The Ashanti Confederacy

Abstract

The Basel missionaries, Ramseyer and Kühne, had this to say of Ashanti government in the reign of Kofi Karikari (1867–74): …the reins of the Ashantee government are not exclusively in the hands of the king, nor does he possess unlimited power, but shares it with a council which includes, besides his majesty, his mother, the three first chiefs of the kingdom [Juabenhene, Bekwaihene, and Mamponghene], and a few nobles of Kumasi (Coomassie). This council is called ‘Asante Kotoko’, or the Ashantee porcupine, which means that like the animal of that name, nobody dare touch them.…It is this Kotoko council which rules the entire kingdom, and deals with the people, who must obey, whatever their own wishes or inclinations may be, in the most despotic way.…In important matters all the other chiefs of the kingdom are called together to discuss the case, but they are sure to vote in accordance with the view of the council, for who would dare to oppose the Kotoko?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.