Civilization

The Fante

The coastal Akan nation of Ghana, bound by the Asafo companies and their posuban shrines, the ancestral oracle of Nananom Mpow, and the 1868 Fante Confederation.

On a street in Elmina, wedged between a fishing quarter and the surf, stands a squat concrete fortress not much taller than a house, painted in enamel reds and blues and crowded with molded figures: lions, a sailor at a mast, a clock face, a ship, an angel, and along the parapet a row of soldiers holding the pose of a firing line that never moves. It is called a posuban, and there are dozens like it along this coast, each the property of a fighting company, each a shrine. The word is a coinage — English post fused to the Akan ban, a wall or fortification — and the thing it names is a coastal answer to the great stone castles a few hundred yards away on the shore. Where the Europeans built São Jorge da Mina in gray masonry to hold the gold and later the captives, the townspeople built their own painted forts inland from the water, to hold regalia, to receive sacrifice, and to declare, in three dimensions and bright paint, who they are.

A posuban, the concrete fortress-shrine of a Fante asafo company, in Elmina, Ghana. Maarten van der Bent, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The people who raise these shrines are the Fante, in their own speech the Mfantsefo (the older colonial spelling is Fanti): the coastal branch of the Akan, settled along the Atlantic edge of Ghana’s Central Region and the eastern fringe of the Western Region. Their towns are the port and castle towns of the Gold Coast — Cape Coast, which they call Oguaa; Elmina; Anomabo; Winneba; Saltpond — and, half a day inland, Mankessim, the old ritual capital. They are one Akan nation among several, kin to the forest Asante and sharing the same sky-god, the same matriclans, the same dense proverbial culture; but their history is a coastal history, made where the interior meets the sea, and it produced institutions the inland Akan never needed. This entry follows those coast-born things: the fighting companies and their shrines, the ancestral oracle at Mankessim, the great cleansing festival at Cape Coast, and the improbable written constitution that a federation of coastal towns proclaimed in 1868.

The half that broke off

The Fante tell their own origin as a migration and a fracture. In the tradition kept along the coast, the founding group — the Borbor Fante, sometimes rendered Boka Fante — were not aboriginal to the shore but an intrusive people who came down out of the interior. Their point of departure is named as Tekyiman (Techiman), the old Bono town on the forest’s northern edge, and their descent is dated by custom to around 1250, with the founding of Mankessim traditionally placed at 1252. These are not documentary dates; they are the reckoning of oral tradition, and they should be held as such. The migration is remembered as led by three figures — Oburmankoma, Odapagyan, and Oson, glossed respectively as the whale, the eagle, and the elephant — animal-names that carry the weight of totem and title rather than biography.

The name Fante itself is folk-etymologized within this story. It is parsed as fa-atsew — “the half that broke off,” or “half that left” — the portion of the parent Akan body that split from the main stem at Techiman and went south, leaving the rest behind. Whether the etymology is historically sound or a later gloss, it fixes the central self-understanding: the Fante are a people defined by a departure, a fragment that became a nation on new ground.

That ground was not empty. The coast already held an older population the tradition calls the Etsii Fante, of Guan aboriginal stock — the earlier inhabitants of the shore and its lagoons, whom the incoming Borbor absorbed, so that the modern Fante are reckoned a fusion of the two. It is a pattern common across the Akan world: an intrusive Akan-speaking group settling among and eventually enclosing an aboriginal Guan substratum. Like all the Akan, the Fante are matrilineal — descent, inheritance, and clan membership pass through the mother, and a man’s heir is his sister’s son — and this matriliny will matter, because one of their signature institutions runs stubbornly against it. They speak Mfantse (Fante), a distinct dialect cluster of the Twi-Fante continuum, marked enough to be a badge of coastal identity. Modern population counts are estimates only; one recent figure puts the Fante at roughly four and a half million, about thirteen percent of Ghana’s population — a number to treat as an order of magnitude, not a census.

When the three migration-leaders died, their embalmed remains were carried to a grove of forest half a mile south of the village of Obidan, near Mankessim, and interred there. The grove became Nananom Mpow — “the grove of the ancestors,” the grove of the grandsires — and it is the hinge on which the whole religious life of the coast turns.

Nananom Mpow: the ancestors as oracle

Fante sacred life is not organized, as the Asante’s is, around a single sacred kingship and a stool that holds the nation’s soul. It is organized around three coast-specific institutions, and the first and oldest is the ancestor complex at Mankessim. For the underlying cosmology — the withdrawn creator Nyame at the apex, the lesser deities of river and force, the venerated dead who remain present to the living — the Fante belong wholly to the wider world of Akan religion, and that world is described there. What is proper to the coast is what the Fante did with the grave of their founders.

The three leaders buried at Nananom Mpow did not stay merely honored dead. From the mid-eighteenth century the grove rose to become the pre-eminent oracle of the entire Gold Coast — not a local shrine but a regional power consulted by the elites of many of the small coastal states. The earliest written notice of it comes from the Danish trader Ludvig Rømer, whose account of the 1740s records the grove already functioning as a place of the highest resort. As the historian Rebecca Shumway has shown in The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the shrine’s ascent tracks the eighteenth-century transformation of the coast itself — the pivot from gold to captives as the coast’s chief export, and the coalescing of the loose Fante towns into something more coordinated. Shumway calls the result a “coastal coalition,” and Nananom Mpow was its ritual heart: an oracle that expressed the ancestors’ judgment, a war-deity consulted before campaigns, and a law court whose verdicts bound the elite. Its priests charged high fees and, in arbitrating disputes between towns, gave the fractious little states a common authority above any one of them — an ancestral tribunal standing where the Asante set a golden stool.

The oracular and shrine procedures themselves — how the grove was entered, how its verdict was sought and read — belong to the priests and to the public record’s distance, and are not the property of a description like this one. What can be said plainly is the shape of the thing: a burial grove of the founders that grew into the coast’s supreme court and war-god, and in doing so gave a decentralized people a center.

The asafo: an army of the fathers

The second coastal institution is the one a visitor meets first, because it owns the posuban in the street. The asafo are the fighting companies of the Fante towns — the word built from sa, war, and fo, people: the war-people, the militia. Every Fante town is divided among them; a town may hold anywhere from two to some fourteen companies, each with its own name, colors, quarter, shrine, and fierce rivalry with the others. In war they were the town’s army; in peace they are its police, its labor gangs for public work, and the muscle and ceremony of every civic occasion — the bearers who install a chief and, on occasion, the pressure that removes one.

Their organization carries the one great structural oddity of Fante life. In a society where everything else descends through the mother, membership in an asafo company descends through the father. A child belongs to its mother’s clan for inheritance and to its father’s company for war — so that the two lineages of Fante social order, the matriclan and the company, cross at right angles in every person. It is a deliberate counterweight: the matriclans bind the coast into kin-groups that cut across towns, while the patrilineal companies bind the men of a single town into a body that will fight for that town’s soil. Each company stands under a supreme captain, the Supi, and beneath him the captains, the Safohen or asafohen; the town’s overall military head is the Tufuhen. The offices are living ones, filled today, and the companies parade today.

A view of Cape Coast Castle from the shore, Cape Coast (Oguaa), Ghana. Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The company’s identity lives in two kinds of made object. The first is the posuban itself — the concrete fortress-shrine, brightly painted and thick with molded figures, that stores the company’s regalia and receives its sacrifices. The oldest were simple raised platforms; the flamboyant multi-story fantasias of lions, ships, clocks, airplanes, and biblical scenes are largely a twentieth-century elaboration, a competitive architecture in which each company tries to out-build its rivals. The figures are boasts and proverbs made solid — a lion for courage, a scene of Adam and Eve or of Elijah’s ascent absorbed from the mission and turned to the company’s own uses. The posuban looks like a toy castle, and the resemblance is not accidental: it is a coastal people’s own fort, raised in the shadow of the real ones on the shore, mimicking their form and answering their power.

The second object is the flag. Each company owns asafo flags — frankaa (plural mfrankaa) — appliqué banners of stitched cloth on which figured scenes of people, animals, and objects encode a proverb, a historical claim, or a taunt aimed at a rival company. A bird eating a fish tail-first says that this company can do the impossible; a leopard says what a leopard says. At festivals a trained flag-dancer, the frankaakitanyi, carries and whirls the banner through a choreographed, athletic performance, the cloth an extension of the body. The flags carry their own compressed history in one corner: older examples bear a Union Jack canton, marking the nineteenth-century companies’ negotiated allegiance to the British; after Ghana’s independence in 1957 the Union Jack was replaced by the black star of the new nation’s flag. The dating of any frankaa can be read off its upper corner. As the art historians at Smarthistory note, the flags are at once regalia, boast, and proverb — the town’s argument with itself and its neighbors, sewn in cotton and danced in the street.

Fetu Afahye: clearing the dirt

The third coastal institution is the festival cycle, and its greatest instance is the Oguaa Fetu Afahye, the cleansing festival of Cape Coast. The name is glossed in the local speech as efin tu — the removing, the clearing away, of dirt — and the festival is exactly that: an annual purification of the town, its people, and its relations with the powers that keep it. Tradition traces its origin to the seventeenth century, to a plague that once ravaged the Oguaa community; the people called on their gods, the sickness lifted, the land was cleansed, and the festival commemorates that deliverance and renews it. Where Akan religion speaks generally of the lesser deities, Fetu Afahye names them by number and place: it honors the seventy-seven gods of the Oguaa Traditional Area, the tutelary powers of the Cape Coast state, and its rites — a day of communal cleaning called Amuntumadeze, a ban on drumming and noise, the public sacrifice of a cow to the seventy-seven, the durbar of chiefs in state under umbrellas — enact the clearing of the year’s accumulated pollution. It climaxes on the first Saturday of September and it is celebrated now, a living civic and sacred calendar rather than a memory of one.

The festival also carries a scar of the colonial encounter. Under British and mission pressure the observance was for a time outlawed and disparaged as a “Black Christmas,” a phrase meant to file it under superstition — a framing to be named as the colony’s, not adopted as description. The people of Oguaa contested the label, and the festival survived the ban to become one of the most attended in Ghana.

Middlemen of the Atlantic

The Fante reception in the wider historical record begins with commerce, and it must be stated without flinching. The Fante held the shore precisely where the Atlantic economy did its business, and they held it as brokers. Behind them lay the gold and, increasingly, the captives of the interior; before them, planted on their own beaches, stood the European castles — Portuguese São Jorge da Mina at Elmina, built in 1482, the oldest European structure south of the Sahara; Cape Coast Castle, in British hands and serving as the Gold Coast headquarters from the 1660s. Between the forts and the interior the Fante towns stood as the indispensable middle, and they made the middle pay. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Fante port of Anomabo had eclipsed both Elmina and Cape Coast as the principal slaving harbor of the Gold Coast — its traders running an offshore “boat trade” that met ships in the roadstead and bypassed the forts’ monopolies, so that the caboceers of a single town could set the terms of the largest slave market on the coast.

This is the sober fact at the center of the Fante reception: the coast profited as brokers of a trade in enslaved human beings. The European powers who owned the castles bear their own full share; the Fante brokers bear theirs; neither truth cancels the other. It was to hold and tax this trade that the British built Anomabo Castle — later Fort William — between 1753 and 1760, to the design of the engineer John Apperley, and called it the strongest fortification on the coast; it stood as a hub of British Atlantic slaving until Britain abolished the trade in 1807. The same coast whose people were the trade’s brokers held, at other moments and in other persons, its victims — the doubled position that runs through the whole Gold Coast, and that reaches its most concentrated memorial upriver at Assin Manso, the “slave river” of the last bath.

Pressed between the sea and the forest, the Fante lived also under the growing weight of the Asante Empire rising behind them. The inland state’s expansion toward the coast — its drive to reach the forts and the trade directly, without Fante middlemen taking their cut — was the northern pressure that forced the coastal towns toward coalition. It came to open war in the Asante–Fante War of 1806–07. When Asante fugitives took refuge among the Fante and at the British fort, the Asantehene Osei Bonsu marched to the coast; on 15 June 1807 his army stormed the town and besieged the garrison at Anomabo in a battle of terrible slaughter, and the surviving Fante leaders were brought, for a time, under Asante overlordship. The forest power had reached the sea.

The Constitution of Mankessim

The most cited Fante afterlife is political, and it is the reason the nation is read, by later Ghanaians, as an early African experiment in self-government. Squeezed now between Asante on the land side and an expanding British presence on the sea side — and provoked in 1868 by a British–Dutch exchange of coastal forts that treated Fante towns as chips to be swapped — the paramount chiefs of the coast met at Mankessim in January 1868 and proclaimed a Fante Confederation: a union of the coastal states to act together against both European powers, with King Ghartey IV of Winneba chosen as its head.

What began as a war-league grew, over the next three years, into something more ambitious. The educated Fante merchants and professionals of the coast — men schooled in the mission and the counting-house — joined the chiefs, and in November 1871 the Confederation adopted a written Constitution of Mankessim. It established a federal structure: an assembly of the paramount chiefs, an executive council weighted toward the educated merchant class, and at its head a King-President with largely judicial and ceremonial authority, Ghartey IV of Winneba, while an elected council carried the executive business. It proposed roads, schools, courts, and a treasury. It is this document that later nationalists would point back to: an African federation drafting its own constitution and claiming the right to govern its own coast, a generation before the language of self-government was current.

Britain did not permit it. The colonial authorities read the Confederation as sedition, arrested its leading men, offered inducements to divide the chiefs, and let the union starve as trade and revenue collapsed. It was gone by 1873, and in 1874 Britain declared the coast a Crown Colony outright — the Gold Coast Colony — folding the Fante towns, their forts, and their confederation into the imperial administration. The experiment in coastal constitutionalism was over within six years of its written charter.

Loss, market, and living coast

Two further strands of the reception belong here, and both cut toward loss. The ancestral grove at Nananom Mpow did not survive the century intact. In 1840 a Methodist convert named Akweesi founded the Christian village of Obidan beside the sacred wood, and in August 1851, after the convert and a preacher entered the grove — the mission’s most prominent figure on this coast was Thomas Birch Freeman — the chief of Mankessim, Nana Edu, attacked and burned Obidan and seized its people. British authorities fined the chief eighteen pounds and bound him over to keep the peace; and in the aftermath the grove itself was cleared. The supreme oracle of the eighteenth-century coast was cut down in the collision between the shrine and the church, and the founders’ grove passed out of its old power.

The asafo flags, meanwhile, have entered a second life as commodities. The appliqué frankaa, sewn to encode a company’s proverb and danced by its flag-bearer, now hang in museums from Washington to Amsterdam and circulate on the international market as collectible “folk art,” severed from the company and the town that gave them meaning. These afterlives — the flag as gallery object, the festival as spectacle, the framings of “folk art” and “Black Christmas” — are worth naming precisely so that the framings are marked as external and not mistaken for the thing itself.

A Fante asafo company flag (frankaa), cotton appliqué, with a Union Jack canton, mid-twentieth century. via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

For the thing itself is not a memory. The Fante are a living nation of the Ghanaian coast, several million strong, and their institutions are current. The asafo companies still hold their quarters and elect their Supi; the posuban still rise in Elmina and Anomabo and Saltpond, still painted, still added to, still receiving the company’s regalia. Fetu Afahye still clears the dirt of Oguaa on the first Saturday of September, and the seventy-seven gods are still thanked. The grove at Mankessim is gone and the Confederation was suppressed, but the painted concrete fort in the Elmina street — half toy, half temple, wholly serious — is not the relic of a war-band. It is the standing sign of a company that mustered last year and will muster again.