Ashanti Empire blamed for slavery

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Category: History

Created on Wednesday, 28 April 2010 00:00

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Ashanti Empire blamed for slavery

By Jake akwasi sarkodie

A professor at Harvard University Henry Louis Gates Jr. has blamed the ashanti empire for actively partaking in the slavetrade and profitting from it. He argues that the ashanti empire directly captured and sold human beings for immense economic gain.

“The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virgini.

Professor Gates writing in the New York times said the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. The African American professor cited ex president Rawlings as being one of the few African leaders who have openly apologized for the role Africans played in the trans Atlantic slave trade.

The professor noted that the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time adding the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold.

The eminent black scholar asked did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. He argues that it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.

The professor whose wrongful arrest recently caused a racial debate in the US drawing in president Obama added that the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.

Jake akwasi sarkodie

freelance journalist. frankfurt,Germany http://jakegh.blogspot.com/2010/04/ashanti-empire-blamed-for-slavery.html

Source: Ghanaweb

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Can Mills Cage Rawlings?

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Category: Politics

Created on Monday, 05 April 2010 00:00

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Can Mills Cage Rawlings?

{sidebar id=10 align=right}This is what Rawlings told the youth forum at Ho. "Former President Rawlings said the NDC is a very special phenomenon that came out of the PNDC and AFRC and questioned how many of the youth of the party will report to the President on the negative happenings on the ground.

“How many of you will for instance report the poor performance of District Chief Executives. Forty percent of them are under-performing. Some of them are outright incompetent. “If you the youth see things and do not say it and I say it then I become an easy target all the time. But the reality of what I say is out there and you have to voice it out,” the former President said."

The solipsism of Rawlings took center stage when the vindictive, self-serving raving lunatic former head of state met the youth in a forum organised by the Youth Wing of the NDC party at Ho last Saturday.I know there is enormous panorama of opinion as to where the hecklers of the day and armed robbers of the night who call themselves the youth wing of this party get their moral support from. Listening to the statement bloviate from Rawlings, one is left with no choice but to believe Rawlings is the brain behind the lawlessness going on in Ghana by using the youth wing of NDC to create chaos and havoc and make ruling of the country too hard for the hugger-mugger Mills administration.

Folks, don't get me wrong, when one live with rats, the possibility of growing whiskers to adapt to the living enviroment of rats cannot be avoided. Mills is the beneficiary of Rawlings hypocracy and I have no sympathy for him for tasting the other side of Rawlings sword, good for him. Now Rawlings is urging his drug addict zombies to defy laid down rules of his own Party and take the law into their hands without any regard to authority.

Rawlings has realised that, coup d'tat is not going to be entertained in Ghana even if he can find some fools in the Army to help him carry one out so as cunning as a fox that he is, he has found another avenue to make himself relevant in an administration that has shunned every move of his to control it by turning to the mostly unemployed 'korbolors' who make their living robbing innocent Ghanaians to carry water for him. Can you blame Rawlings for taking advantage of a slow and coward President who is afraid to act due to his need to be liked by everybody? This is a President who is afraid to take a position on any issue and instead resorted to setting up committees to even decide when he should take his prescribed nose bleed medicine.

The day this President lost the respect of the country was when he acceded to the armed robbers who call themselves NDC Youth wing and fired that thief called Carl Wilson who was stealing cars for the Castle Mafia. Remember this Carl Wilson stealing endevour came out a few months ago and we were made to believe that, this guy who might not even be Ghanaian was on his way out of that job but immediately after the furor has died down, he was allowed to keep his job and continue to steal cars. He was only dismissed because he started seizing cars belonging to NDC sympathizers which did not sit well with some people in NDC including the Party chairman, Dr Kwabena Adjei. Does the President need the NDC Youth wing to tell him to fire a car thief operating under his nose from the Castle?

A couple of weeks ago, the Minister of Upper East Region and the Police Commander of that region refused to grant the Mamprussis a permit to hold a festival at Bawku due to the security situation of that town but the Mamprussi youth who doubles as the NDC youth wing of Bawku told the authorities they will go ahead and hold their festival, permit or not. What is amazing is that, the Mamprussis went ahead and had their festival despite being denied the right to hold this festival, thank God, there were few minor incidents during the celebration of this Mamprussi festival. What all these incidents by the NDC various youth wing portray is that, they are above the laws of the land as the Commander of the Yendi Police attested to: that, he is not prepared to arrest these hooligans from NDC because he is not ready to lose his job by taking such a formidable force on.

" But the reality of what I say is out there and you have to voice it out,” the former President said."

Is this not inciting the youth to take the laws into their hands? Is Rawlings not committing the same crime Nana Darkwa is charged for making statements that can cause disturbances in the country? Why is Rawlings not arrested? Does he has more rights as a citizen than Nana Darkwa?

"AGYA ATTA, OPEN YOUR EYES OOOO"

What is Rawlings telling the Youth of this lawless NDC Party to do? Take the law into their own hands and start seizing NHIS, NYEP offices and resort to mob rule? That is exactly what they did when immediately after his speech, the Yendi wing of the NDC youth wing appropriated to itself the administration of that district by running the DCE of Yendi away by threatening his life if he dares come back to Yendi.

Our beloved country has a vacuum at the Presidency since the man elected to rule has an aversion of making decisions and will rather allow the NDC hooligans being encouraged by the narcisstic schedenfreude Rawlings to rule under proxy through the NDC Youth bandits.

Source: Justice Sarpong Houston, Texas.

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Chief's Head On Plate Draws Tears

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Category: Culture & Tourism

Created on Friday, 23 April 2010 00:00

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Chief's Head On Plate Draws Tears

From Thomas Fosu Jnr, Asamankese

{sidebar id=10 align=right}EMOTIONS WERE high at the palace of the chief of Asamankese  yesterday, when Osabarima Kwaku Amoah III,Asamankesehene, performed some rituals and slaughtered a fat sheep to sever his relationship with the chief of Aworasa, Nana Pobi Asomaning, who went public

about two weeks ago to accuse him of usurping the powers of Okyenhene, Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin and selling Asamankese lands indiscriminately.

Osabarima Amoah III, was moved to tears as he evoked the spirits of their forefathers to rebut the Aworasahene’s allegations. He said what pained him the most was the allegation that he had ordered people to kill Nana Asomaning and for his head to be delivered to him on a plate.

“My children and relations abroad have been bombarding me with calls to verify the truth of the allegations and I was very traumatized by the allegations which I know absolutely nothing about”, he said.

“I have called my sub-chiefs and subjects here with the press to react to the allegations since they are serious allegations which call for police investigations”, he stated, asking the police to immediately launch investigations into the matter to find out if he is culpable, and if so, arraign him before court. And that if Nana Asomaning is just creating unnecessary panic, he should also be arrested and put before court.

According to Osabarima Kwaku Amoah III, as a result of the allegations made against him, he does not want to see the Aworasahene, who he(Osabarima) enstooled himself, at any public function he(Osabarima) organizes or anywhere near him.

“I am today asking our ancestors to deal with Nana Asomaning for bringing disgrace to the Asamankese stool”.

Osabarima also apologized to the press for not making himself available to answer questions relating to the allegations and said that since the accusation bordered on criminality and security, he wanted the journalists to talk to the Municipal police commander first or the Municipal Chief Executive.

Earlier on at a press conference at the palace attended by a large number of indigenes from the town as well as sub-chiefs and elders all wearing black attire, members of Asamankese Concerned Citizens Association, called on the police to immediately arrest the chief of Aworasa to assist them (the police) in the investigations of all the allegations bordering on the attempted murder and the threat on his life.

“This Pobi Asomaning has seriously indicted the police and the government in power in his publication, and caused public panic by the allegations that armed men are roaming the streets of Asamankese and shooting onto roof-tops while the police and the security agencies look on”, Nana Aboagye Yiadom, a spokesperson for the association said.

According to him, the people of Asamankese are peace-loving people and have lived in peace with all the people in the area.

The spokesperson explained that the chief of Aworasa is doing all these things because he sees himself as heir to the Asamankese stool.

Mr. Yiadom noted that Aworasahene preferred destoolment charges against Osabarima Amoah before the Kyebi Judicial Committee in 2007, but failed in his attempt and instead decided to connive with the Okyenhene to impose him on Asamankese as the chairman of Okyeman Lands Commission; an action members of the association kicked against.

“We the members of the association rejected that move by the Okyenhene and went ahead to remove the Aworasahene from the Asamankese palace two months after taking office”, he concluded.

Source: Daily Guide, 23 April 2010

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Comment: Did I Read Akumfi Ameyaw's Impugnation of My Ancestor Correctly?

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Category: Culture & Tourism

Created on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 00:00

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Comment: Did I Read Akumfi Ameyaw's Impugnation of My Ancestor Correctly?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

{sidebar id=10 align=right}The last several weeks on the Ghanaian political landscape have witnessed some of the most intriguing moments in our 53 years as a geopolitically sovereign British-minted corporation called the Republic of Ghana. The last several weeks have also eerily brought home to those of us who studiously care about the destiny of our polity that in no way and under absolutely no circumstances, whatsoever, can we take our meta-nationhood or nationality for granted.

Indeed, this was precisely what Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah meant when he told then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, on the eve of our country's liberation from British colonial rule, that postcolonial Ghana was veritably a voluntary association of sovereign nations the bulk of which shared a common language and heritage.

And, perhaps even more significantly, that at anytime that the principal associates, or citizens, firmly became convinced that those periodically entrusted with its stewardship were objectively at cross-purposes with the constitutionally ratified aims and aspirations of the people at large, two things, perforce, needed to happen.

The first of the foregoing historically occurred on February 24, 1966, when the neo-fascist dictatorship of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) was auspiciously and popularly toppled by the Kotoka-led Ghana Armed Forces. Recently, however, some fanatical Nkrumacrats who either heartily jubilated over, and even penned and published morally scathing novels and critiques about the CPP and its megalomaniacal chieftain, or simply and conspicuously refused to put up any remarkable defense on behalf of their purported idol, have embarked on a quixotic campaign of canonical sanitization, by which flagrant measure the beneficent ouster of Mr. Nkrumah and the CPP comes to be vacuously and ahistorically envisaged as a regrettable act of externally-engineered aggression, while deviously and slyly ignoring Nkrumah's vanguard role as a pro-Soviet propagandist and docile policy instrument/tool against such widely perceived pro-Western adversarial African leaders as Togo's Sylvanus Olympio, Ivoires Houphouette-Boigny, and Mzee Kamau (Jomo) of Kenya, among a host of others.

The second contingency, fortunately, remains merely a “potentiality. And, of course, it dialectically inheres in the ability, over the long haul, of Ghanaian politicians to effectively foster an organic climate of geopolitical cohesion so as to guarantee the meaningful development of a collective sense of nationhood. To-date, almost every Ghanaian identifies him-/herself in terms of ethnicity and/or sub-ethnicity, with the meta-national concept of Ghanaian nationality largely acting as a convenient superstructure. And it is the seemingly daunting latter state of affairs that continues to ensure Ghana's fluxional  or between and betwixt “ state as a veritable Anglo-centric corporation, a patently neocolonialist polity.

And on the foregoing score must also be quickly pointed out that Nkrumah's at once desperate, neocolonialist and unimaginative attempts to balkanize as well as systematically destabilize the organicity and/or cohesion of the great Akan states, particularly Asante and Akyem, in a bid to expediently and hermetically entrenching his seal of de facto domination on Corporate Ghana at large, did a woeful little to impede the Euro-colonial disruption of a hitherto collective and fairly unified Akan multi-nation.

But that Nkrumah would paradoxically and systematically seek to balkanize and stultify, as well as ossify, the functional organicity of the globally celebrated “Akan Personality at the same time that the Nkroful Prometheus sought to progressively induce the salutary emergence of a mythical African Personality, is a conundrum that has yet to be objectively and meaningfully explained to Ghanaians and the world at large.

And regarding his evidently quixotic and grimly illogical attempt to balkanize and culturally regress the development of Ghana, at the same time that he overtly sought the salutary induction of African unification, this has been amply and eloquently discussed by such avid Africanist scholars and erudite historians as Basil Davidson, Richard Rathbone and Dennis Austin, to name a few.

And it is precisely the foregoing that brings us to the widely reported recent renewal of “ancient” hostilities between the Kumasehene and his former lieutenant (note here the glaring fact that I have consciously and appropriately desisted from the use of the rather unflattering term of vassal or subject), the Techimanhene.

I personally had earlier on decided not to join this otherwise purely familial fracas, even as a bona fide and direct descendant of His Majesty Otumfuo Osei-Tutu I, via Nkoranza, Bare Kese, Kokofu, Asiakwa and Dwaben's very own Nana Antwiwaa, grandmother of King Osei-Tutu I, and the legendary woman who brought and settled my forebears at Asiakwa from Adanse.

Actually, what prevented me from promptly and predictably weighing in on the Kumase-Techiman brouhaha was the abrupt and inexplicable crashing of the CPU, the Central Processing Unit, of my computer. And for purely visceral reasons, I firmly believe that it is all well and good that Osabarima Kwame Okoampa-Agyeman was unable to butt in when it seemed most opportune or timely. For, needless to say, I had also been gingerly waiting for Oseadeeyo Akumfi Ameyaw IV, the substantive Techimanhene and the apparent tinder-box of the Tuobodom-Techiman impasse, to directly address the issue.

Then finally, on Thursday, March 25, 2010, Nana Ameyaw Akumfi released an article captioned “The Techiman-Tuobodom Stand[-]Off: Setting the Records Straight” (Ghanaweb.com).

I must confess right off the bat that I came away from reading the Techiman chieftain's article/press release more fully convinced than ever before and uncontrollably livid over the fact that Nana Akumfi Ameyaw, counting on the partisan support of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), a party known more for its routine and cavalier violation of the human and civil rights of Ghanaian citizens than the democratic application of the law, may well have woefully underestimated the stygian depths of the troubled waters into which he had decided to plunge, particularly at the very moment when he summarily determined to effect his so-called citizen's arrest of Osabarima Baffuor Asare, whose royal moorings and heritage and chief-ship investment Nana Akumfi Ameyaw consistently impugned and cavalierly disparaged with such invidious epithets as “Mr. Kwadwo Mfante who styles himself as Omanhene of Tuobodom.

Anyway, for those loudmouthed Ghanaian journalists who pathetically confused the entire episode with a comedic folk theater, the truth of the matter is that even if the Techimanhene reserved legitimate authority, or rights, over the man who was allegedly stripped naked and mistreated in Nana Akumfi Ameyaw's palace, still it would be up to the royal family of Tuobodom and not the Techimanhene to determine which claimant/pretender to the stool was an Mfante, Frafra or bona fideTuobodomite.

I also personally feel deeply offended that rather than frontally address the grievances advanced against him, Nana Akumfi Ameyaw arrogantly decided to add insult to injury by sneeringly impugning both the integrity of the regnant Asantehene and that of an 18th century Nkoranza chieftain, Nana Baffo Pim, whom “Mr.” Akumfi Ameyaw claims changed gold in a pot being sent to [the] Kumasihene by the messengers of Techimanhene with gunpowder.

Precisely why the Techimanhene would send a cache of gold to the Kumasehene is not clarified, though the keen reader can hardly fail to appreciate the poignant acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Kumasehene's authority over the Techiman chieftain.

Nonetheless, my quarrel here regards the Techimanhene's brazen castigation of Nana Nkoranzahene as a thieving mischief-maker. And then, also, precisely where did the sitting Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu II, go wrong for the Techimanhene to make the following flagrantly condescending remark: It is noteworthy to mention here that if the then Kumasihene had enquired at that time[,] he would have known [learned?] that the Techimanhene would never present gunpowder to him or any other person which signified an invitation to do battle in those days. Today, in the 21st century when means of communications [sic] are even much better, the Otumfour [sic] has ignored to utilize any of them [sic] and has chosen the path of confrontational discord”?

Whatever the preceding means, it still does not answer the Techimanhene’s own admission that, indeed, he personally caused the apprehension of the Tuobodomhene – or is it the one who pretends to be known as such?  who was promptly abducted and brought into the Techimanhene.s palace, unforgettably tutored in the Royal Art of Subordination, and then stolidly handed over to the same law-enforcement agents who had consistently and, under both the tenures of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), flatly refused to arrest the Tuobodomhene!

Still, the most outrageous observation regarding the Techiman-Tuobodom episode came from a quite well-known NDC pen-pushing panjandrum who, curiously presuming to reserve the judicial and political right to call the Asantehene to order, idiotically proceeded to accuse Otumfuo Osei-Tutu II of invidiously and blindly using his Oyoko familial kinship to back the presidential ambitions and candidacy of Nana Akufo-Addo. You see, it is this sort of Volta-Viral Scatology (VVS) that causes me to persistently and consistently fault the Brits for callously throwing us civilized Akans  among those primitive Notsie Vagabonds. My profuse apologies for there are, of course, remarkable exceptions.

Then again, why do we even allow sourpusses who couldn't tell the difference between an Asonaba and an Oyokoba, on any particular day of the week, to savagely and shamelessly interfere in our ethno-sub-national internal affairs? Blame Boakye-Djan, that sorry mess of a barroom Osahene. I say!

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy policy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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