Gold Coast Became An

1 2 Published by the first time in 1935, long before the Gold Coast became an Independent State, Short History of the Gold Coast is even today an important book for students all over the world, with interest in the African culture. Hard to get nowadays, since it is out of print for decades, the contents of “Short History” are essential in many aspects. The precious research about Africa before the arrival of the white men – showing empires, nations and cultures – indeed booster Africans and Afro- descendants’ self-esteem. The Akans, Ghana’s main ethnical group, is broadly investigated, when Ward starts by saying: “DIFFERENT Akan peoples tell many very different stories of their origins. Many say that they came from Tekyiman in Ashanti. Some say they came “out of a hole in the ground," at Asantemanso near Bekwai, or at some other place. Some of the Ashantis say that they came down from heaven at Asiakwa in Akim. Others say that they came from the grass country, in the north. And some say that they have never moved, but have been in their present homes ever since the creation of the world.” In times of extremely hard travels across Ghana – Ward move himself searching for answers: “What are we to learn from these different stories ? The first thing we notice if we try and learn more details about Akan history is that nobody remembers anything of it before about the year 1450 at the very earliest. The Gyaman people know of eight or nine chiefs before the time of Opoku Ware of Ashanti (1720); but very few other tribes can go back as far as that. The Ashantis themselves know of four chiefs before their famous leader Osei Tutu, who came to the stool about 1697; so that their first chief can hardly be earlier than 1580. Most Akan stools can trace their history back about the same distance. But we are a long way still from getting back to the creation of the world. Moreover, little is known about the very earliest chiefs. They are often mere names, and it is only about 1700 or later that 3 the stool tradition becomes full of detail. And in four cases out of five, the first chief that is remembered is the chief that led the tribe from some old home to a new home. Far the greater number of the stools begin their memories in a time of migration; and in nearly every case the migration is from a place in the north to a new home nearer the sea”. And somehow dignifying his pathos, matches the unknown origins of the Akan to the history of his own Colonial power at that time, by writing: “All this is very like English history. We know that the forefathers of the English people came from across the sea into the British Isles and conquered the people they found there. The English people of to-day is a mixed race, descended from the conquerors and from the wives they took from the conquered race. But we know nothing at all of the history of the conquerors before they settled in England. There were many different tribes that joined in the conquest; and their descendants have remembered the name of their war-leaders who first landed in the new country-but they have remembered nothing of the time before. As for the traditions of their slave mothers, they are lost; for who wishes to remember stories of slavery?” The long research of Ward call to anybody attention his capability in collect names of different tribes and nations, different chiefs and kings, dates of wars and conspiracies. His research involving the Ashanti before the arrival of the Europeans it is magnificent. All the same, his descriptions of the Gold Coast after 1800, “when Osei Tutu Kwamina Asibe Bonsu became Asantehene. Let us look quickly over the Gold Coast and see what was happening, and who was ruling, just at that time and during the years just before. Osei Bonsu (as he is generally called for short) was the first Asantehene to have trouble with the white men, and so his time begins a new chapter in the story of the Gold Coast.” Dacosta, in publishing this out of print book, public domain work, aims to cooperate with students of English language that may have no access to a printed book of such importance. And revels Dacosta’s commitment with Ghana. The lecture of the old edition was made using OCR system, and bears many small mistakes not noted by the revision. Any cooperation for the correction of those mistakes will be very well welcomed. E-mail to: [email protected] 4 CHAPTER I BEFORE THE WHITE MEN CAME WHEN we talk about the Gold Coast, we must remember that until the white men came and began ruling over the lands of West Africa, there was no country called the Gold Coast. There were many separate states: for example, the kingdom of Ashanti, the Fante Confederation, the kingdoms of Dagomba and Banda, and many more. When the British came and settled their boundaries with the French and the Germans, they drew their boundaries sometimes right through the middle of these African states. Thus some of the Ewe people and of the Dagomba people live in the Gold Coast, and some of them live in Togoland. Therefore, if we want to study the history of the Gold Coast, we must learn the history of the different African states that lived in this country before the white men came. Nowadays we are so used to railways and telephones and bicycles and lorries and many other different things that come from Europe, that we sometimes forget that there was a time before the white men came. We are so used to thinking that our civilization comes from Europe, that we sometimes forget that in the old days, before the white men came, the Gold Coast used to get its civilization not from Europe at all, but from North Africa. The Gold Coast is a small part of the great country called the Sudan, which is the part of Africa between the river Nile and Cape Verde, with the Sahara desert in the middle of it. We do not know where the ancestors of the Negro peoples came from in the first place. We guess that they came from somewhere in the east of Africa, and that they came along the strip of grass country which lies between the southern edge of the desert and the tropical forest. Why did they move? Perhaps for the same reasons that make tribes or villages move today: they had not enough water, or the grass was dried up, or their enemies troubled them. Anyway, they did move, and came westward; and so it, happened that in the course of time the long strip of grass-land, 500 miles wide and over 2,000 miles 5 long, between the desert and the forest, was occupied by the Negro peoples. We do not know how long ago all this happened: perhaps more than five thousand years ago. It may be that there were other people living in West Africa before the Negroes came. We find spear heads, chisels, and other tools made of stone, much like those that are found in other parts of the world, lying on the surface or just under the surface of the ground in the Gold Coast. They are not used by any Gold Coast people to-day, and the people of the country to-day know little about them. They call them Nyame akuma or similar names, and believe that they fell down from the sky. But there must have been at one time a race of people who made these tools and used them, for they are certainly made by men. But we do not know whether these old people were Negro or of some other race; nor do we know how long ago they lived. At any rate, we can say that for a very long time, Negro peoples have been living in the Sudan, and have been gradually filling up the forest lands. The Negro race has been split into many hundreds of different nations and tribes, and they have fought against each other; some have become great kingdoms, and others have become slaves. There are hundreds of Negro languages, and many of them are divided into different dialects. Many times it must have happened that the language of a conquering nation has combined with the language of another nation it has conquered, and the result has been a third language, a mixture of the two and yet different from either. Today, therefore, it is difficult to find anything about the history of any West African people by studying its language. And we do not yet know much about the ways in which one African language changes into another. So if we find that two places hundreds of miles apart, or two people living hundreds of years apart, have names which look alike, we must be careful before we say that there must be some connection between them. There may be no connection between the names at all. How are we to learn the history of the peoples of the Gold Coast or of other parts of West Africa? We can learn something from the writings of outsiders-such as the Europeans and the Arabs-who have visited West Africa. We are learning 6 something, and we shall learn much more as time goes on, from what we find when we dig up the ruins of homes and towns where people used to live hundreds of years ago.

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