It has become a common spectacle in Ghana to find, year after year, images of the Asantehene kneeling before a priest of the Church of England, the Anglican Church, for prayers. The Asantehene is essentially, as we have learned over the years, the supreme leader of the Asantes of Ghana, and in addition, invariably, the spiritual embodiment of the soul of the Asantes.
Which is why his genuflection before the priests of the Anglican Church remain divisive even in the provinces of the Asante. The Anglican Church is the religious property of the British. In fact, the Anglican Church is the embodiment of the soul of Britain.
Generally, Traditional African leaders in West Africa, over many decades, after their defeat to the various European Hordes that once terrorized the West African coasts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have become subscribers to either the principalities of the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, many of these leaders claim to be spiritual representatives of the souls of their own peoples.
The contradiction is glaring. In an attempt to make some sense of the spiritual confusion, some Asantes for instance, have taken to defending the right of the Asantehene to kneel before the principalities of the Anglican Church of England. To square the imagery and convince the rest of Asante and others in Ghana that the Asantehene has not broken with Asante tradition and spirituality, various doctrines of a certain Asante religion have emerged.
Prominent amongst them is the idea of religious syncretism in which the claim follows that the Asante religion does not preclude anyone, and certainly not their supreme leader, from engaging in the worship of various other gods. The seed for this argument proceeds with the precedence that the Asante had domesticated, for various purposes, certain Savannah Gods. The claim concludes that Asante religion is a multi-religious discipline, and that its strength and appeal lies in its guarantee of undivided religious allegiances.
Which is not the same as religious freedom, which guarantees the right of an individual to pick and practice any religion. Whether the practice of many religions by one person can be deemed a religious practice or not, on its own, is a subject for another debate. However, the internal discrepancy of the doctrine of what is being claimed as an Asante religion is the issue.
Which, naturally, fetches its own internal contradictions in the face of the Asantehene’s dalliance with Anglicanism. How can a people claim to have a religion of all religions? How can a people claim to have a discipline of all disciplines? How can one accept to be a servant of a god based on the requirements of another god? This illogicality is not only a problem with the claim of this version of an Asante religion, it is a well-documented problem for all syncretic spiritualties, notably of Santeria—an admixture of Vodun and Catholicism—in the Black Americas.
Even in Santeria, many have awoken to the contradiction of the philosophies of both Vodun and Catholicism. They are incompatible—the former rooted in the Cosmogony of Ife and the latter in an Abrahamic Cosmogony. Since the late twentieth century, many practitioners of Santeria have emphasized a “Yorubization” or “Dahomenization” process to remove Roman Catholic influences, and they have created forms of Santería closer to the traditional Vodun religion in West Africa.
Diasporic Africa can be forgiven for such gross conflation of religious principles. After all, they were enslaved peoples for hundreds of years who had no contacts back to West Africa to correct these obvious, unthinkable conflations. What is the Asantehene’s excuse for the obvious conflation of what is being claimed as an Asante religion with Anglicanism?
None. Except to continue in the practice of a religion that emerged after the Asante were defeated by the British. It is well-documented that the Asantehene Agyiman Prempeh I and Queenmother Yaa Asantewaa were both force-fed Anglicanism in the 1920s by their British captors while exiled on the archipelago of Seychelles, off the East African coasts of Somalia. Kumasi, the seat of the Asantehene, is some 6,500 kilometers across the entire African continent from Mahé, Seychelles. A modern flight, some one hundred years hence in technology, will still take more than half a day to complete!
This is the circumstance under which the Anglicanism of the Asantehene was born, i.e. within the British Defeat and Disgrace of the Asante. Everywhere else, this kind of event is called European Colonialism and Imperialism. But what we have today is the stubborn attitude of a few Asante to link Anglicanism among the Asantehene and his cohort as some higher purpose in religious syncretism. Syncretism is illogical enough. This is much worse—it is a philosophizing of disgrace.
Have they lost their pride? Has the royal seat of Asante lost her pride? Perhaps.
Furthermore, the cursory, alternative idea that the Asantehene is engaging in the long tradition of importing the Anglican god into Asante, like the Asantes did for some Savannah Gods into their pantheon of Asante Gods to ward off witchcraft (according to one Meera Venkatachalam) is both disturbing and characteristically childish. Who can support the idea that the Asantehene is seeking protection from Yahweh against the witchcraft of his own masses through Anglicanism? My guess is no one can support such philosophizing disgrace.
It is not that the royal seat of Asante has lost its pride. It is worse. It has lost more than its pride. It is contriving, even spiritually in this instance, to become part and parcel of a certain autochthonous, newly-minted royal class of African colonialism. In a way, it seems as though the royal clans of Asante now see themselves as a part of the royal houses of Britain, and they wish collectively—albeit as subordinates to the British—to rule over their masses.
In this British feudal system, it is easy to see why the current Asantehene declared the Commonwealth of Nations, a British Colonial Outfit, as the “finest creation in modern history.” There is reason to assert the obvious: the Asantehene’s genuflection before the priests of the Church of England, or the Anglican Church, is a step further, towards his invitation to join in at the table where genocides are planned and committed by Europeans and Euro-Americans, rosaries around their necks, eating with shiny forks and knives made from actual silver and gold, and with not a single word of “genocide” or “uncivilized phrase” ever spoken.
If Asante had a religion with a disciplined conviction, my guess is that it would be based on the strength of its own origin narratives such as the belief in their emergence from a Hole in the ground near present-day Assin-Manso. Such a cosmogony, like Assin-Manso, a Hole in Asase Yaa, a hole in Mother Earth, could become the philosophical template for fashioning a unique, soulful and spirited cosmogony and philosophy to protect Asantelands from galamsey and all the other environmental degradation that threatens the vast terrains and waters of Asante.
by John Frazer Dzegba