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Be(com)ing Asante, be(com)ing Akan: thoughts on gender, identity and the colonial encounter

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Ethnicity in Ghana

Abstract

The issues tentatively explored in this chapter1 — gender, identity and the colonial encounter in Asante — can be framed by two extraordinary, though very different, photographs, taken approximately forty years apart. The first (Figure 5.1) is of the king of Asante, Asantehene Agyeman Prempe I, and the Queenmother, Asantehernaa Yaa Kyaa, seated with a small group of retainers. The picture was taken in Elmina shortly after their arrest in Kumasi by British forces early in 1896. It is one of the few photographs we have in which the (in)famous Asantehemaa appears. Reviled by her eventual captors as ‘influential and unscrupulous’, ‘wicked but astute’, Yaa Kyaa opposed any accommodation to British interests in the years preceding her arrest. The photograph in question, which has been republished numerous times, signifies in very dramatic, gendered ways the British colonial ‘capture’ of Asante.2

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Authors
  1. Jean Allman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany

    Carola Lentz (Professor of Social Anthropology) (Professor of Social Anthropology)

  2. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Paul Nugent (Senior Lecturer in African History) (Senior Lecturer in African History)

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© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Allman, J. (2000). Be(com)ing Asante, be(com)ing Akan: thoughts on gender, identity and the colonial encounter. In: Lentz, C., Nugent, P. (eds) Ethnicity in Ghana. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62337-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62337-2_5

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-62339-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-62337-2

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

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