Abstract:
Emanating from the contexts of history, cultural studies, and religious studies,
this work explores oral history about Okomfo Anokye, the legendary priest of the
Asante people, to investigate the meaning and representation of death within the
milieu of indigenous Asante cosmology. The Asante are an aboriginal group,
within the larger Akan ethnic group, in Ghana, West Africa. Asante became a
polity in the second half of the seventeenth century and a supreme West African
chiefdom by the end of the eighteenth century. The confederacy started under two
leaders – Osei Tutu, the first chief, and Okomfo (Priest) Anokye, the spiritual
advisor and high priest. These “almost apotheosised” men used pragmatic
politics, diplomacy and magico-religious means to engineer an Asante history,
culture, and national image. Moreover, Okomfo Anokye’s legendary mysticmagician
personae inscribed in Asante oral history and traditions certain myths
for the explanation of the mystery of life and death. Renowned African
philosophers such as Danquah,1 Wiredu2 and Gyekye,3 have discussed Asante and
Akan philosophical responses to death. Conversely, this essay explores Asante
conceptions and rationalisation of death within the context of an Okomfo Anokyecentred
and inspired myth. This study will unpack the narrative of this indigenous
myth and present a hermeneutics of inner ideas therein which enable Asante to
personify death, interpret its pervasiveness and invincibility, and explain physical
expiration of bodily (transient) life as an inevitable transit into another type of
life, the spiritual. This showcases an indigenous people’s contribution to the
larger discourse on humankind’s attempt to deal with the reality of death.
