Sé:gbɛ:gnön🍀

you who fashion our rugged lives to suit you. your grace is in style. always in vogue. ¬kantamanto nyame.

Osei Tutu I & Okomfo Anokye: A Record of Slave Ownership 1. Contrary to what ethnic apologists claim, slavery in Asante was more foundational than incidental. 2. From its earliest formation as a nation built largely “because of war”[Asa nti], the Asante state integrated war-fed slavery into its political and social order. 3. This position is asserted and well documented by the Asante historian Emerita Prof. Akosua Adoma Perbi, who, through the goodwill of her father, the revered ethnomusicologist Emeritus Prof. J. H. Kwabena Nketia, gained rare access to Nana Opoku Ware II and his royal historians at Manhyia. 4. The story is told that when Asantehene Osei Tutu rewarded Okomfo Anokye, it was not in gold alone, but in people: 300 slaves and 100 pereguans (~£800 at the time). 5. And when Kumawuhene Okyere Bofuo gave Okomfo Anokye 100 slaves and 200 pereguans (~£1600 at the time). These were not symbolic gestures. 6. They reveal a system in which human beings were currency, reward, and wealth. 7. Such gifts would have been unthinkable without a deeply embedded slave economy. 8. Over time, slavery became institutional, structuring governance, hierarchy, and accumulation. 9. For three centuries, Asante emerged as the largest slave-trading, slave-owning, and slave-dealing state in the region. 10. The state did not merely practice slavery; it depended on it. 11. So much so that the smooth running of Asante society was inextricably bound to slave labour and trade. Narratives of slaveholding & trading across other Ghanaian polities & ethnicities will follow in due time.

On the politics of shoes in colonial Ghana 1. When Francis Kofi Selormey pointed out in his AWS Classic, The Narrow Path, a memoir about his childhood, that he was the first child in his village to wear shoes, anyone born after the baby boomer generation would be quick to ask, “Why the fuss about something as petty as a pair of shoes?” 2. But a quick inquiry into the socio-politics around the donning of shoes in colonial Ghana would reveal one thing: 3. Footwear was a fashion luxury. 4. And only the administrative class of Europeans, their mulatto offspring, and the small class of wealthy and educated African elites could afford it. 5. Even when they could, only a privileged few had access to the merchants and shops that had shoes in stock: the UACs, F. & A. Swanzys, A. G. Leventis, G. B. Ollivants, and the Miller Brothers of this world. 6. Outside of these commercial shops, the Basel and Wesleyan Mission stores, run by Christian missionaries, sold basic imported goods, including footwear, especially to African converts and mission-educated Africans. 7. Subsequently, from the early 20th century onward, Syrian, Indian, and Lebanese merchants offered shoes for sale to the layman, but mainly in urban retail stores in Accra, Cape Coast, Takoradi, and Kumasi. 8. Later, African merchant houses emerged from the coastal elite families to trade in mass-imported shoes: the Bannermans, Brews, and others. 9. With that, the unfortunate fate of many a barefooted colonial and early Ghanaian began to change.

bojo waxing fluently in classical greek.

entrance, accra railway station. 1920s

english folks claim shakespeare as their cultural inheritance, yet much of his work is steeped in the romanticisation of rome.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "you should study risk taking, not risk management"

@i_am_nunya sounds like a hoax, because women, anatomically, do not have a prostate.

You can sniff a foolish case from a mile away

🎶ohye atar gyan, ebo taylor. good heavens! the horns! the horns!

Continuity of Anti-Slavery Across Generations 1. While Britain abstained from supporting the motion to label the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity, 2. @BellRibeiroAddy, British MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, has firmly supported a position aligned with her ancestral homeland, Ghana. 3. This stance echoes that of her ancestor, Thomas Birch Freeman, a Euro-African missionary whose family background included links to enslavement. 4. Freeman was a vocal critic of slavery in the Gold Coast in the 1840s. 5. While, many of his contemporaries at time, mainly prominent African and Euro-African elites, such as J.C. Grant (forefather of Paa Grant of UGCC fame), Joseph de Graft, Owuo Nemim, Kofi Blay, Mantses Ankrah & Dowuona, Togbi Amegashie, and Kwesi Akuffo, were involved in slave trading & resisted abolition, 6. Only to stop when officially banned the trade in 1874. Same year Ghana became a formal British colony. #Ayekoo!

@yrnrgee fort prinzenstein was in salaga, i guess. and nyaho tamakloe was a slave at anomabo, i suppose.

Please we Ewes were not involved in selling slaves to the white people please. You can clearly see we have no fort or castle in our region 👍

🍀scarecrow. rest, eternal rest. the very first chief vandal. @ova

@Mihrxx Here's my video on the African who opposed British abolition in present-day Ghana. Go watch and subscribe. youtu.be/-vI5RR7sMDM?si…

@KZankeli Wait, they were still selling slaves even after the Brits banned it?

gã chiefs involved in slave broking and trading: ankrah(kinka), dowuona(osu), teteh tsuru(gã mashie), attoh, sempe mensah...

Dr, Do Better! 1. Ghana’s first police station at Prampram was not established by the British. Neither was it built in 1833, nor did it follow the British abolition. 2. In fact, the Danes built it in 1814—nearly two decades earlier, and about a decade after they initiated abolition in 1803. Yes! Before the British initiation in 1807. 3. And well before the eventual British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. 4. It is literally carved in stone: the pavement mosaic at the Prampram Police Station site makes this clear. It explicitly references “Police Station… 1814… by the Danes.” 5. Interestingly, all this happened long before the Gold Coast became a British colony. 6. That did not occur until after 1850, when the Danes sold all their forts and castles (Christiansborg, Kongenstein, and Prinzenstein) to the British and left the shores of Ghana. #Asomdwee