Articles with the keyword Asante people of Ghana
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“I now go to church, I am not under the chief”: The colonial origins of religion and politics in Ghana
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 33(3) 2008: 6-17
Abstract
Today traditional chieftaincy in Africa has become a topic of public and academic
discussions about good governance, democracy, civil society and the like.
Chieftaincy is perceived increasingly as a ‘political institution’ and the religious
quality of the chiefly offices that the classic ethnographies emphasized has been
largely forgotten. The essay seeks to explain this disjuncture by looking at the
case of the Asante people of Ghana, claiming that one of the most dramatic
changes brought by the colonial rule was the secularization of indigenous
leadership, which permanently transformed the ways in which the traditional
institutions were conceptualized. The origin of the contemporary ‘political
discourse’ about chiefs is traced to the conflicts between Christian missions and
chiefs during the early colonial period.Keywords Asante people of Ghana, Christian missions, colonialism, divine kingship