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The Culture of Akan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

J. B. Danquah
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Extract

Underlying Eva Meyerowitz's remarkable work, The Sacred State of the Akan, are two assumptions, partly expressed and in part left to be inferred by the reader from the great mass of evidence which her thorough and painstaking research has made available.

The first assumption is that the culture of the Akan today shows a decline from a higher culture which they formerly possessed. The second assumption is that the culture with which the Akan must be identified is the ancient heliolithic culture which once flourished in the Mediterranean and the Ancient East.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 1952 , pp. 360 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1952

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References

page 360 note 1 The Sacred State of the Akan, by Meyerowitz, Eva L. R.. 1951. London: Faber and Faber. Pp. 222Google Scholar, plates, maps, illustrations in text. 42s. net.

page 362 note 1 It may be as well to point out here that I find myself unable to justify Eva Meyerowitz's rendering of God's third name as ‘Ɔdumankoma’ rather than ‘Ɔdomankoma’ or ‘Odomankama’. Quite apart from the fact that the ‘u’ form is not found in Christaller, and is therefore most probably untraditional, there is this internal evidence against the spelling of the name with u in the second syllable after Ɔ. As it stands—‘Ɔdumankoma’—the word is unpronounceable on the Akan tongue. For if indeed the second syllable in the name is ‘u’, then by the rule of assimilation the initial Ɔ should become an O both in sound and in writing.

The rule as laid down by Christaller is simple. ‘The open vowels a, ε, ɔ, requiring the widest opening of the mouth, are changed into the half-open vowels, a, full e & o, when followed by one of the close vowels i, u, or by gya, nya, twa or dwa; but remain unchanged before the half-close (or narrow) vowels e, o.’ (Dictionary of the Asante and Fante language, 2nd ed., p. xvi.)

page 365 note 1 ‘Forty days’