GHANA STUDIES / Volume 10 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 145 ASANTE HISTORY A Personal Impression of Forty Years T. C. McCASKIE Imagination is not, as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent: it is the ability to disclose that which exists. —John Berger I. The editors of Ghana Studies have invited me to write a short memoir of my forty years of involvement with Asante history, and to record my impressions of where we have got to now and where we might go in the future. This is by no means an easy thing to do. I have imposed two conditions on what I have to say. First, my own experience is central to what follows, as it must be, and I use that as a basis for broader commentary and speculation . Second, I have taken the decision not to write a bibliographical essay, which would hardly be comprehensive but would certainly be indigestible. Instead, I have refrained from writing this piece until I was physically removed from my own study and all it contains. I am writing this in the Tarn in south-west France, and there is nothing in the house that relates to the Asante past. What follows, then, is a series of impressions, reflections on a people, place and past that have dominated my entire career as a historian. There are no footnotes. However, it is worth noting here that any such battery of references would have shown how far the study of Asante history has advanced over the past four decades. In 1972, as a postgraduate student, I published an essay on Asante in Comparative Studies in Society and History . I wrote this in the university library in Cambridge, and to this day remember my ambition was to read everything that was available and relevant to the argument. Youthful hubris? Perhaps. But the point is that then it was possible to entertain such a thought. This is no longer the case. Few 146 Ghana Studies • volume 10 • 2007 of my PhD students now work on Asante. They say it would take their allotted three years of research time just to master the secondary literature. This may be true, but it is also a matter for regret. Asante historiography is richer, fuller and deeper than that pertaining to any other African culture, but there is much, much more to do. This, then, is a work of memory. I bounce thoughts off my own experience . It is proverbial that memory is selective, incomplete and marshaled by shifting orderings of the self. I plead guilty along with everyone else. What I have tried to do here is to summon up those episodes and insights from my experience that still seem to be—at least today, and for now—relevant to thinking about the past and future of Asante history. There is no particular ordering to these observations beyond their status as a trace of how I think now about issues I have thought about on and off for years. A final view is impossible in its own right, and anyway it would leave me with a sense of wounded superannuation. My present research has turned away from Asante, for the first time but I think only momentarily, and it is perhaps the unusual liberation of distance that has coaxed forth the thoughts that follow. II. It is an overcast day in 1990. Baffour Osei Akoto and I face each other across the kitchen table in the old Manhyia palace in Kumasi. The table is heaped up with plastic shopping bags. These are filled with banknotes. This is payment from two foreign TV companies for the right to film when the Asantehene next displays the Golden Stool to his people. We work in companionable silence, emptying the bags, sorting the cash and counting it. In late afternoon the skies darken. Crashing thunder announces a cloudburst . The rain falls in sheets. The kitchen is now unbearably humid. The banknotes are damply plastered together. We give up and go and sit on the porch outside. Brandy is produced. We drink and talk. We have been talking on...