Law, Politics and Analogy in Akan Historiography

Abstract

Although the early students of African history attempted to break with what they regarded as the hegemony of imperial history, they frequently deployed conceptual language drawn from the histories of the imperial metropoles. The terminology of African historical studies borrowed extensively from the taxonomy of western European history. While part of the reason for this might have been the perceived need to explain strange peoples, places and institutions to an uninformed readership, it is also explained by the wish of many scholars in this field to prove African history's basic similarity to and hence equality with that western narrative. The nature of such analogies was, however, shaped by the focus of the early scholarship. This article attempts to show that the concerns of the earliest scholars engaged in the task of African history were to shape a particular view of the Akan people of the Gold Coast/Ghana and especially their polities. The fact that these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African intellectuals were lawyers as well as scholars laid down ways of regarding Akan polities – as states with constitutions and as peoples regulated by the rule of law – which have resisted alternative and more plausible readings until relatively recently.