Asase Ba Podcast - S4E3 What Was Pre-Colonial Ghana Actually Like? ft. Hermann
Transcript
Michelle:
Hello and welcome to Asase Ba, a podcast that honours oral tradition and shines a light on Ghanaian stories that are often untold or silenced. I'm your host, Michelle, and my pronouns are she and her. Welcome back, everyone! I want to thank everyone who has been engaging with the podcast, especially on Instagram and answering all my questions. It makes me happy.
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This episode is another history episode. I am a history girl; I love going on YouTube and watching videos of the elders discussing history, oral history. I love reading articles or journal articles about pre-colonial stuff, and listening to podcasts about history when I can find them.
Today is an interview episode, and we are talking about pre-colonial times in Ghana with our guest, Hermann, and Hermann's pronouns are he/him. He is an assistant professor of African Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He joins us to discuss pre-colonial Ghana, if pre-colonial Ghana is romanticized, what we can learn from back then, the limitations of written and oral history, and much, much more. I know from Instagram, that many of you are interested in pre-colonial history.
A couple of weeks back, I actually posed a question and asked, "What would you like to know about pre-colonial history?" This interview isn't a direct response to all the answers that I got, but I feel like it's a good primer, a good general overview of it.
I definitely want to do more pre-colonial history episodes later on in the future in other seasons. I know a lot of you are interested, so yes, let's get into this episode.
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Michelle:
Hi, Hermann. Welcome to Asase Ba podcast. Can you introduce yourself?
Hermann:
My name is Hermann von Hesse. I'm from Ghana, same as Michelle, and I'm an Assistant Professor of African Art History here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I have a Ph.D. in African History with a minor in Art History from the University of Wisconsin Madison. I started teaching here in Urbana-Champaign and this is actually my first semester. I’m passionate about everything African history, African art history, African material cultures and Ghanaian cultural history.
When Was Pre-Colonial Ghana?
Michelle:
Nice. I love it. Speaking of history and African history, today we're going to be speaking specifically about pre-colonial times in Ghana. Before we launch into that, when we talk about pre-colonial Ghana, what timeframe is considered pre-colonial Ghana?
Hermann:
The term pre-colonial is imprecise and fraught with so many conceptual problems because pre-colonial or colonial starts at different points in African history, even in Ghana. The time that the Gold Coast or what is now coastal Ghana became a British colony was different from when places like Asante and the Northern territories came under British rule. So at the time that the Gold Coast was under colonial rule, Asante was still pre-colonial.
Also, at a time when most of Africa was pre-colonial, places like the Cape in South Africa had already experienced a Dutch colonial presence and a Dutch settler colony. When you say pre-colonial, it depends on which part of Africa you are talking about and which time period.
But one of the problems with these categories is the fact that we assume that when we say pre-colonial and the transition away from that, there was a European magic wand that completely changed Africans from being something completely different from what preceded the colonial. But it's important to note that, even in pre-colonial times, Africa was still interacting with Europeans.
Before Europeans came to Africa south of the Sahara, the continent was interacting with other parts of the world through long-distance trade and so on. When the colonial era began, it was just a combination of different external influences and connections. The transition to the colonial era was not simply a transition to a world that was completely different. In many cases, it wasn't until the 1920s and 30s that Africa became significantly different from what it was in the 1870s or even the early 1900s.
Michelle:
Does this specifically apply to Ghana?
Hermann:
I wanted to put that perspective. Yeah.
Michelle:
I definitely understand. I know that, for example, the Portuguese set foot where we would classify as Ghana today in the 1400s, I believe. So as you mentioned, we've had a history of interacting with the Europeans, whether it was during that time when we were trading with them, etc. But I guess what you're saying is that the relationship shifted as time went on. Prior to that formal colonization period, we were still interacting with them, but not in a way that we think of when we think of colonization.
Hermann:
Exactly. Simply put, Africans had sovereignty, and Europeans lived at the mercy of Africans. I want to summarize it with historian Tom McCaskey's very interesting phrase: “Initially, the British asked, then they persuaded, and eventually they commanded.”
This sums up Ghana's interactions with Europeans until the second half of the 19th century, particularly by the 1870s when power drastically shifted in favour of Europeans. Eventually, by the end of the 19th century, Asante and the neighbouring territories were effectively brought under British colonial domination.
Viewing Pre-Colonial Ghana Through a Critical Lens
Michelle:
I know, just going on social media or reading certain content by different people, googling pre-colonial Ghana, some people tend to romanticize or generalize what pre-colonial Ghana looked like.
Hermann:
People are saying “Oh, the economy is bad, and Akuffo Ado is not delivering on his promises.” And then people will look back to when President Mahama was president, and then they'll say, “Oh, you see, President Mahama was great, you know, everything was fine, and all of that” So this romanticization of pre-colonial Ghana comes out of these discourses of very politicized Africans who are agitating against all the racist colonial policies and of colonial exclusion.
So it's important to note that the romanticization of pre-colonial Ghana was an important political tool that nationalists who wanted to reorient Gold Coast Africans and give them a sense of nationhood used. They went back and picked up these stories as a way of forging a sense of national cohesion against European domination.
The Gold Coast was not a nation, the term Gold Coast was a mere geographical description, and there were several nations within the Gold Coast. Back in the day, if you said the Gold Coast it was just like saying West Africa. Gold Coast was a region.
So, it was the British—it was the proclamation of the Gold Coast Colonial Protectorate in 1874 that really transformed the Gold Coast from a mere geographical region to a colonial state. Then, in 1900, Asante was conquered and made a crown colony and then the Northern territories were also brought under British rule. By the 1940s, all of these territories were centralized. And then in 1957, we got independence.
So there are lots of nationalist myths that were created to glue this patchwork of different nations and people with different languages and different histories together.
Michelle:
Yeah, thank you for noting that, because that's so important. There was never one singular Gold Coast or pre-colonial Ghana, because there were so many different ethnic groups, different languages, and different sorts of conflicts going on before we became Gold Coast or Ghana. There was also a lot of imperialism and things going on between the different groups and Ghana.
Hermann:
I mean, we inter-married. It's just like in Europe—there were different European groups, and they intermarried, but they fought and killed each other a lot. Basically, it was the same thing we were doing.
What Can We Learn From Pre-Colonial Ghana?
Michelle:
On the other hand, what do you think we can learn from pre-colonial Ghana and how can we apply it to our present day? I don't want to paint it like a general pre-colonial Ghana, but just for lack of a better term how can we learn from our past?
Hermann:
I mean for me, what I find fascinating about pre-colonial Ghanaian nations, and cultures is that…Whenever I delve into their cultures, honestly, I find them very strange because the past is a completely different world, even though there are continuities. But, you asked me about the positives, so I'll dwell on that.
I think their architecture is one thing that I'm really interested in these days. We talk about sustainable architecture and going green and all of that, but there are two-story buildings made of adobe mud still standing in old Accra and Cape Coast. And parts of the Fante-speaking world right along the coast.
Some of these have been standing for over 160 years and they are still there. I wonder what material science engineers are doing. I feel a lot of architectural training at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology lacks historical components to these kinds of technical training.
A lot of knowledge of our pre-20th century craft is disappearing. As somebody who is an architectural historian—a historian of material culture and cultural social history more broadly—these are some of the things that I would advocate that we look into. I'm really fascinated by a lot of the material cultures and how we can adapt that to a lot of our discourses about going green and sustainable architecture.
These are not things that Europeans invented in the 20th century or in the 21st century. If somebody in coastal Ghana can live in a two-story adobe house with all our technology, why can't we reproduce that and transform it into something more durable? We talk about the rising cost of building materials so these are things that we can learn from.
Michelle:
Yeah, that's super interesting. It makes me think of our education system pre-colonization and the different ways that we learned. I recently did an episode where I talked about the Basel Mission and how today they are known for “bringing schools to Ghana” but the thing is we had our own educational systems and our own ways of passing down knowledge.
And I know you mentioned certain ways of doing our crafts. I learned we had different trades like basket weaving or drumming. Even with any of our traditional customs and traditions, there is a training system to it. This includes the spiritual training systems within different ethnic groups.
Another component is probably learning about our traditional customs and traditions and seeing what we can use today or how it can evolve. Thank you for bringing that up in terms of our architectural buildings. I think it's definitely useful to go back and see what we can bring with us today.
Hermann:
Yeah, but one thing that I also wanted to point out is that our pre-colonial ancestors were not against borrowing ideas from Europeans. In fact, those who were Gold Coast merchants who started building first started building in stone because the stone could better protect the imported merchandise that they were trading.
Also, they figured out a way to innovate or transform their single-story mud houses into double-story houses. So even if you cannot build in stone, you can still build durable mud houses using adobe, like sun-dried bricks. They were able to expand their cultural repertoire in ways that made economic, and even political sense. The grander your house, the more your political clout also grew.
Michelle:
So we took some European ideas back in the day and applied them to our context and what made sense for us. Is that what you're saying?
Hermann:
Yeah. I mean, there was cultural exchange too; it wasn’t a one-way traffic. Europeans were dying in numbers. The life expectancy for Europeans in most of the Gold Coast—particularly in Accra—was just 1.5 years. So Europeans were consulting local shrines. Their local wives were giving them all kinds of herbal concoctions to cure malaria, blackwater fever and all kinds of tropical diseases.
They were eating local food and they were taking local wives because if you didn't do that, you wouldn't live long. A lot of the time, those Europeans sitting in their forts were drinking a lot because they were bored most of the time. So it's also important to point out that there were cultural exchanges and our ancestors had dynamic cultures and they borrowed foreign cultures, to suit their own cultural contexts. It’'s very important to point out some of these dynamics as well.
Michelle:
Yeah, I guess that points to the nuance and the way that we think about history because I know that today, it's easy to make things either this way or that way. But there is some sort of nuance in how certain things work.
We can acknowledge power differences and how things evolve throughout time. But I guess it is important to note that the way that we may have interacted with these Europeans was nuanced. It’s hard to think of things in that way today, especially with how everything is set up right now with yt supremacy.
Hermann:
It’s funny because a lot of the time we think about the past based on how things eventually panned out and how we see things in contemporary times. But people don't think about the past through the lens of how things started and how power relations were not necessarily what they became subsequently. So when you do history by looking at what things became rather than looking at what things were, you will get a lot of things wrong.
A lot of the time, discourses around the transatlantic slave trade and African participation in that very degrading system and the human trafficking of Black bodies have often been framed in terms of—or I should rather say that white power on American plantations is often projected on these sites.
So for example, in the middle of the 18th century, an American or a British ship captain would say, “Anomabu was where the Negroes were masters.” I’ll end that section here. We should completely rethink power relations during that time. The moment Europeans entered the Gold Coast, that was where the Negroes were masters. So once they were on the plantation or in the European colonies in the Americas, it was a completely different story.
Who Gets to Tell the Stories of Pre-colonial Ghana?
Michelle:
Something that I've been thinking about is, who gets to tell our history because I find that I am missing at least content or history or reflections from people who were marginalized, especially when we think of pre-colonial Ghana.
Usually, history is from the point of view of the Europeans who were recording it, or if not, it's from the point of view of the monarchy or the elites. So I wonder if there is some sort of recollection or records from the point of view of the people that were marginalized during that time, and I wonder how that would impact the way we viewed pre-colonial Ghana or the way we view these sorts of power structures.
Have you come across any records that are framed from the point of view of those who were marginalized?
Hermann:
That's a very important question because our people were non-literate. With the exception of West African Muslims, by far, a lot of non-Muslim West Africans were non-literate.
Michelle:
When you say non-literate, can you explain what that means?
Hermann:
Non-literate meaning they couldn't read and write. We don't call them illiterate because the term illiterate has all kinds of negative—
Michelle:
—connotations.
Hermann:
Right. So non-literate is more neutral.
Michelle:
And we passed our information via oral tradition.
Hermann:
In non-Islamic West Africa, the Europeans were writing down everything because they were operating companies. So they needed to keep accounts, log books and account books. If they were giving out goods on credits to African merchants, African kings, African nobles, and so on, they needed to record that.
So as historians when we look at these log books and account books, they are not just trade books. They are not only recording trade, but a lot of times, there may be disputes between different African kings or even within specific African kingdoms and states. So sometimes Europeans will be brought in to solve the conflict because they are seen as neutral.
And because of this, the Europeans also wrote down a lot of things. They didn’t always understand the things they recorded or the things that we talked about so we approach these sources very carefully.
Occasionally, we find Africans also writing stuff, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. We have missionary-educated Africans or Africans who had been educated in Europe also writing things. All sources are problematic, right? It's important to do what we call “reading against the grain” to obtain some of the local perspectives.
So, for example, in the 1840s, there was a mixed-race schoolteacher in Osu who was sacked from her post because she was allegedly practicing “fetishism.” If you encounter something like this, I mean, even just by using common sense, it tells you a story that mixed-race Africans on the Gold Coast negotiated different beliefs. They practiced Christianity, in addition to local religious beliefs, but then the sources just tell you that teachers were being fired because they practiced fetishism.
But when you take that, every source should raise questions in your mind. Or when you look at a source, you should be able to raise a number of questions and the questions that you raise will help you to interpret that very racist or biased European perspective.
That's what we call “reading against the grain”. So the source will not necessarily tell you that they were practicing Christianity in addition to the indigenous spiritualities. But firing somebody for fetishism tells you a lot. These are some of the ways in which we try to get closer to the story.
But then from the 19th century, there were lots of missionary-educated Africans who also wrote stuff. They were writing ethnographies. And in some of the mission schools, they were even being asked to write essays on their identities. In the mission schools. I have school exercises for school kids who are being asked by their European teachers and mentors to write down the names of their deities.
Michelle:
That's interesting. Do you have it in your collection or have you just seen that?
Hermann:
I have it.
Michelle:
I would love to see that.
Hermann:
Some of my ancestors in the 18th century had exercises from 1855, and they were being asked to write about their identities and their traditional festivals.
When people were confirmed in church, they were asked to write special essays about their conversion in English. There's lots of culture to unpack there, and it tells us reasons why some of these guys were converted to Christianity.
Sometimes they were testing their deities. There was a guy who said his brother bought a horse. The brother fell from the horse and injured his head and he wanted his deities to heal him. They couldn't, and he believed Jesus healed him. So he said, “well, Jesus, if you heal me, I'll serve you.”
They were healed and this guy interpreted his healing as a sign of God's power. And that's how he became a Christian. I mean, personally, I identify as an agnostic, almost agnostic-atheist. But what I tell people is these stories are very powerful and I don't believe the missionaries had the power to indoctrinate.
I think it’s sort of a caricature when people liken the Basel missionaries and others to, for example, what white people did to Canadian boarding school kids. I sent one of your friends a document in which the Basel Mission girls' school in Accra allowed the girls to go home and celebrate Homowo.
Because the culture was so dominant, if you tell the kids not to participate in their cultures, they'll stop coming to church and you won't be able to win their souls for Christ.
Michelle:
That's interesting you mentioned that because I just did an episode about the Basel Mission and its impact. I know a lot of the time, they taught the students in their local languages. That surprised me. Honestly, I thought they would have taught them in English. They weren't even English—excuse me—I thought they would teach them in their European language.
In the episode, I talked about the different techniques they use and even the different reasons why someone might've wanted to join the mission. It wasn't that we just passively accepted things. There were economic reasons for some people to join. There is a sort of nuance to that.
I also wonder in terms of the oral tradition component and in telling our pre-colonial history or talking about our traditions and customs, where does that come into play? And even as a historian, do you find yourself talking to an elder or learning things via oral history to augment the written documents that are available to us?
The Role of Oral Tradition in Documenting Pre-Colonial Ghana
Hermann:
Yeah, that's an important question because I mean, most people don't think about oral traditions this way, but oral traditions are not necessarily things passed on from one generation to the other, going back forever. A lot of the time, oral traditions are invented in the heat of the moment in order to legitimize claims to a chieftaincy position or claims to land or to legitimize people saying that they were firstcomers. When I say firstcomers in our context, if you want to claim privilege on the land, you have to claim that your ancestors got there first, right?
So during the consolidation of colonial rule in Ghana, there were lots of social disruptions. The cash economy was introduced, property became land and other natural resources became extremely valuable. If they want to build a court or school, they need land for so that they can pay compensation.
So who gets the money? Who gets the compensation? Where does the money go? So people began to invent a lot of things and one of the things that influenced our oral traditions was missionary education. A lot of our earliest histories with the exception of again, Muslim West Africa, were written by missionary-educated Africans, so these were some of the first generation of Christians.
People had to make sense of being both African and Christian so all kinds of stories were invented about how the Ga people came from Israel, or how they were connected to biblical lands, and how the Akan people also have similar origins. And so you see how the power of missionary education influenced a lot of narratives and also the nature of the colonial economy and how it sort of monetized our system and led to people inventing all kinds of traditions.
These ideas fed back into subsequent oral traditions. Scholars call it the feedback loop in oral traditions. I mean, sometimes I talk to elders and they tell me stuff from Carl Reindorf’s issue of The Gold Coast and Asante written in 1895. They've not necessarily read Reindorf, but whatever Reindorf wrote passed into oral traditions.
Oral traditions can be very problematic because a lot of the time, it's just book histories that have fed into the oral tradition. So sometimes I even prefer using recorded oral traditions that go back to the middle of the 19th century. And then when you go back, to more contemporary times, you realize that all these traditions change whenever there's a dispute or there are different claimants to a chieftaincy position or to property.
Then people begin to invent all kinds of things. I'm not saying oral traditions are totally rubbish. Just like other sources of history, they are not problem-free. We shouldn't assume that oral traditions are pristine ideas and narratives that were handed down, they can also be very problematic.
Michelle:
I think the message is to view things with a critical lens and not necessarily that our oral tradition sucks or written history or European written history is superior. It’s that there are issues with different sources because of humans being human.
Thank you so much Hermann for this very nuanced recollection of pre-colonial Ghana. Before we go, where can people connect with you online, whether it's social media or any sort of website?
Hermann:
I'm always on Facebook because it's easier to use. My name on Facebook is Herman W. von Hesse.
Michelle:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Hermann.
Hermann:
And thanks for having me.
Conclusion
Michelle:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode on pre-colonial history. What I learned is I really want to know more about history from the point of view of marginalized folks, because I feel like that's what's often missing for me. I think one way of doing that is learning from our personal family history or the histories of our communities.
In general, I want to be able to read, listen or watch different sources online that don't just focus on the monarchy or the elites or what the European traders observed. I want to learn from the perspective of the marginalized folks. Hopefully, I come across something soon.
Anyway, thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok @asasebapod. If anything resonated with you, if you have any feedback, use the hashtag #asasebapod. Bye!
Episode Notes
On this episode, we dive into a discussion about pre-colonial Ghana! Hermann (pronouns: he/his) joins us to discuss the romanticization of pre-colonial Ghana, what we can learn from back then, nuances in interpreting history, the limitations of written and oral history, and much more!
Join in on the conversation! Use the hashtag #AsaseBaPod.
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