Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum offers a complex and deeply personal ethnography of Asafo warrior organizations in Kormantse, a Fante-speaking town on the coast of Ghana. Aduonum’s original ethnographic voice weaves poetry, proverbs, and prose as she recounts her experiences learning Asafo abakͻsεm (“matters that have come and gone”) and ndwom (songs). Her story centres on the captains, drummers, and flagbearers of Asafo troupes and on the various other Kormantse residents who constitute her teachers. In addition to bearing witness to the multifaceted work and expertise of the women and men who maintain Asafo as an archive connecting Ghanaians to their ancestors, Aduonum posits an anticolonial African musicology by reconfiguring ethnographic form, structure, and method.

Invoking the Akan proverb “ͻnantefoͻ sene oni ne ͻse asεm” (“the walker knows more than her mother and father”), Aduonum engages with walking as a core research methodology. As readers amble with Aduonum and her Kormantse mentors, she centres their multiple, disparate voices within the overall structure of the book. She does not attempt to reconcile differences of opinion among her companions into a single narrative, nor does she ignore them. Instead, rather than obscure her own interpretive position as ethnographer, Aduonum records her own reactions and observations while resisting the temptation to settle for an answer. Furthermore, she reflects candidly on her position as a Ghanaian Akan woman, an expatriate living in the United States, and an indigenous scholar, sharing vulnerable reactions to—and even disagreements with—Asafo culture bearers’ perspectives, as when some occasionally contradict her feminist principles. If explicitly engaging one’s positionality is imperative in music scholarship today, Aduonum extends this beyond mere acknowledgement: her personal experiences shape the very organization of the text through storytelling.

Walking with Asafo in Ghana thus revolves around Aduonum’s ambulatory conversations with key mentors, which she organizes thematically around introspective and impressionistic accounts rather than sharpening them into heavy-handed theoretical pronouncements. Framed between the introduction and final re-invocation, Aduonum organizes the book into three core parts. Part 1 orients readers to Asafo history and Aduonum’s peripatetic research methods. We encounter contrasting Kormantse scholars’ perspectives on major issues in contemporary Asafo in Chapter 1, such as whether Asafo permits women to study drumming, and how tensions with the Christian church have led to declining participation in Asafo companies. In Chapter 2, Aduonum contemplates her “history walks,” in which she visits key sites in Kormantse to develop her historical knowledge, while in Chapter 3 she retreads these paths through “memory walks” to engage in dialogue with her memories and those of her teachers.

Part 2 comprises two chapters examining the contributions of Kormantse women to Asafo, which often appears as a male tradition. Aduonum recounts her walks with women elders in two different parts of Kormantse and emphasizes their power as Asafo culture bearers. Beginning in Chapter 4, she pays critical attention to the dynamics of gendered knowledge and produces a more comprehensive account of Asafo through the deep knowledge that these elders reveal. This work conceptually expands in Chapter 5, where she discusses the women’s ensemble adzewa. Some of the most compelling passages in the book unfold here as Aduonum records a dialogue that illustrates the candour and complex relationship of two elders, Maame Owusuma and Maame Ekua Atta.

The final three chapters comprise Part 3, in which Aduonum relates insights on Asafo ndwom performance practice and pedagogy. Chapter 6 guides readers through a variety of Asafo funerary events, exploring the symbolism of the flags each Asafo company uses to represent itself and the complex relationship of Asafo ndwom with other musical forms involved in funerals. She also introduces the core instruments of Asafo ensembles, which include several drums and nnawur (bells) of varying sizes led by the Asafokyen kεse (master drum). In Chapter 7, Aduonum focuses on her multimodal process of learning about which elements “sweeten” Asafo ndwom, including how it balances lead and accompanying vocalists, as well as verbal artistry like kasa twii (provocative speech) and kenkan (improvised narratives). Chapter 8 concludes the book with an account of how Aduonum shared her findings with the Kormantse community. Here, she also reflects on questions of sustaining Asafo ndwom, noting that she incorporated Asafo songs into her 2019 solo performance piece, Walking with My Ancestors: Cape Coast Castle.

The book operates in multimodal storytelling, intersubjective conversations among Kormantse elders, and Aduonum’s candid reflections engage readers. This structure drives them forward through her exploration of anticolonial possibilities in ethnography. While each chapter brings into focus specific episodes from her fieldwork, they are also tightly interwoven. These entanglements challenge reading conventions that seek to extract key theoretical points from isolated chapters and gloss over the rest. Instead, Aduonum entices readers to walk with her for the full length of the book, deepening our relationships with her and the Kormantse community. Reflecting on my own positionality as a white settler and musicologist trained in the United States, I found myself contemplating this as an invitation to reflect on the coloniality of our prevailing practices not just as ethnographers—which has received overdue mainstream attention recently—but also as readers. Aduonum’s approach thus resonates with recent challenges to normative reading, such as William Cheng’s (Reference Cheng2016) exploration of reparative reading as a means of healing the harms of paranoid reading conventions, and Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening (Reference Robinson2020), where he asks non-Indigenous readers to skip a chapter not meant for them. This might frustrate readers seeking a quick, partial read. They will not find comprehensive literature reviews, even as the book is informed by the deep knowledge of Kormantse scholars and an array of published theoretical, ethnographic, and historiographic scholarship.

Aduonum joins a growing cohort of ethnographers in and beyond music studies who demonstrate how walking allows people to develop embodied knowledge through material and sensorial experience. In several ethnographies, walking emerges foremost as an object of study within a particular community: consider, for example, Yorimar Bonilla’s (Reference Bonilla2011) analysis of the memory walks of Guadeloupean labour activists, Marié Abe’s (Reference Abe2018) exploration of Japan’s peripatetic chindon-ya troupes, and Angela Impey’s (Reference Impey2018) study of women’s walking songs in southern African borderlands. Aduonum, for her part, does explore walking in Asafo performance, as in the funeral processions of Chapter 6; by and large, however, her analysis privileges its methodological affordances.

As a methodology, walking has important limits: think not only of the technical challenge of recording a walking interview but also of physical ability or of the policing of culturally constructed spaces, both of which manifest in her children’s comparisons of growing up Black in Ghana versus the United States. Walking is not for everyone, or for everywhere, and Aduonum does not argue that it is inherently superior to other methodologies. However, it does allow us to step beyond the most privileged discursive sources in ethnography and historiography. For example, Aduonum’s memory walks offer her a “haptic way of knowing” as she revisits, alone, paths that she previously walked with Kormantse elders. They provide an opportunity to re-experience and synthesize the divergent narratives she had previously been told. Striving to expand the scope of soundwalks or listening walks that may be more familiar to musicologists, Aduonum also formulates “musicking walks”—indebted to Christopher Small’s (Reference Small2011) formulation—as a way to attune people to the multisensory, serendipitous, and social dimensions of walking beyond the sonic. If the framing of musicking walks sometimes feels quite broad, it offers a useful way to focus attention not just on multisensory ethnography, as many anthropologists have advocated, but on one’s intersubjective movement through space.

Complementing Aduonum’s decolonial voice with material commitment, Walking with Asafo is available as an open-access e-book. The companion website hosts studio audio recordings of Asafo ndwom, as well as transcriptions and English translations of song texts discussed throughout the text. The recordings are clear and valuably document Asafo singing dynamics; I only wish that some field recordings were also included on the website to provide an aural sense of the soundscapes of situated performances that so vividly emerge in the prose. Beyond its immediate appeal to scholars of West African performance traditions, the book will engage anyone interested in gender and performance, diasporic resonances across the Black Atlantic, or the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. It would work especially well for seminars exploring decolonial approaches to ethnography, historiography, or experiments in writing voice.