Asante in The Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order by IvorWilksReview by: Gerald M. McSheffreyCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 10, No. 2(1976), pp. 385-387Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/483854 .

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LIVRES/BOOKS 385

essentiel de planifier un processus qui permette une convergence entre la creation d'une de- mande locale pour les ressources locales et l'utilisation des ressources locales. Ceci est crucial selon l'auteur afin que l'augmentation de la demande locale cr66e par l'industrialisa- tion ne serve pas A transf6rer vers l'exterieur par le biais d'une technologie ou des inputs importes, une partie de plus en plus importante de la plus-value mais, au contraire, a soutenir un processus autocentr6 et auto-suffisant.

La question du transfert de technologie -

probl~me 6videmment central dans la redefini- tion d'un tel processus -, est trait6 par John Carlsen qui illustre les possibilites A la disposi- tion d'un pays pour augmenter son pouvoir de negociation ou pour reduire les cooits de la technologie 6trang&re partir de deux exp&- rience non africaines dans ce domaine: celles de la Colombie et de l'Inde.

Le livre se termine de mani&re tris A propos avec un article de Gustave Massiah, (( Multina- tional Corporations and a Strategy for Natio- nal Independence ,. A partir d'une presentation des trois categories analytiques suivantes:

a) la sp6cificit6 et le developpement des firmes multinationales ;

b) le r6le des firmes dans le cadre des strategies imptrialistes et les consequences de ce r6le surtout en ce qui concerne les contradictions entre alliances de classes;

c) les strat6gies visant l'ind6pendance natio- nale vis-A-vis des strat6gies des firmes;

l'auteur precise le cadre methodologique qui est sous-jacent et plus ou moins implicite dans chacune des contributions du livre. Ce cadre sert de fondement pour l'articulation par l'au- teur, de certains principes n6cessaires pour l'adoption d'une strat6gie ind6pendante natio- nale.

La clarification des problimes m6thodologi- ques apport6e par la rigueur de cette contribu- tion, est une invitation a la poursuite et 'a l'avancement des 6tudes dans ce domaine.

II va sans dire que ce livre est un manuel de base indispensable pour tous ceux qui s'interes- sent i l'analyse concrete des problemes de la dependance et du

, sous-d6veloppement) en

Afrique.

Bonnie CAMPBELL

Departement de science politique, Universite du Qudbec d Montrial.

Ivor WILKS, Asante in The Nineteenth Century : The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1975, Distributed in Canada by The MacMillan Co. of Canada, 800p.

There would appear to be few historians better qualified (in a strictly academic sense at least) to write a definitive history of Asante than Ivor Wilks. Wilks has spent almost twenty years researching the history of Asante during which time he has written a series of articles dealing with various aspects of its history in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Some historians of Africa, including this reviewer, however, have been somewhat less than enthusiastic in the past about certain aspects of Wilks' "history," in particular his questionable approach to the writing of African history. Now with the recent pub- lication of Wilks' first substantial work, a massive 800-page account of Asante in the 19th century, the time appears most oppor- tune for a discussion of certain fundamental and, no doubt, contentious historiographical issues which are implicit in Wilks' approach to the study of African history.

Before raising these thorny issues, how- ever, one must in all fairness first point out the considerable achievement this volume represents and especially those aspects of it on which most African historians would readily agree. Foremost in this respect is the wealth of detailed historical data on Asante which Wilks has painstakingly col- lected, if somewhat confusingly assembled in this volume. His command of the potential documentary sources for the history of Asante in the 18th and 19th centuries is unsurpassed, and this factor alone ensures that Asante in The Nineteenth Century will become an indispensable reference and source book for all serious students of Asante history in future. Equally impressive is Wilks' description of the evolution of the political order within Asante and its subsequent extension in order to meet the demands of territorial expansion and econo- mic growth in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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386 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES

The title, here as elsewhere however, does not do justice to the scope of Wilks' study which, in many respects, is almost as much a history of 18th century Asante as it is of 19th century Asante.

Unfortunately, much of an otherwise valu- able discussion of the Asante political system is marred by the somewhat extravagant claims which are made concerning the administrative efficiency and overall conti-

nuity of what Wilks insists on calling "the bureaucratic process" in Asante. Wilks is want to attribute, for example, distinct con- stitutional r6les to such bodies as the "na- tional assembly" and the "executive arm" of the "central administration" in Kumasi which it is unlikely the Asante themselves ever actually recognized in practice. When one considers, moreover, the segmentary and pyramidal structure of the Asante con-

federacy and the extremely limited technol-

ogy at the disposal of the "executive arm" in Kumasi, one must seriously ask whether indeed it ever exercised the extensive powers which Wilks attributes to it. Similarly, his

chapters on Asante "imperial administra- tion," a hitherto often overlooked aspect of Asante, surely would have been more informative had he not chosen to describe the Asante system as if it were an almost exact replica of the British colonial system of "indirect rule" complete with resident

provincial and district commissioners.

Equally exasperating at times, if not historically unsound, is Wilks' prose where the complexity of the language often far surpasses the complexity of the though which the author is attempting to express. The following passage on the "great roads" or "highways" of Asante, which unfortunately is not atypical, demonstrates what the reader unversed in the lexicon of the social sciences can expect to encounter. "In a simple topo- logical model of a radial system with eight trunks, roads converge on the central node at angles of 450, assuming the homogeneity of the environment : that is, that no variable factors exist such as to produce an asym- metry of the trunks about the nodal place" (p. 15). Not surprisingly, the roads in Asante did not conform to this topological

model, and we are told that "...explanations different in kind are required to account for the existence of roads which diverge sharply from each other (characterized by high posi- tive discrepancy values), and of those which diverge little (with high negative values)" (p. 15).

One would be inclined to dismiss most of the critical comments above as relatively unsignificant in themselves were it not for the fact that they are an intrinsic part of what is a much more vital and controversial

subject, namely, Wilks' whole approach to the writing of African history.

Wilks was aware himself that the utiliza- tion of culturally alien terminology and modern concepts such as "bureaucratic pro- cess," "national assembly," "executive

arm," "modernization," "mercantilism," "free trade," "middle class," "state capi- talism," etc., to describe and to interpret the Asante historical experience was apt to

provoke adverse critical reaction. In the introduction, therefore, he defends the use of what he calls "concepts developed in

geographically and temporally different con- texts" because he insists "only thus can the Asante past be viewed within the wider

perspectives of human endeavour and its

place within comparative history ultimately be assured" (p. xiv). The only alternative, he would have us believe, is "...always to stress the unique and unrelated" and this alas 'can lead the scholar towards the mo- rasses of a nationalistic or 'tribal' mystique and an underlying historical solipsism" (p. xiv). Hopefully, any historian who has given serious thought to the nature and purpose of his discipline would readily real- ize that there are indeed alternatives to the "morasses" mentioned above and that indeed the greatest "morass" of all might be an uncritical acceptance of Wilks' own rather implausible philosophy of history.

As it is, serious historians may well ponder, for example, what to make of Wilks' claims based on the most fragmentary and hypothetical evidence that Asante in the 1820s had embarked on "an ambitious scheme to establish what was in effect an organization of West African states for

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LIVRES / BOOKS 387

mutual security" and had laid down even "the design for a continental alliance"

(p. 312). Cross-cultural comparisons not- withstanding, some historians may find it difficult also to accept that human sacrifice and capital punishment were really one and the same thing in Asante or that there was a significant "middle class" element in late 19th century Asante which was engaged in an ideological debate over the relative merits of traditionalism vs. modernization and free trade vs. state capitalism. No less unsettling to some historians surely is Wilks' assertion that the debate over free trade vs. state

capitalism which led to the destoolment of the Asantehene, Mensa Bonsu in 1883 "can bear detailed comparison" with "...the se-

quence of events which led to the overthrow of Nkrumah in 1966..." (p. 723).

If this is the kind of history which is likely to result, one must ask whether Wilks' expressed aim of assuring Asante or African history in general "...its place within compar- ative history" (p. xiv) ought to be ranked foremost among the current priorities of African history ; moreover, assuming it were, then does a "comparative history" not in- volve something more than merely describing and interpreting the historical experience of one culture by the indiscriminate utilization of the alien terminology and often his- torically irrelevant concepts derived from another. Wilks might have done well here to have heeded the perceptive warnings on this score so carefully enunciated some time ago by Jack Goody in Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (1971) and Christo- pher Wrigley in African Affairs, 70 (1971).

Strangely enough, Wilks seems less than convinced himself that this is the kind of African history which ought to be written. He states in the introduction that what has interested him most in this study was not "...those aspects of Asante society which are unique to it [but] those aspects which it has in common with other complex societies whether on the African continent or else- where" (p. xiv). He closes his study, how- ever, with a quote from Kwame Nkrumah which suggests perhaps that a type of Afri- can history other than that written by Wilks

himself might be in order. One line in

particular of Nkrumah's statement stands out, and this is that "African society must be treated as enjoying its own integrity, its

history must be a mirror of that society..." (p. 724). Whether Wilks has respected the

integrity of Asante. history and given a true reflection of that society is a question which can be answered best, I suppose, by African historians whose history and society it is. Others may be of a mind to measure Wilks' achievement against that of Rattray, Fuller, Ward and Lystad, his predecessors in. the field of Asante studies.

As to our verdict which some historians of Africa may find unduly harsh, it is based on the conviction that much of Wilks' un- orthodox approach to the writing of African history would be found equally unacceptable in other areas of the discipline, and it would' be unfortunate if the critical standards in African history were to be any less rigorous than those Which prevail outside of it.

Gerald M. MCSHEFFREY

Department of History, Loyola Campus, Concordia University

Howard WOLPE, Urban Politics in Ni-

geria: A Study of Port Harcourt,

Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1975, 314p.

Over a decade ago when Howard Wolpe conducted the field research on which his book is based, most observers of African

politics considered tribalism a lingering, re-

actionary force, a temporary lag in the abrupt transition from traditional to modern society. Since that time we have all become a good deal wiser. There is more apprecia- tion of the complicated nature of primordial sentiments such as ethnicity, and more questioning of the simplistic dichotomous models of society in which our earlier as-

sumptions were grounded. It is easier to reject theories than to create them, however,

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