Doran H. Ross

Come and try : Towards a history of fante military shrines

The arts of the traditional military companies of the Fante, called asafo, are best known through the profusion of appliqué flags (frankaa) which were discussed most recently on these pages by Kwame Labi (2002), and considered elsewhere through the enormously popular traveling exhibition/publication Asafo!: African Flags of the Fante (Adler and Barnard 1992).2 The latter project was so popular, in fact, that it has led to asafo flags becoming one of the most frequently faked of all Ghanaian art forms, right up there in the pantheon of duplicity with Akua’ba. As has been detailed in multiple anthropological and historical studies, the asafo (sa, war, and fo, people) were the warrior groups or armies of the traditional Akan states.3 With their military roles almost fully usurped by the administration of the British Gold Coast Colony beginning in 1872, the asafo were forced to redirect their energies. This they did with considerable success, and they thrive today as potent social and civic organizations with significant political, ritual, and performance roles in most Fante states. Depending on whom you read, there are from seventeen to twenty-four traditional Fante states (Christensen 1954:14 lists nineteen) with up to fourteen asafo companies per state. Within a state, each company is identified by a name and number, usually followed by the town or village in which it is located: e.g. Asafo Kyirem No. 2 Company, Mankesim, a group that we will return to a number of times below.4 Considerably less kinetic and much less collectible than flags are the often spectacular cement shrines of the asafo called posuban, but more commonly referred to by the Fante themselves with the English words “post,” “fort,” or “castle” (Cover, Figs. 1–2). These have frequently caught the attention of visitors to Ghana largely due to their perceived playfulness and to what is assumed to be All photogrAphs by the Author unless otherwise

Elephant : the animal and its ivory in African culture

Abstract “Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture” opened on September 30, 1992, and will run through May 16, 1993, in the J. Paul Getty Trust Gallery of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Curated by Doran H. Ross, the exhibition features approximately 250 objects introduced by a slide program and accompanied by two video programs and fifty mural photographs showing objects in context. One of the highlights is an installation of thirty elephant masks from twenty different cultures. The following discussion, a modified version of “Imagining Elephants: An Overview” from the companion catalogue, focuses on the first half of the exhibition, which deals with the image of the elephant in African art. The catalogue (over 450 pp., approx. 250 b/w and 250 color photos;

Photography in Africa

39 softcover,

Timothy Francis Garrard April 28, 1943–May 17, 2007

69 hardcover plus

The arts of Ghana

3 postage and handling per volume), edited by Ross, contains nineteen essays by seventeen leading scholars. It can be ordered from the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Publication Orde...

The Verbal Art of Akan Linguist Staffs

The compelling nature of the photograph-as work of art, as documentary record, and in its impact on life itself-makes this imagery and its attendant technology critical to the study and understanding of the arts in Africa. This journal itself has celebrated the vital role of photography, at least implicitly, by publishing thousands of black-andwhite and color pictures, and a few specific photographic studies. Americans, Europeans, and, increasingly, the peoples of Africa see so many photographs on a daily basis that it is often forgotten that this type of image making is barely more than a hundred years old. Indeed the advent of photography as a viable portable medium and the serious study of African culture are nearly parallel developments. For many of us today, cameras are mandatory accessory organs to our eyes and memories. And yet for many students of African art and life, both cameras and photographic images themselves have all too often been taken

Artists Advertising Themselves: Contemporary Studio Façades in Ghana

Before Timothy Garrard became one of the leading historians of the gold trade in West Africa and the metal arts of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, he was, to the surprise of many who only knew him in his Africanist guise, a lawyer. Tim started life in Peterborough, Northamptonshire, and grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. He studied law at Worcester College, Oxford, training as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, London—the youngest person to be called to the bar in that year before becoming Clerk of Courts at the Old Bailey. This was just a short prelude to his move to Accra in 1967, where he took a position as a parliamentary draftsman for the Ghanaian government with the job titles of Senior State Attorney in the Office of the Attorney General and Draftsman to the Ghana Law Reform Commission. One of Tim’s proudest achievements during his years as a legal draftsman was his initiative to require slat barriers on the roadside flanks of the old Bedford passenger lorries, to prevent riders from jumping out into traffic when disembarking, previously a major cause of traffic fatalities. In 1977 he shifted divisions of government and became Senior Legal Draftsman to the Judicial Service, which put him under the Supreme Court of Ghana with the courtesy title of “judge,” an appellation he never used. In the late sixties he began developing an interest in Ghanaian archaeology and in the distinctive cast-brass gold weights of the Akan. The latter interest—actually, “obsession” is probably a better word—led to the publication of a four-part set of articles in the old series of The Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana in 1972–73. Beginning in 1975 he worked under the direction of Dr. Merrick Posnansky on interviews and excavations at Begho, a leading market town in northern Ghana from at least the fourteenth century. Meanwhile he continued his studies of gold weights and other early Akan metalwork traditions in the Department of Archaeology, University of Ghana, Legon. Though he took part in excavations on at least four occasions, digging was not his forte; he far preferred the analysis of artifacts and collection of oral history. He worked on the oral histories of several of the villages around Hani in the Begho area and made a great contribution by looking particularly at women’s histories. He completed his substantial (273-page) and underappreciated Master of Arts thesis, “Brass in Akan Society to the Nineteenth Century: A Survey of the Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Evidence,” in 1980. Some of this research was published in the anthology Akan Transformations (UCLA Museum of Cultural History, 1983), a volume he coedited with Doran Ross. That same year his invaluable Akan Weights and the Gold Trade was published by Longmans in the Legon History series. In addition to the substantial archival and library research that came to characterize his work, Tim methodically weighed more than 3,000 Akan weights from private and public collections, including those of the British Museum and the National Museum of Ghana, to reach his conclusions that Akan weights ultimately derived from four different external systems. Herbert M. Cole in his African Arts review (1981, vol. 14, no. 3) was effusive in his praise for the volume: “The book is a remarkable compendium of assiduously researched and meticulously sifted data, including cautious interpretations and judicious histories of the varied facets of the West African gold trade and its paraphernalia” (p. 14), calling it “an exceptional effort in the highest class of scholarship on elusive and subtle subjects” (p. 22). Tim also convincingly demonstrated that round edge-ground ceramic discs found on archaeological sites in Ghana, and also at Jenne-Jeno in Mali, were in fact gold weights. Tim believed in the importance of replication and time and motion studies and apprenticed himself to a well-known brass caster for three weeks; he eventually turned out figurative weights, particularly elephants, that are more meticulous than any older Akan pieces. One wonders now how many museums have Garrard pieces that they believe are just recent gold tourist-trade weights! In addition to writing the basic and most comprehensive text to date on Akan weights, Tim assembled a substantial collection himself, which included not just the much-soughtafter figural weights but an astounding array of “pseudo-weights” and an unparalleled collection of the paraphernalia connected with gold weights, ranging from wooden gold-panning trays to whisks, containers, and scales. The pseudo-weights are generally bits and pieces of European brasswork that became detached from larger objects and subsequently were employed as counterbalances in the weighing of gold alongside locally produced weights. An essay on this material was also published in Akan Transformations. That volume was produced near the beginning of Tim’s work on a Timothy Francis Garrard April 28, 1943–May 17, 2007