Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past

Abstract

Ann B. Stahl. Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xix + 268 pp. Photographs. Drawings. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Price not reported. Cloth. Ann B. Stahl has provided an important and long-awaited contribution to the growing list of monograph-length archaeological studies of later African history. An examination of this period is crucial to developing an increasingly nuanced picture of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of West Africa, and the ways in which interactions with European traders were negotiated in the complex political and economic relations that trade engendered. Stahl's research differs from most of the other long-term historical archaeological projects in West Africa by focusing on the Banda chieftaincy region in central western Ghana, an area lying in the hinterland of coastal interaction that was not associated with the major inland polities well known through historical records. This research helps to bring balance to the study of the wider region. Stahl frames her work as an interrogation of (xvii) that are legacies of the past, whether constructed from historical, anthropological, and archaeological perspectives, or through the production and use of local histories. She sets the stage by introducing a chieftaincy dispute she witnessed in Banda as an example of the way legitimacy is produced or undermined by contested histories. She then discusses the ways silences produced by differing epistemological frameworks (anthropological, historical, and archaeological) leave interdisciplinary that can be productively engaged not by viewing their disjunctions as obstacles, but rather by viewing them supplementally as spaces that provide insights into the tensions that caused these silences. The second chapter critically explores the nature of the sources available for this study, including traditional histories, document-based histories, and archaeological data. The third and fourth chapters move from general theoretical issues of history to a focus on the Banda region by discussing the meanings of history (both local and official) in Banda itself and the ways it has been influenced by the changing geographies of the region as local autonomy diminished and centralized authority (first colonial and then Ghanaian state-based) became inscribed on the landscape. The fourth chapter elaborates the context of Banda history by describing the larger events (regional African trade networks, the trans-Atlantic trade, the rise of the Asante confederacy, the consolidation of British colonial rule and local administration) and how these developments affected the region. …