The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast: Muslim Cosmopolitans in the British Empire
309
The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast: Muslim Cosmopolitans in the British Empire
309eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a global movement with more than half a million Ghanaian members, runs an extensive network of English-language schools and medical facilities in Ghana today. Founded in South Asia in 1889, the Ahmadiyya arrived in Ghana when a small coastal community invited an Ahmadiyya missionary to visit in 1921. Why did this invitation arise and how did the Ahmadiyya become such a vibrant religious community? John H. Hanson places the early history of the Ahmadiyya into the religious and cultural transformations of the British Gold Coast (colonial Ghana). Beginning with accounts of the visions of the African Methodist Binyameen Sam, Hanson reveals how Sam established a Muslim community in a coastal context dominated by indigenous expressions and Christian missions. Hanson also illuminates the Islamic networks that connected this small Muslim community through London to British India. African Ahmadi Muslims, working with a few South Asian Ahmadiyya missionaries, spread the Ahmadiyya's theological message and educational ethos with zeal and effectiveness. This is a global story of religious engagement, modernity, and cultural transformations arising at the dawn of independence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253029515 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 309 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
John H. Hanson is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, where he is also Director of the Africa Studies Program. He is author of Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa: The Futanke Colonies in Karta and coeditor (with Maria Grosz-Ngaté and Patrick O'Meara) of Africa. He is also an editor of History in Africa: A Journal of Method.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Hausa Force and the Religious Marketplace in the Fante States
Reverend t. b. picot, chairman of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission in the Gold Coast, went to Kumasi, the Asante capital, in 1876 to press the asantehene to relax constraints on Methodist evangelism. Picot traveled shortly after British imperial troops had returned from their invasion of Asante in 1873-1874, a war that left Kumasi looted and burned but Asante still outside the domain of the newly declared British Gold Coast colony. Buoyed by the British victory, Picot sought to build on the Methodist presence in the Fante states of the Gold Coast, where they had been active from the 1830s and had won adherents among traders and others in coastal towns. Immediately after the war, tens of thousands of Fante rural residents began to attend Methodist services for the first time, a religious surge that led the Methodists to establish new mission stations and schools in interior villages. The revival's timing suggests that Fante villagers were persuaded by the British victory to seek access to the Christian God, and Picot hoped that Asante residents similarly would be open to the Methodist message of personal salvation.
Asantehene Mensa Bonsu was undeterred by the war's outcome and did not agree to Reverend Picot's request. Reaffirming long-standing Asante restrictions on Christianity, Mensa Bonsu insisted that "God at the beginning gave the Bible to the white people, another book to the Muslims, and abosom to us." Abosom are spiritual forces believed to make contact with humans through ritual specialists known as akomfoo. Asantehene Mensa Bonsu asserted that Methodist proselytism had "ruined" the Fante states because Fante Christians no longer accorded proper respect to Fante rulers and akomfoo. Left unstated was that Asante religious restrictions also applied to Muslims: mallams were forbidden from proselytizing and expected to serve the asantehene by providing protective amulets and herbal cures. Asante rulers also prevented savanna Muslims from traveling to the coast, largely to protect Asante commercial interests. Muslim access to the Fante states opened, however, during the British invasion of the 1870s: arriving by sea were mallams who accompanied the Hausa Force, a colonial militia based in Lagos. These mallams provided esoteric healing, and conversations between Muslims and Christians led some Fante Methodists to find parallels in the Bible and the Quran.
Historians have not examined this era of religious change. Methodists remembered the postwar Gold Coast revival for decades, but recent historical works rarely mention the surge in Christian affiliation. Scholars also have not analyzed the Muslim influences of the Hausa Force and its mallams, either in the Gold Coast or in Lagos. Reluctance to do so is related in part to awareness of British "martial races" thinking associated with their constitution based on imaged ethnic identities. David Killingray convincingly argued that the Gold Coast Constabulary, modeled on the Hausa Force, was diverse ethnically and was Muslim only in the imagination of its British officers. But the Hausa Force, I contend, was distinct from the Gold Coast Constabulary and practiced a demonstrative "barracks Islam." The force also drew on the services of mallams, who introduced Muslim ideas and practices to Fante communities in the Gold Coast.
This chapter analyzes transformations in the late nineteenth-century religious marketplace of the Fante states of the Gold Coast. It begins by reviewing the history of the Fante states and describing the features of the religious marketplace. The following section examines the Hausa Force's formation in Lagos and its role in the British invasion of Asante in the 1870s. Then the chapter turns to the force's exuberant Muslim performances in the Gold Coast. The final section concerns the era of religious change after the British victory over Asante.
The Fante States
Akan speakers, including the Fante people (mfantsefoo), came to dominate the rainforest in today's southern Ghana over the past half millennium. The processes associated with this expansion are multiple, and scholars still are investigating patterns of migration, settlement, and assimilation of others. Encouraging social absorption was the Akan cultural practice of matrilineal reckoning that allowed outsiders to marry and have their offspring incorporated into the mother's kinship group. Akan polities also integrated diverse peoples into an expanding political culture: new communities emerged around Akan-speaking adventurers known as abirempon, often remembered as hunters who founded new settlements in virgin forest. As these communities attracted others, the settlements eventually became enduring polities led by ahene (singular, ohene), rulers associated with matrilineal royal lines. Akan political culture included elaborate court rituals that conferred legitimacy and supported numerous courtesans. Asante had become the dominant Akan state by the eighteenth century, but its rise did not eliminate all other Akan polities; the Fante states endured and contested Asante assertions of authority along the coast.
Fante oral historians narrate the founding of the Fante states as an epic tale of migration from Tekyiman (see map 1), a savanna settlement just north of the rainforest. These migrants, known as Borbor Fante, reportedly arrived at Mankessim (maps 3 and 4) near the coast. The remains of spiritual guides leading these immigrants were buried near Mankessim, at a sacred grove known as Nananom Mpow. Some Borbor Fante families left Mankessim to found Fante polities nearby, but they retained a connection to Nananom Mpow and political elites at Mankessim. Fante states proliferated, including city-states along the coast, but they never formed a centralized or unitary state. Acknowledging Nananom Mpow as a sacred site cemented a loose political charter in the southern rainforest and coast, enabling Mankessim to serve as a meeting place to affirm shared political interests, to discuss crises facing the region, and to develop military and other strategies to cope with external threats.
Historians situate the rise of the Fante states into global developments. Gold mined in the rainforest connected the region to commercial networks. The initial contacts were to the savanna and trans-Saharan routes to North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Later gold entered the Atlantic world on European ships after Portuguese merchants arrived at the coast in the late fifteenth century. Following them were British, Danish, and Dutch merchants, who leased land and built forts along what became known as the Gold Coast. The forts became sites for the exportation of war captives to the Americas as demand for slaves increased in the eighteenth century. These historical processes were complex, including both internal and external factors: the result was that small rainforest polities gave way to larger states as warfare increased to provide captives to European merchants along the coast. The Asante Empire became the dominant power in the rainforest and extended its military campaigns into the savanna, initially capturing its own prisoners of war and later receiving annual tribute in the form of captives from tributary states in the savanna. Political leaders in the Fante states assumed roles as brokers in the exchange of Asante war captives to European merchants at the coast: Cape Coast and Anomabu were major markets for enslaved Africans heading to British possessions in the Americas. As Asante became an empire, its relations with the Fante states grew uneasy: Asante armies invaded the coast on numerous occasions to undermine the Fante states, to challenge Europeans in the forts, and to secure favorable terms of trade.
Social rank was an important element in the Fante states. Akan speakers established polities in which ahene and other royals (adehyee; singular, odehyee) had higher standing than commoners and outsiders. Ahene, adehyee, and commoners had slaves, Akan social dependents including pawns working off indebtedness, convicted criminals serving victims' families, and hostages taken in war; each had a distinct term designating their type of subordinate status. Demand for dependent labor in expanding Akan settlements was the reason the first Portuguese merchants exchanged slaves obtained elsewhere in Africa for gold in the Gold Coast. The flow reversed during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, and warfare led Akan speakers to develop new categories of subordinates, such as nnonkofoo, prisoners of war taken from the savanna. Most nnonkofoo were sold into the transatlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century, but during the nineteenth century nnonkofoo remained and worked in the Gold Coast as the transatlantic slave trade ended and new opportunities opened for commerce in cash crops and other commodities.
Fante entrepreneurs were involved in the economic changes of the nineteenth century Gold Coast. Their influence increased as Fante ahene lost the ability to accumulate wealth from tolls on the passage of slaves to coastal markets with the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Fante innovators established new businesses associated with the export of cash crops, such as palm oil, and forest products, such as timber and rubber, to meet demand for these items in an industrializing Europe. Facilitating the rise of Fante merchants were two other economic changes: British firms developed a system in which credit flowed more easily to African merchants, and British steamers, brought into West African service in the 1850s, began to take orders directly from African firms. Fante entrepreneurs seized these opportunities and made considerable profits, for example, in accumulating and selling palm oil or in making canoes for use as surfboats servicing European steamers. Wealth concentrated in the hands of several hundred Gold Coast merchants, who relied on slaves and other dependents as workers in their firms and homes. These affluent merchants usually were not sitting ahene but often were adehyee whose connections facilitated access to land and labor. Expanding trade also benefited commoners who earned small sums working for affluent merchants, starting small businesses peddling European goods in the interior, and serving as brokers between palm oil merchants and Africans collecting wild palm kernels in the interior.
Increasing wealth led to new forms of Fante self-presentation. Sartorial practices reflected rank and status. Ahene and adehyee wore elegant, locally produced cloths, woven in African looms and expressing Fante styles; ahene added golden regalia to mark their political office during ceremonial events. Commoners and slaves wore plain local cloths. But in the mid-nineteenth century, European clothing became fashionable. Fante merchants and traders adopted dresses for women and pants, shirts, and jackets for men, and others aspired to this new style and other aspects of European material culture. Affluent merchants also formed new social organizations, such as Freemason and Temperance societies, modeled along European lines but expressing local perspectives and interests. British law, too, interested the elite, who studied abroad and returned to engage the British on local rights. Coastal residents published newspapers and produced written histories to counter British representations in an era of growing European disregard of Africa's past. These changes reflected wider Fante social transformations that also were evident in religious expressions.
The Religious Marketplace in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fante States
British imperialism and Methodist proselytism combined to create a new religious marketplace in the Fante states during the mid-nineteenth century. British dominance in the region expanded gradually over the course of the nineteenth century, even as Asante remained a major regional power for most the era. The 1807 Asante invasion of the Fante states destroyed Abora, the most powerful Fante state at the time, and the Asante army temporarily occupied Mankessim and other Fante towns. Although the Fante states reclaimed autonomy by the 1820s, they did so with British assistance. As cash cropping gained momentum in the Gold Coast, British imperial interests were whetted, and by 1844 Fante ahene agreed to allow British judicial assessors the right to prosecute serious offenses, such as murder and robbery, anywhere in the Gold Coast. This legal concession led to the opening of prisons and the establishment of an armed force in British forts. The latter proved difficult to maintain, as the pay was too low to attract many local applicants: British officials turned to various external solutions, such as deploying forces of the West Indian Regiment and ultimately members of the Hausa Force in the early 1870s. British domination in the Gold Coast continued to expand as they consolidated control over coastal forts that Denmark and Netherlands had occupied for centuries. The formal declaration of the Gold Coast colony in 1874 was the culmination of decades of formal and informal British influence in the affairs of the coast.
English-language schools expanded with rising British imperialism in the Gold Coast. These schools initially operated in the British forts, where sons of local elites received an English-language education. Fante ahene also needed literate members of the court to communicate with the British in writing, instead of relying on courtiers, known as akyeame, who spoke on behalf of political elites. Over time the need for literate clerks increased: they did not displace akyeame, who remained influential in local contexts, but added a new role to the retinue serving Fante royalty in the mid-nineteenth century. Expanding Fante businesses also wanted workers who could speak English. Increasing demand for English-language skills was met by the schools established by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. The mission was the second factor in the formation of a religious marketplace through its emphasis on salvation, individual conscience, and religious choice. The Methodist role in the formation of the Gold Coast religious marketplace is discussed after an overview of indigenous religious expressions along the coast.
Indigenous Religious Practices
The religious lives of mfantsefoo and other Akan speakers in the rainforest were shaped by an "arena of belief" that identified spiritual forces and defined religious practices. Fante traditions of emigration from Tekyiman to Mankessim stressed the role of akomfoo in guiding this journey, and the religious shrine at Nananom Mpow reinforced the connections between political and religious elites in the Fante states. Nineteenth-century Fante ahene maintained a close association with akomfoo, but they never exercised the strict control over religious expressions that the asantehene did in the interior: Fante akomfoo had relative autonomy to establish their own networks and provided ritual services to local residents as well as political elites. The activities of akomfoo enter the historical record in vague and unsympathetic European references to "the fetish," and these glimpses into religious activities suggest an influential presence of akomfoo as healers of the ill, ritual experts at family life-cycle events, and public servants at harvest festivals and political transitions. Methodist missionaries lamented that all Fante settlements had sacred groves attended by akomfoo, attesting to the pervasive influence of indigenous religious practices in the Fante states.
John Mensah Sarbah provides insight into Fante indigenous religious practices and ideas. Mensah Sarbah, an early twentieth-century Gold Coast lawyer raised in a prominent African Christian family, acknowledged the significance of harvest festivals and sacred groves in the lives of coastal residents. He stressed the superordinate spiritual force, onyankupon, or "Great Friend," in the heavens, and repeated the Fante proverb "Speak to the winds, and God will hear thee." The indigenous arena of belief drew on Akan concepts regarding a creator, onyankupon (or onyame, the more widely invoked term). In Akan imaginings onyame formed the world and stepped back from involvement in human affairs. Men and women were not alone, and Sarbah's proverb indicates that humans could express their concerns to God by speaking to the wind, but no formal shrines or religious specialists were devoted to serving onyame. The Methodist missionary John Martin grasped this aspect of the arena of belief, conceding in his journal that "they believe in the existence of the Supreme, but regard him with the feelings of a deist." The historian Thomas McCaskie added from his research on nineteenth-century Asante that "onyame was the final arbiter of justice, but in this, as in other matters, he was remote and allocative rather than approachable and flexible."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Ahmadiyya In The Gold Coast"
by .
Copyright © 2017 John H. Hanson.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Note on Terminology and Spelling
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Section 1: Preparing the Way in the Gold Coast
1. The Hausa Force and the Religious Marketplace in the Fante States
2. Binyameen Sam's Fante Muslim Community
Section 2: Ahmadiyya Genesis and Expansion to London and Lagos
3. The Genesis of the Ahmadiyya in British India
4. Ahmadiyya Expansion to London and Lagos
Section 3: Ahmadiyya Arrival and Consolidation in the Gold Coast
5. Ahmadiyya Arrival in the Gold Coast
6. Ahmadiyya Consolidation in the Gold Coast
7. Ahmadiyya Expansion to Asante
8. Ahmadiyya Expansion to Wa
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"A nuanced argument for the unusual development of a South Asian Muslim reform movement, born in the complex religious environment of British colonialism, taking root in a completely different setting in Gold Coast, today's Ghana. It will have considerable appeal for African, world and imperial history, for religious studies, and for those dealing with questions of modernity."
A significant history of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in what is now Ghana that reconstructs its history and also places it in the context of wider geographical movements by people and ideas, including the history of religious change in British India, the role of travel with the empire in disseminating new ideas and practices, and the trans-national and trans-regional history of a religious movement.
A nuanced argument for the unusual development of a South Asian Muslim reform movement, born in the complex religious environment of British colonialism, taking root in a completely different setting in Gold Coast, today's Ghana. It will have considerable appeal for African, world and imperial history, for religious studies, and for those dealing with questions of modernity.
A nuanced argument for the unusual development of a South Asian Muslim reform movement, born in the complex religious environment of British colonialism, taking root in a completely different setting in Gold Coast, today's Ghana. It will have considerable appeal for African, world and imperial history, for religious studies, and for those dealing with questions of modernity.
A significant history of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in what is now Ghana that reconstructs its history and also places it in the context of wider geographical movements by people and ideas, including the history of religious change in British India, the role of travel with the empire in disseminating new ideas and practices, and the trans-national and trans-regional history of a religious movement.