku Ware placed the power and integrity of Asante above personal gratification. Reputedly, Asantehene Opoku Ware was the wealthiest of all Asante rulers. His gold was amassed from the loot and tribute of a lifetime of unequalled military conquest, for which he was given the sobriquet ‘the unbeatable warrior’ (katakyie). According to ‘Noi’, Asantehene Opoku Ware was notably capricious and tyrannical, and his person inspired ‘loathing and disgust’ as well as fear. Even so, all who encountered him acknowledged that he was the very model of a great king.Footnote ³⁶

It is quite possible that Opoku Ware suffered from acromegaly, a non-heritable complaint in which the pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone after the child's growth plates have closed. Those so afflicted often grow tall, and the initial symptoms are typically enlargement of the hands and feet, and then of the nose, lips and ears, together with a generalized thickening of the skin. Hyperpigmentation of one component of skin colour is also a common sign of the complaint. If Asantehene Opoku Ware evinced any other known symptoms of the disease – prognathism of the jaw, macroglossia of the tongue, protrusion and bossing of the brow, distension of the eyes – then he must indeed have been a singular and memorable sight. Another sign of acromegaly is gigantism in infancy and in early childhood.Footnote ³⁷ Asante oral traditions report this of Opoku Ware, but they attribute it and all of his other possible symptoms to the distinctly unusual circumstances of his conception and birth. This (hi)story is a commonplace, and the recension given here is derived from the assemblage of oral accounts drawn together in Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’.

Nyaako Kusi Amoa was one of only two children and the sole daughter of Osei Tutu's uterine sister Bimma Fie.Footnote ³⁸ Her uncle gave her in marriage to Amakomhene Akosa Yiadom. Amakom was a power in the Kwaman (Kumase) area prior to the creation of Asante, and this marriage was clearly an attempt by Osei Tutu to bind one of his neighbours closely to him and to integrate him into his new creation. There was no issue of this union before Akosa Yiadom either died or fell out with Osei Tutu and was killed by him. This divergence in tradition has arisen from later and endlessly renewed conflicts over the position of Kumase Adontenhene between the royals of Amakom and those of Aduaben. Both lineages claim that Adu Panin (Adu Boyε), Akosa Yiadom's successor as the Kumase Adontenhene, was one of their own.Footnote ³⁹ Whatever the case, Nyaako Kusi Amoa was now given in marriage to Adu Panin. He died (the byname boyε suggests of stomach complaints), and was succeeded by his brother Adu Manu (Adu Donyina) who took the widow as a levirate wife. Then the same thing happened again. Adu Manu expired and his brother Adu Mensa (mmiεnsa, ‘the third born Adu’) succeeded in turn to his office and to his wife. Adu Mensa is generally said to have been the biological father of Opoku Ware. However, the matter is a little more complex in Asante understanding; it is believed that three brothers fathered Opoku Ware, each successive genitor ‘strengthening’ the child until it was born. This metaphysical construct is itself akyiwadeε, never directly mentioned but alluded to in the tradition that Nyaako Kusi Amoa ‘conceived for three years’. It seems that pregnancy and birth were fraught to the point where both alarmed Osei Tutu. It is said that Komfo Anokye obligingly confided to the Asantehene that the child was a boy, and that he was taking time in the womb to prepare himself to be a great warrior so that he might bring his great-uncle's statesmanship ‘to perfection’.

Ancillary details amplify this tradition, and they hint very strongly at the physicality of Opoku Ware as discussed above. Nyaako Kusi Amoa is said to have been in labour for 14 days before giving birth to a boy who was named Opoku. At birth, ‘the child's right hand stood upright, shaking all the time’, and this went on for a week. Again, Komfo Anokye is the agent of both explanation and reassurance. He forged a sword from materials he ‘assembled’ (later the mpɔnpɔnsɔn state sword), and when it was put into the baby's right hand the shaking ceased.Footnote ⁴⁰ Opoku grew into a ‘very wild’ child, inseparable from his sword and aggressive with it. His playmates were terrified of him. So, Komfo Anokye advised that he be sent away to live in isolation under the careful watch of a woman named Ama Wanni in her house in Kumase Pampaso. He stayed there until he was six years old, when he was presented to a public assembly of Kumase office holders. On the day this happened a serious fire broke out in Kumase. It was said that the strange boy's appearance was linked to the event – Opoku firi a ehyε (‘Opoku has caused a great conflagration’). Once again Komfo Anokye's advice was sought. He said that the fire was Opoku's way of announcing that he wanted a stool, and one that was distinguished by the supreme accolade of a retinue of ahoprafoɔ (elephant tail bearers). The small boy Opoku was accordingly awarded the stool of Asomfo Kakari, who had recently died, in Kumase Adum. In due course Opoku grew into a striking individual, and because of his great height he was nicknamed Opoku Ware (Opoku a oware) or Opoku Tεntεn.

The ‘History of Ashanti’ goes on to say that Opoku Ware was in the war camp when Osei Tutu died (or was killed) in Akyem Kotoku. The generals swore to go on with the fight, but an Asantehene-to-be was needed to carry Osei Tutu's bosommuru sword before the army.Footnote ⁴¹ One Boa Akwatia, who was older than Opoku Ware, asked to be made the Asantehene. It is recounted that this person had fought alongside Mamponhene when the latter crushed his rebellious Adwira (Ejura) subjects. The victors quarrelled over the spoils, and in a fit of rage Boa Akwatia struck the Mampon ruler, holder of a very senior stool and titular commander-in-chief of the Asante army. This outrageous behaviour was publicly censured by Asantehene Osei Tutu, and it disqualified Boa Akwatia from the succession. So, in Akyem Kotoku the rulership of Asante was offered to the still youthful Opoku Ware and he duly became Asantehene. What are we to make of all this? Firstly, there is the matter of the identity of Boa Akwatia. Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II curtly and unhelpfully dismissed him as simply ‘another member of the royal family’. In his dynastic memoir, however, Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh reported that it was said that Boa Akwatia was either a matrilineal ‘nephew’ of Obiri Yeboa, in royal dynastic orthodoxy the maternal great-uncle and predecessor of Osei Tutu as sovereign over the Kwaman (Kumase) area before the creation of Asante, or the son of Osei Tutu's maternal grandmother's elder sister Otwiwaa Kεseε. The royal Kumase Oyoko genealogical charter abounds in such complexities of detail, but it can be read overall to furnish significant insights.

Birempomaa Piesie, daughter of the apical ancestress of the Kumase Oyoko dynasty, gave birth to ten children. Four of them concern us here. In birth order these were: Kyeremaa, mother of Kwabia Anwanfi and Oti Akenten, pre-Asante rulers of Kwaman; Aboagye Akomadoma, the mother of Obiri Yeboa, the third pre-Asante ruler of Kwaman in succession to the two just mentioned, and uncle (?) of Boa Akwatia; Otwiwaa Kεseε, mother (?) of Boa Akwatia; and Abena Gyapa, the maternal grandmother of Osei Tutu, the successor of Obiri Yeboa who forged Asante from Kwaman and its allies and became the first Asantehene. It will be observed that the matrilineal descent line of Osei Tutu is junior to the others described. Thus, in Asante thinking the ‘royal’ Boa Akwatia, through either one of his ascribed identities, was genealogically senior to as well as personally older than Opoku Ware. Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh provided the same substantive history as did his successor of the confrontation between Boa Akwatia and Mamponhene, but he added some brief but telling remarks. At the time of Boa Akwatia's transgression, ‘the royal families on the side of King [Osei] Tutu were less than the part of Boa Katia’, and so ‘when Poku Tintin (Opoku Ware) was borned, King [Osei] Tutu ordered the child to be brought into a cottage to a woman called [Ama] Wanni at Pampaso’. This (hi)story concludes with Komfo Anokye telling Osei Tutu, ‘I will show thee two signs, and you will see whether the chair [the Golden Stool] will still remain in your family [or] go to the part of Boa Katia.’Footnote ⁴²

Whatever the actual sequence of events, by one means or another Osei Tutu's uterine sister's matrilineal grandson Opoku Ware was enstooled as the second Asantehene by connivance of his matrilineal great-uncle the first Asantehene – and so it is said Komfo Anokye – in a scheme to retain the succession to the sika dwa within a single descent line of the sprawling royal lineage.Footnote ⁴³ This is a preferred and recognizably common Asante practice, but Osei Tutu achieved it against considerable odds. By this line of reasoning, the implication of the evidence just recounted is that the childhood of Opoku Ware was spent at Pampaso in the guarded security of reclusive isolation because Osei Tutu fretted over this singular boy's health and also feared the intention of rival segments of the royal dynasty towards him. This is borne out by a very simple consideration. Our best evidence shows that Nyaako Kusi Amoa, Osei Tutu's sole uterine niece, had four children in all. She had two sons, but these died ‘as they were laid down’, that is at birth. Her third son was Opoku Ware. She then had a fourth and final child who vanishes from the record completely, and must also be presumed to have died in infancy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Against the odds then, the third (mmiεnsa) and seemingly the only surviving child of Nyaako Kusi Amoa became Asantehene.

There is a coda. As is well known, there are disagreements in the sources and among partisan informants, as well as consequent uncertainties among historians, as to the precise matrilineal identities of the pre-Asante rulers of the Kwaman (Kumase) area.Footnote ⁴⁵ Dynastic orthodoxy now insists that all of these were Oyoko, the precursors of their kinsman Osei Tutu. Others claim that they belonged to lineages of other Akan-Asante matriclans, with Aduana, Asenie, Asona, and Ekuona the most cited. There may well be no way to resolve this question, but the following merits note in the present context. Dupuis remarked that after Opoku Ware and the army returned to Kumase from Akyem Kotoku, the gloom over the death of Osei Tutu ‘degenerated into bitter reproaches and invectives against certain chiefs of the Issounah tribe, who, it was suspected, had temporized with Assin while the king [Osei Tutu] was on the march, and had, as it was imagined, betrayed the interest of the state’.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Issounah’ in Dupuis's transcription is Asona, or possibly Asenie. The implication is that opposition to the Oyoko in the persona of Osei Tutu and Opoku Ware was manifest and that this may have arisen from a resurrected claim or a new attempt to wrest the leadership of the nascent Asante kingdom from the Oyoko. Let us content ourselves by noting that Reindorf observed that the Asona ‘family group’ was the ‘most numerous’ among the Akan matriclans, and that it had been ‘once most powerful, but at what period we are not certain’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The patrilineal line of Opoku Ware was Asenie, and if it was this group that ‘betrayed the interest of the state’, then we must entertain the possibility that the claims of introducing patrilineal succession might have been mooted before being quashed.

In one of our conversations, Asantehene Opoku Ware II (1970–99) gave it as his opinion that his namesake's oath ntamkεseε mmiεnsa was a deliberate act to affirm (foa nsεm boa si so dua) existing political arrangements in Asante. Osei Tutu founded Asante, and Opoku Ware joined his oath with that of his predecessor to confirm the present and future reality of that creation. In essence, said the Asantehene, his namesake had ‘stamped his foot’ – that is, spoken the final word, as when he gave his unalterable decision in a disputed court case – on any discussion of or challenge to the hard won status quo put in place by Osei Tutu, Komfo Anokye, and himself. Silence on this matter was ensured by the oath itself, which was supremely akyiwadeε. Such oaths are of course neither arbitrary nor contentless. In their curt referential wording they allude to events and feelings that must not be spoken of directly in public. Opoku Ware's oath memorialized his ‘three’ fathers, the brothers Adu, and also the fact that he himself was a third-born child. We have already noted Agyekum's remark that Opoku Ware made use of the ‘mystical circumstances’ that attended his conception and birth to underpin and reinforce the sheer dread gravity of ntamkεseε mmiεnsa. I think we can speculate in a little more detail about this matter. Opoku Ware's oath is perhaps best understood as a congeries of references to how he projected himself and was seen by his own subjects and others. His conception and birth conferred an aura of the supernatural or otherworldly upon him in the eyes of his peers, but then so too did his singular appearance, at once both physical and cultivated, his reputation as a great warlord and an expansionist conqueror, and his unequalled wealth in gold. Osei Tutu's ‘great oath’ was a posthumous creation, but Opoku Ware's was a calculated declamation authored by a puissant and, so I would argue, an acutely self-aware ruler.

VII

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 and of the self-fashioning of Opoku Ware circle around and are commentaries on the core but ineffable issue of power (tumi) in Asante perception and society.Footnote ⁴⁸ 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. The royal spokesman (ɔkyeame) and Asante nationalist politician Baffour Osei Akoto told me that in the 1960s his enemy Nkrumah employed his presidential power to try to shape understandings of the past, but also attempted to marginalize and to suppress historical readings that he found to be antithetical to his own project. Acknowledgement of the part that power plays in authorizing (as well as authoring) history was pithily summed up for me by Buasiako Antwi, another royal spokesman. When I asked him about the veracity of the historical record as expressed through oral traditions, rituals, and performances, he replied with the shortest of sentences – ‘akwantempɔn da hɔ a akwamma da ho’ (‘Wherever there is a highway, there is also a by-way’) – and told me always to think about Asante history-making with that in mind.

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.’)Footnote ⁴⁹ 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.