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On Mentally Mapping Greater Asante: A Study of Time and Motion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Ivor Wilks
Ivor Wilks
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

This paper examines the way in which Greater Asante was ‘mentally mapped’, thereby enabling government to regulate the movement of couriers, and others, along the great-roads. Lacking clocks, speed was reckoned anthropometrically, by reference to dɔn: rhythmic walking at a normal pace. Computing this against the determinate parts of the day, from dawn to dusk, on which travel (as opposed to eating and resting) was customary, it became possible to estimate the location of a courier at a given point in time. Greater Asante was ‘mapped’ as a circle, the diameter of which was the Asante month of forty-two days (of travel). The circle embraced the most distant of the territories over which the Asantehene claimed authority; these were in fact more or less twenty days from the capital. That it also embraced, in the south, lands under the sea, was of no practical relevance. Superimposing the reckoning of travel times on the matrix of the forty-two days ‘imperium’, the Asante government was able to establish a (‘Monday’) timetable for the conduct of business. The record shows that it worked remarkably well. An understanding of ‘traditional’ practices and procedures has much importance for the understanding of ‘modern’ ones: the past is encapsulated in the present.

Type
Conceptualizing Space
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , July 1992 , pp. 175 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

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33 I discussed this matter with Kofi Asare-Bediako, of Kumase. Don, he said, quite spontaneously, ‘is walking, with your arms and legs moving like a pendulum’. It is likely that the Akan word for a clock, odon, testifies to a perception of the motion of the pendulum as analogous to that of the rhythmic walker.

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76 Hutchison, in Bowdich, Mission, 419–21.

77 For further examples of scheduling, see McCaskie, ‘Time’, 185–95.

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88 In the mid-1960s I was able to find only one person, aged about ninety, who had worked in the Treasury before 1896, and then in a very junior capacity. Wilks, FN/15 and 20, interviews with Kwaku Owusu 4 Aug. 1965 and 13 April 1966.

89 I am indebted to Larry Yarak for drawing my attention to problems in my treatment of the great-roads. Dan Britz has, as always, made his immense knowledge of the resources of Northwestern's Africana Library available to me. In 1975 R. A. Hay's expertise was invaluable in developing the ‘Asantedat’ programme at the Northwestern University Computing Center. Without such a concordance of the Asante and Christian calendars, this paper could not have been written. Parts of the paper were presented as ‘The Asante concept of frontier: space as time’, at the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Baltimore, 1990.