How Adu Boahen unlocked Ghana’s history
When the British historian, W. F. Ward, wrote in his 1948 book, History of the Gold Coast that the main ethnic groups of the Gold Coast – among them the Akan, the Akwamu, the Ga, and the Ewe – were relative “newcomers” to the country, and that “there is no nation now dwelling in the Gold Coast which has been in the country longer than the European … we may [thus] take the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries as the beginning of the Gold Coast history,” little did he know that a 16-year-old Ghanaian boy would grow up and comprehensively demolish his work. That boy became a historian of note, a professor called Albert Adu Boahen, who died on May 24, 2006. Cameron Duodu continues his tribute to one of Africa’s great historians.
The late Professor Adu Boahen was an irreverent and mischievous individual with an irrepressible sense of humour. His nickname, as I have noted previously, was Kontopiaat, a sobriquet he must have colonised at Mtantsipim School in Cape Coast, Ghana, his alma mater.
Mfantsipim is an elite institution which was an intellectual power house long before its current rival in the intellectual stakes, Achimota School, sprouted its teeth. At these schools, almost everyone has a nick-name, and there is usually a special term that is shorthand for particular characteristics in human beings.
For instance, a teacher who was a real master of the subject he taught would be known as one who delivered ‘conc’ stuff (for ‘concentrated’), whilst one whose stuff produced yawns in the classroom would be known as a ‘dilute’ chap.
I never actually asked Adu Boahen what Kontopiaat meant, but from the way he used it, one could deduce that it meant mischievous, rascally, or foolishly funny. If Adu wanted to reproach someone affectionately, for instance, he would say, “Hey, but you Kontopiaat, why did you go and do such and such a thing?” And he would expect the explanation to be witty enough to make him laugh.
Adu’s behaviour on February 3, 1966 – when he gave a talk in London to a joint meeting of the Royal African Society and the Royal Commonwealth Society, under the chairmanship of no less a person than Professor Roland Oliver, the man who had founded the African history section of the institution at which Boahen had pursued his post-graduate studies, London University School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) – could be classified as a metaphor for unbridled Kontopiaatism.
Whenever someone is giving a lecture attended by his former professor, he usually adopts a deferential tone. In Adu’s case, his former professor was not only attending the talk, but actually chairing it. So it might have been assumed that the deference Adu would show to the academic establishment would be so extensive that it would stretch from the meeting place to the very doors of the building.
Ha! Not on your life. Anyone who expected deference from Adu Boahen was in for a shock. He began the lecture by picking out the three books normally regarded as “authoritative” historical works, to which anyone interested in Ghana’s history was “always referred”: (1) A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti by W. Claridge (first published in 1915); (2) History of the Gold Coast by W. F. Ward (published “in 1948) and (3) Ghana, An Historical Interpretation by J. D. Page (published in 1961). Adu then declared that:
“I must start [this lecture] with a confession… [It] is this – that I am going to say a lot of things that may sound highly controversial and probably revolutionary, and there are three main reasons for this. I am going to be controversial because I accept the view … that is ‘historical controversy enables us not only to arrive at the truth, but also to keep up the blood circulation in this cold climate”. [Can you hear the Brits laughing uneasily, Ha-ha-hah]?
“The second reason is that my approach to the history of Ghana… is different. Claridge, Ward and Fage looked at the history of Ghana essentially from the outside, and their main concern was the activities of Europeans in Ghana – why and when Europeans came in, what they did and so forth. My colleagues and I [at the history department of the University of Ghana] are now looking at it from the inside, that is, from the African standpoint. For instance, we are now interested not so much in why Europeans began to come to West Africa in the 15th century as in what they found when they did arrive; not only in what they did, but also the effect of this on the social, economic and political, and institutions of the Ghanaians; not so much in the growth of British jurisdiction in Ghana as in the reactions of the Ghanaians to this.”
“The third reason is that my colleagues and I are now using sources which the earlier historians never used or even had access to. The three historians [Claridge, Ward and Fage] used only published sources, mainly in English, and some oral tradition. Now, besides these, we have been exploring unpublished documentary material not only in English but also in Dutch, Danish and Portuguese… We are also now relying very heavily on Arabic sources written mainly in Northern Ghana by Ghanaians themselves. This particular source, whose richness is now becoming obvious, has been hitherto virtually ignored and it is this neglect that accounts not only for the fact that Northern Ghana has received only scant attention in existing history books but also for the erroneous, but widely held view, that literacy was first introduced to Ghana by European missionaries. In addition to these documentary sources, we are also using evidence provided by such disparate disciplines as archaeology, linguistics, ethnography and even ethno- musicology; all of which had hardly got off the ground in Ghana, even by the time of Fage.”
Can you just see Professor Roland Oliver, a close collaborator of Fage’s, twitching nervously in his chair as he heard this? Adu Boahen was telling the high and mighty of African Studies in Great Britain that their main source of reading – on Ghana, at any rate – was flawed because the “authoritative” historians who produced those works had been both incompetent and negligent!
What had they been saying, then, and what could be said about it in the light of recent research and approach? It was usual with general historical surveys of countries, [Adu said] to start with a description of the main peoples, when they arrived there, their routes of migration and their linguistic classifications; and Claridge, Ward and Fage had proved no exception.
But Claridge had only “devoted eight pages, out of 1,224, to this subject – a clear indication of the importance he attached to this particular theme”, Adu pointed out sarcastically. Ward too discussed them, as well as the physical features of Ghana, in only the first 43 pages of his 413- page book, while Fage, for his part, only discussed the theme “in the first four pages and the last ten pages of his book”.
Ward stated “dogmatically” in his book that the main ethnic groups of the Gold Coast – among them the Akan, the Akwamu, the Ga, and the Ewe – were relative “newcomers” to the country, and that: “There is no nation now dwelling in the Gold Coast which has been in the country longer than the European.” Ward had added that in a real sense, “we may take the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries as the beginning of the Gold Coast history”.
Now, this view was identical to what the Boers when they were propagating in apartheid-ruled South Africa, to the effect that both whites and blacks could lay legitimate claim to the land there, because they had both migrated to South Africa from outside the country, and had fought over land which had, historically, not belonged to either of them! Boahen, of course, challenged this. He wrote:
“Documentary sources, archaeological evidence, linguistic evidence, and oral traditions have cast grave doubts on, if not totally disproved these views. In the first place … Portuguese records [show that] there were states existing on the coast of modern Ghana when the Portuguese arrived from the 1470s, in the names of the kings of two of these states, Aguafo or Komenda, and Fetu are mentioned in a letter written by the Governor of Elmina[Castle] dated 18th August 1503! And in a work written in 1505, the author, Pacheco Pereira, describes Axim, the Kingdom of Ahanta, the town of Sama [Shama] in the Kingdom of Jabi [Gyebi], the village of Komenda, the town of Cape Coast and the Kingdom of Asebu.
To be continued
BY CAMERON DUODU
