Kwasi Konadu's rich and challenging work begins with a grainy VHS recording of a funeral. Funeral videos are common in Ghana, but are usually reserved for prominent business persons or politicians. This one was different. It was the wakekeeping for Kofi Dɔnkɔ (b. approx. 1914, d. 1995), a pillar of the community of Takyiman, in the Bono-speaking region of central Ghana. Dɔnkɔ was a polymath: a blacksmith who harnessed the magical powers of fire and steel, a farmer who grew cocoa as a cash crop, and a healer with an encyclopedic knowledge of the local herbaria. The surprising reverence given to Dɔnkɔ inspired Konadu to conduct years of research on his place within the ritual complex of the Takyiman, the cocoa economy, the imposition of Asante rule, the colonial era, and the rise of Islam and Christianity in the region, and so much else. The result is a book that Konadu deems a ‘communography’ (8), an effort to decenter ethnicity, colony, and nation in favor of local notions of place and time. Dɔnkɔ's voice is at the center of the story, telling us how he, and the people around him: ‘go about things in our own way in this part of the world’ (26).

Konadu begins the book with a discussion of the ‘“parcels” of cosmic life' (deities, water spirits, witches, mysterious dwarves, and more) that influence life around the Tano Valley, where speakers of the Bono Akan dialect founded their polity (27). Kofi Dɔnkɔ was a descendent of the priestly order that harnessed these forces through ritual, forging Takyiman together as an urban unit. With this starting point, Konadu's analysis expresses much more than the formation of a political entity: he sets out to excavate the generations of hard work that established Bono place and identity, in a religious, social, and cultural sense.

Over centuries, the Bono polity and the Tano religious complex developed into a robust kingdom, but due to succession disputes, Takyiman and its outlying villages were weakened militarily. By the mid-eighteenth century, Bono was divided and occupied by the Asante kingdom, though Konadu contends that Tano as a spiritual entity was never conquered. As such, a distinct Bono identity survived, spurring a rebellion against Asante in the late nineteenth century, and a rebirth for the kingdom.

As Konadu moves into the twentieth century and Gold Coast colonial period, the pace of the book quickens. Takyiman changed rapidly from an agrarian rainforest economy to a cash crop economy, producing gold, rubber, and cocoa for the colonial market, as well as foodstuffs for a growing Gold Coast population. The result was increasing environmental damage from mining, and a new era of endemic malaria caused by the felling of the rainforest for cash crops. Konadu demonstrates how, under British rule, traditional sanitary controls were wrested away from chiefs and priests, leading to spiritual, health, and social disorder in the city. Colonial interventions were followed by religious upheaval. Konadu again disrupts traditional narratives here, challenging Margaret Field's 1950s exoticization of witch-fighting migrant deities (aobsommerafɔɔ) as the result of rising wealth from cocoa farming, by demonstrating how new gods were a symptom of the ‘malignant virus’ of indirect rule and the social dislocation caused by land redistribution (126).Footnote ¹ He also describes how, in the early twentieth century, Takyiman ritualists and political leaders recognized the threat of Christianity and joined together to scare catechists away with rituals involving the burial of charms, the pouring of libation, and the firing of guns at the mission station (177). The balance of power between church worship and local religion changed by the 1970s, when, Konadu suggests, a new type of Pentecostalism began to ravage the ‘psychic landscape of the populace’ (174). Meanwhile, Kofi Dɔnkɔ remained engaged in local struggles for power, getting involved in the cocoa economy for profit, and building medical practices to deal with the rise in illnesses in the city. The result was a transformation of the process of ritual healing from beyond the blacksmith complex into an era of community clinical care. All of these local events, as Konadu demonstrates, were as significant as any metanarrative imposed from beyond.

One major twentieth century event that challenges Konadu’s otherwise locally generated narrative was the arrival of Dennis Warren, a white American graduate student from the University of Indiana. Warren came to the region in the 1970s, seeking out the ‘venerated Bono priest-healer’ (167) Kofi Dɔnkɔ at his clinic in Tunsuase. At this point in Konadu’s book, the reading gets a bit awkward. The author snaps that Warren was able to ‘profit from Kofi Dɔnkɔ's accrued knowledge and reputation’ (14) by writing several books based on Dɔnkɔ's lexica of herbal remedies. Konadu's language then becomes checkered with commentary about Warren's ‘interracial’ marriage (166), and the implication that some of the records of Dɔnkɔ's interaction with Warren went purposely missing (172). There is evident bitterness here, as Konadu uses Warren's work to argue that Dɔnkɔ, like other citizens of the newly independent nation of Ghana, was ‘still exposed to the exploits of capitalists, neocolonialists, and the coming-of-age-of African Studies’ (165). Such complications aside, the section on Warren appropriately problematizes the harvesting of anthropological knowledge in the postcolony. It is also worth noting that the Dɔnkɔ/Warren encounter, despite what might have been waylaid, did leave a trove of field notes that enabled Konadu to provide a beautiful reflection on Kofi Dɔnkɔ's daily healing activities. The Dɔnkɔ/Warren records bear witness to the modest blacksmith as someone in full control of his clinical practice and spiritual world, healing a wide array of illnesses in patients from Takyiman and abroad.

There is no getting around the intellectual intensity that the author has invested into Our Own Way in this Part of the World. There are some side arguments going on that I can’t cover here, and perhaps wouldn’t be able to even if I tried. And at times, the book gets dense, making it a tough ethnographic slog in parts, especially when the author drags the reader a bit too far into the weeds of everyday Bono life. But there are also some lovely passages too, such as when Konadu thoughtfully suggests that the caricature of ‘fetishism’ might be reframed as a ‘broader agreement between the spiritual forces of nature and the world created by human culture’ (92). The most important thing is that Konadu's thesis holds. Kofi Dɔnkɔ represents the type of bounded personhood that ‘stretched across two empires, national borders, ecologies, polities, and racial and religious ideologies, signaling a non-national decolonized possibility’ (232). By revealing Dɔnkɔ’s story, Konadu has accomplished something innovative, a book worth reading for anyone who wants to challenge themselves to rethink the field of African Studies.