Chapter Twenty-Three

Asante, Apagyafie and President Kufuor of Ghana: A Historical Interpretation

T.C. McCaskie

Preamble

Historians today recognize that the African oral traditions they collect can sometimes be used in fruitful combination with written sources from the pre-colonial era. Occasionally, as in Robin Law’s authoritative discussion of the pre-colonial Dahomean “port” of Ouidah, “the history of particular families can be traced over several generations, in some cases back into the eighteenth century.”[1] Indeed, Law uses histories of this sort to effect in his reconstruction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper makes use of similar materials, but with two differences from Law’s project. First, it is about Asante rather than Dahomey. Second, it reverses Law’s optic; that is, it deals with the past in relation to the present and not with the present in terms of the past. It is about current Asante and Ghanaian politics viewed through the prism of family history. Specifically, it deals with the history of the shaping of the life and career of J.A. Kufuor of Asante, President of the Republic of Ghana since 2000. [2]

Two Marriages

In the 1660s the young Kumase royal Osei Tutu was a detainee at the court of the Denkyira king Boamponsem. He was held as a hostage to ensure that his people did not revolt against their Denkyira overlord. He was a captive, but a privileged one. He lived in the palace and served Boamponsem. He studied kingship and statecraft. He married a number of women and had liaisons with many more. In the 1670s his womanizing led to a confrontation with the Denkyira king. In fear for his life he fled back to Kumase and ultimately sought refuge far to the east in Akwamu. In the 1680s he was summoned home to assume the Kumase chiefship left vacant by the death of his kinsman Obiri Yeboa.

In 1694 Boamponsem died. He was succeeded by Ntim Gyakari. The new Denkyira ruler was oppressive and alienated his own people as well as his tributaries. In the later 1690s numerous Denkyira fled north to Kumase. Osei Tutu saw them as welcome additions to his chiefdom. He bound them to him by marrying among them and allocating farmland to them. Some were resettled north of Kumase, but many more were sent to the southwest to colonize the forested Atwema district on both sides of the Ofin River and south toward the Denkyira borderlands. Ntim Gyakari’s demands became excessive. Osei Tutu went into open revolt supported by other chiefs in the Kumase area and immigrant Denkyira refugees. In 1701 at Feyiase, nine miles southeast of Kumase, this rebel coalition fought and killed Ntim Gyakari. Osei Tutu was now the preeminent ruler in the Pra-Ofin River Basin. After Feyiase he was installed as the first Asantehene on the new Golden Stool while his military coalition became the nucleus of the expansionist Asante state. Extensive traditions surround all of these events but only two such narratives concern us here. They recount Osei Tutu’s marriages to two Denkyira women, Ama Brempomaa and Adoma Akosua. [3]

Osei Tutu first met Ama Brempomaa in Denkyira in the 1660s. She was the only full sister of Kotoko Ameyaw, occupant of the Akwamu military stool of Denkyira and a friend of Osei Tutu. She was well born and all traditions are agreed that she was very beautiful.[4] But whatever the nature of her relations with Osei Tutu during this time, the two did not marry in Denkyira. The implication of the traditions is that Osei Tutu’s flight disrupted their affair but that he never forgot her. Thus, when he succeeded to the Kumase stool he encouraged Ama Brempomaa and her brother to abandon Ntim Gyakari. They did so, like many others at this time. Kotoko Ameyaw arrived in Kumase with his sister, his stool, a lot of gold regalia and some two thousand followers. Osei Tutu and Ama Brempomaa now married. Her brother as Denkyira Akwamuhene was assigned to serve his new brother-in-law via the Akwamu stool of Kumase. In 1701 Kotoko Ameyaw fought under Kumase Akwamuhene against Denkyira at Feyiase. Ama Brempomaa, her brother, and their people were granted farmland ten miles north of Kumase at Mmowere on the road to Ofinso. When Kotoko Ameyaw died the stool he brought from Denkyira was renamed after him as its first occupant in Asante. Osei Tutu held his wife Ama Brempomaa in such esteem that he decreed that his successors-in-office must always marry a wife from her lineage. This pattern of obligatory marriage was known as ayite and it was used by Asantehenes to sustain solidarity between the royal dynasty and its key support base among stool-holders and lineages. [5] Ama Brempomaa’s lineage of royal wives is now called Apagya fie mu, for reasons that will be explained below. [6]

Osei Tutu met and reportedly had a child with Adoma Akosua in Denkyira in the 1660s. She was more nobly born and of higher status than Ama Brempomaa. Adoma Akosua was a royal of the Amponsem stool of Nkawie, the biggest settlement in northern Denkyira. The Amponsem male stool was one “from which you become Omanhin [King] of Denkyira,” and the female royals were eligible to become Queen Mothers of Denkyira. [7] In 1694 Asensu Kufuor, Adoma Akosua’s brother, competed unsuccessfully with Ntim Gyakari to succeed Boamponsem and thereafter relations between the two deteriorated. [8] Asensu Kufuor, Adoma Akosua, and their followers were the most important and wealthiest Denkyira migrants who fled to Osei Tutu before Feyiase. Osei Tutu first settled these people at Mpankrono just north of Kumase, but after the defeat of Denkyira they were resettled at Nkawie in Atwema. They were given extensive lands east of the Ofin river between Manso Nkwanta in the south and Tanodumase in the north and ordered to guard the old Denkyira frontier. The occupant of the Denkyira Amponsem stool became the Nkawiehene of Asante. To seal these arrangements, Osei Tutu decreed that all future Asantehenes were to marry women from Adoma Akosua’s lineage. These women were to occupy the female stool of Amponsem as the Queen Mothers of Nkawie. Just as in the case of Ama Brempomaa, the descendants of Adoma Akosua were to supply ayite wives to the Golden Stool. [9]

Apagya and Nkawie

Apagya

Osei Tutu’s successor Asantehene Opoku Ware I (ca. 1720–50) married Afua Atikaa, Ama Brempomaa’s great-niece. Their son Adu Asabere looked like his father. People spoke of him as being kra pa, a reincarnation of the best qualities of his patrilineal ancestors. [10] This was why he was one of Opoku Ware’s favorite sons. In 1742 Adu Asabere led a contingent in his father’s invasion of Akyem Abuakwa. He captured all of the people in a village named Apagya, home of an Akyem military company of that name (apagya, “the fire strikers”). He took them back to Kumase. He made them perform their company drumming and dancing for his father. The Asantehene made a stool for him on the spot, naming him Apagyahene and granting him land for his Akyem Abuakwa subjects at Kwaduenya in present-day north suburban Kumase. Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II (1931–70) attested that the making of the Apagya stool was part of Opoku Ware’s contentious policy of raising ahenemma [sons of Asantehenes) to office to counterbalance the entrenched power of hereditary stool-holders. But this plan was opposed and ended with the Asantehene’s death. Adu Asabere himself died in the 1750s. Most probably he was purged and executed by his father’s successor Asantehene Kusi Obodum (ca. 1750–64). Osei Agyeman Prempeh II recounted that “an oath was sworn cancelling what Opoku Ware made.” The Apagya stool then forfeited Kwaduenya and became “lost” or moribund. [11]

Opoku Ware’s plan was successfully revived by Asantehene Osei Kwadwo (1764–77) and his successors. [12] In or about 1785 Asantehene Osei Kwame (1777–1803) attained his majority. He fined the ex-regent Adontenhene Kwaaten Pete for peculation, and used the proceeds to create stools for a number of ahenemma. Apagya was resurrected so as to “show that Nana Osei Kwame was now old enough to rule.”[13] It was awarded to Owusu Afriyie Gyamadua, a son of Asantehene Osei Kwadwo by his ayite marriage to Akosua Odei of the Ama Brempomaa lineage at Mmowere. [14] Apagyahene was granted stool land at Dabaa, some dozen miles northwest of Kumase. In addition, the Kwaduenya land was restored to Apagya and augmented by the addition of the nearby Asenkurom forest, donated by Bremanhene on the orders of Osei Kwame. Owusu Afriyie Gyamadua served as a tribute gatherer in Akuapem and fought in the Fante campaigns of the early nineteenth century. About 1810 Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame (1804–23) gave him a royal wife. This was Afua Sapon, only daughter of Ama Sewaa, both of whom became Asantehemaa or Queen Mother of Asante. The marriage produced nine children, of whom the third born was Asantehemaa Afua Kobi, mother of the Asantehenes Kofi Kakari (1867–74) and Mensa Bonsu (1874–83). But all of this lay far in the future when Owusu Afriyie Gyamadua was killed fighting the British at Katamanso in 1826.[15]

Apagya, it is reported, was for the sons (and the patrilineal grandsons) of Asantehenes by their marriages to “the descendants of Nana Brempomah.”[16] In structural terms, Adu Asabere’s and Owusu Afriyie Gyamadua’s appointments have been replicated throughout the stool’s history. The present Apagyahene Osei Kyeretwie (Josiah Prempeh) is a son of the Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II by his ayite marriage to Akua Fokuo of the Ama Brempomaa lineage. So, when people talk today of the “great nobility” of the Apagya “house”—Apagya fie mu, Anglicized as Apagyafie—they are alluding to the long history of elite belonging that attaches to a descent line so intimately bound up with the Golden Stool and the glories of the Asante past. However, as the Asante proverb says, “you can’t cook and eat nobility; money is the thing.”[17] Apagya is fortunate then in being a stool with money as well as nobility. “Apagya Stool House,” so it was claimed in 1965, “is one of the wealthiest houses in Ashanti.”[18] In 1994 I was told plainly by the royal linguist and politician Buasiako Antwi that “Apagyafie has the wealth to maintain its ancient dignity.” Indeed, over the past century Apagyafie has accumulated wealth, and by so doing it has maintained its historical status in the forefront of the Asante—and now the Ghanaian—ruling elite. This achievement and its implications will be discussed in due course.

Nkawie

Nkawie land was richly endowed with natural resources. Above all, it had accessible gold deposits in what is today the Gyimira forest reserve. In 1717 the aged Asantehene Osei Tutu died on campaign in Akyem. In 1718, with the Asante army away in the field and an interregnum in Kumase, Ebiri Moro of Aowin attacked the Asante capital from the west via Sehwi. He was beaten back, and for security reasons the Asante frontier was extended west far over the Ofin river. This newly annexed land was divided up between Bantamahene and the other Kumase generals who had repulsed Ebiri Moro and a number of stools already sited in western Asante. Nkawie’s share was a corridor of forestland extending as far west as Bibiani in present-day Sehwi. This area was even richer in gold and other natural resources than the original Nkawie land grant. [19] Renowned for its gold washing and mining, Nkawie was soon acknowledged as one of the wealthiest stools in Asante. In the 1790s Nkawiehene Frimpon Kufuor settled a large debt owed to the Asantehene by Mpankrono, where the Amponsem people had first settled when they came to Kumase. In return he took, so it is said, half of the Mpankrono villagers. He resettled them at Nkawie Kumaa, “little Nkawie,” a satellite of his own town. [20]

Gold defined Nkawie’s pre-colonial history and gave rise to monetary demands from Kumase. Here the ayite arrangement was used as a source of royal borrowing. In the 1840s Asantehene Kwaku Dua (1834–67) secured one hundred mperedwan (£800) from his wife, the Nkawiehemaa Yaa Donkoto, to fund his trade in the Gold Coast. Yaa Donkoto died and Kwaku Dua married her successor Nkawiehemaa Yaa Takua. She was alleged to have made “a certain charm” and was fined one hundred mperedwan (£800). In 1881 Nkawie was asked for twenty mperedwan (£160) to help finance Boakye Tenten’s embassy to the Gold Coast. In 1895 it contributed the same amount when Kwaku Fokuo’s embassy went to the coast, and when this mission proceeded to London it made a further subvention of fifty mperedwan (£400). [21] By this time Nkawie’s wealth had increased again. In the civil wars (1883–88) Nkawie supported the ultimate victor Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh (1888–1931) but was left unscathed by the fighting. It had money and men when other stools were bankrupt of both and so was well placed to profit from the rubber boom of the 1890s. Nkawie’s forests were full of wild rubber trees and it had the labor to exploit them. Agyeman Prempeh made use of monies from this source channelled to him via his wife Nkawiehemaa Yaa Ekua. Her brother Nkawiehene Antwi Agyei paid more than money for his support of the Golden Stool. He was deported by the British to the Seychelles along with his king and died there in exile in 1908. [22]

Since the eighteenth century other stools have tried to claim Nkawie’s resources. Such challenges have mostly been shaped around attempts to reinterpret the terms of the post-Ebiri Moro partition of this part of Asante. Bantama claimed the Nkawie village of Abori, for example, in unsuccessful cases pleaded before two Asantehenes in the 1860s–70s. It argued that Abori was awarded to Bantama because of its role in driving back the Aowin incursion. [23]

Claims of this kind intensified from the later nineteenth century when rubber, cocoa , and timber enmeshed Nkawie in the colonial cash economy. Paradoxically, Nkawie’s hand in defending itself was much strengthened by the British after they exiled its chief Antwi Agyei. In 1901 the British recognized a new Nkawiehene. This was Kwabena Kufuor “who belongs to the royal family and is a very rich man from rubber and his other businesses.”[24] Kwabena Kufuor spent much time trading and doing business in the Gold Coast Colony in the 1890s and was fully alert to the importance of legal documentation in the new colonial order. He made sure that the British recorded his stool’s ownership of the land around Bibiani on the far western Asante border with Sehwi. Above all, he was determined to secure title to the Bibiani deep-level gold mining concession opened up by Europeans in 1895 and eventually leased to the powerful British-based Bibiani Company. [25] In 1906 he took the Sehwi chiefs to court in Cape Coast and was awarded the Bibiani concession title deed “and all fees arising from the property.” He was paid an annual concession rent of £600, supplemented by discretionary sums that sometimes raised this figure to over £1000 a year. This, and his many other sources of income, made Nkawiehene Kwabena Kufuor probably the richest person in early colonial Asante. [26]

Apagya and Nkawie

Apagyafie today is rich and powerful. It has friends and foes in Kumase. In 2000 one of the latter said to me that Apagya had money because a century ago “it sold off the King’s wife to the Nkawie stool.” This makes slurring reference to the following events. Like all his predecessors, Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh took a wife from the Apagya lineage of Ama Brempomaa. This woman was Akua Bema Mansa, one of only two full sisters of Kwabena Mensa, also called Owusu Afriyie, who became Apagyahene in 1889. There was at least one child of the marriage, a son named Boakye Prempeh. According to Apagyafie, he was born “when King Prempeh had been taken to the Seychelles by the British.”[27] This was in 1900, although it is evident that what is meant here is that the boy was born after his father was removed from Kumase in 1896 to begin an exile that lasted until his repatriation in 1924. Whatever the case, Akua Bema Mansa took another husband shortly after the Asantehene’s departure. In or about 1901 she was married to Nkawiehene Kwabena Kufuor. By 1903 the couple had two children, Kwaku Addo Kwarbo and Ama Dapaa, more commonly called Ama Paa. It is this second marriage by the king’s ayite wife that excites criticism among the foes of Apagyafie. It is seen by them as being opportunistic, a rapid change of alliance from an absent king to a rising plutocrat. [28]

Kwabena Mensa was a youth when he was appointed Apagyahene. Simply, he was a survivor of the civil wars of the 1880s when many older and better qualified candidates were killed. He was a paternal great-grandson of Asantehene Osei Yaw (1824–33) and connected to the powerful Kumase Kyidom stool lineage at Ankaase. Just like his brother-in-law Kwabena Kufuor, he was one of those members of the traditional office holding elite who became a successful businessman under colonial rule. During the 1890s he traded rubber on the Gold Coast in exchange for salt, cloth, guns, and ammunition. He is said to have fought against the British in the failed uprising of 1900–01, but if he did he escaped arrest and retained his stool. Thereafter he was a pioneer cocoa grower and broker on a large scale. Like many of his peers, he reinvested his profits in Kumase properties. Like them too, he grew to have mixed feelings about the Asante past. He was in favor of Agyeman Prempeh’s return from exile in 1924 and the eventual restoration of the monarchy in 1935, but he was opposed to any reversion to the old economic order. He wanted absolute rights of disposition over his own estate, and no reintroduction of royal taxes or death duties on property. For him, as for his like-minded elite peers, the purpose of accumulated wealth was to advance his own closest family and lineage kin and their stool by investing for the future in the opportunities afforded by capitalist colonial modernity. Apagyafie was to be a family business corporation. [29]