What Has Oxford Dictionary Got To Do With Kingship’s Definition In Ghana?

The pointless debate over which of our traditional rulers qualify to be legitimately and appropriately classified as a “King” is apt to rage on for quite some time to come. Still, what is disturbingly clear to me, not that it is wholly not to be expected, is that those who are hell-bent on denying the status of “Kingship” to any of our legitimately invested indigenous rulers invariably tend to do so via the lexicographical invocation of Eurocentric definitions. In other words, the “against” or “contra” proponents of the idea that absolutely none of our traditional rulers qualifies to be called a “King,” often do so through the eyes and/or perspective of our erstwhile European colonial rulers (See “Has Ghana a King?” Modernghana.com 5/24/18).

Before one can appropriately define the concept of “Kingship,” or the question of whether Ghanaians have “Kings” or “Chiefs,” one, perforce, has to historically revisit the precolonial era, because the institution of Ghana’s monarchical system far predates the arrival and conquest of Africans by Europeans, most Western-Europeans, beginning in the Fifteenth Century or the 1400s, and may actually be older – in the case of Akwamu – than the British Monarchy. This period, of course, marks the official commencement of the massive commercial enslavement of Africans as chattel or ownable property in the so-called European New World, to wit, the Americas. About this time, every one of the three modern Ghanaian monarchs mentioned by Mr. Isaac KyeiAndoh, in his afore-referenced brief article, effectively ruled a clearly geographically defined territorial polity or kingdom in the erstwhile Gold Coast.

The Okyenhene, for example, ruled over all the lands that today are inhabited by the Three Akyem States, namely, Abuakwa, Kotoku and Bosome, as well as that territory of the present-day New Juaben which, by the way, functionally speaking, is still rented property. It was the Jerry John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that Eurocentrically attempted to break the age-old tradition of the GHȻ 1.00 (ONE CEDI) token or symbolic annual rental payment due the Okyenhene from the Omanhene of the New Juaben Traditional Area. The Dagomba Overlord or Dagbonaa also ruled over a vast kingdom as a Head-of-State, in much the same way that, according to Mr. KyeiAndoh, the Oxford Dictionary defines it. In the case of the Asantehene, it was a federated territory of several kingdoms stretching all the way into the present-day Ivory Coast or Côte d’Ivoire. It was for this reason why historians often spoke of the Asantehene as the ruler of an “Empire,” rather than the Overlord of a kingdom.

Now, it is equally significant to underscore the fact that none of the three kings mentioned above ruled what may be called a “Clan,” defined as a group of people who trace their ancestry through a single totemic or totem-defined lineage. Among the Akan, there are at least 8 of such lineages called “Abusuakuo” or family groups. These Clans are actually “Tribes,” in much the same way as the ancient Israelites defined the term. “Tribes” are much larger than “Clans” and nearly every Akan king ruled over members of all the 8 tribes in their respective territories, namely, Aduana, Asona, Oyoko, Biretuo, Ekuona, Asakyiri, Agona and Asenie. There are nominal variations to the preceding tribes, depending on the dialectal variation of any particular Akan State, such as Assin, Akwamu, Akyem, Asante, Fante and Ahanta.

What has been grossly misclassified as tribes, such as Fante, Bono, Akuapem, Baule, Nzema and Wassa are actually polities or states. You see, the attempt, largely by European colonial imperialists and their woefully miseducated African supplicants and/or admirers, to reduce our indigenous Monarchs to “Chieftains” is a dastardly attempt to “inferiorize” or denigrate the level of the political and/or administrative and cultural sophistication of precolonial and contemporary Africans. It is this subtle psychological trick that smug racially self-denigrating critics like Mr. KyeiAndoh either innocently fail to understand and fully appreciate or are simply darn too intellectually lazy and diffident to grasp.

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