Every Fante town was divided into companies, and every man belonged to one from birth, through his father — which is worth noticing in a matrilineal society, because it means the asafo was the one thing a man got from his father's side.
The posuban shrines at Elmina, Anomabo, Mankessim and Kormantse; asafo flags in museums worldwide.
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Listening to The Companies
The Companies
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The Companies
Every Fante town was divided into companies, and every man belonged to one from birth, through his father — which is worth noticing in a matrilineal society, because it means the asafo was the one thing a man got from his father's side.
Asafo: sa, war; fo, people. War people. They were the militia, and they were also the fire brigade, the public works gang, the police, and the political opposition — an asafo company could and did depose a chief.
And they competed with each other with a ferocity that has not entirely cooled.
They competed in flags. Each company had banners, appliquéd in bright cloth, and every one carries a proverb aimed squarely at a rival company: a bird holding a snake it should not be able to hold; a man sawing through the branch he is sitting on; a hand grasping a moon, with the caption only I can reach it. These are insults, sewn, carried in the street, and legally so — a new flag had to be shown to the chief before it could be flown, precisely because of what it would say.
And they competed in concrete. The posuban is an asafo company's shrine, and along the Fante coast they became something no other African architecture attempted: multi-storey painted structures covered in life-size figures — soldiers, Adam and Eve, lions, a ship, an aeroplane, Europeans in uniform, clocks, a whale swallowing a man. Number 2 Company at Elmina built theirs as a full ship in cement. They are magnificent, deeply strange, crumbling, and almost nobody photographs them.
If you visit Ghana. The posuban shrines at Elmina, Anomabo, Mankessim and Kormantse; asafo flags in museums worldwide.
Every Fante town was divided into companies, and every man belonged to one from birth, through his father — which is worth noticing in a matrilineal society, because it means the asafo was the one thing a man got from his father's side.
Asafo: sa, war; fo, people. War people. They were the militia, and they were also the fire brigade, the public works gang, the police, and the political opposition — an asafo company could and did depose a chief.
And they competed with each other with a ferocity that has not entirely cooled.
They competed in flags. Each company had banners, appliquéd in bright cloth, and every one carries a proverb aimed squarely at a rival company: a bird holding a snake it should not be able to hold; a man sawing through the branch he is sitting on; a hand grasping a moon, with the caption only I can reach it. These are insults, sewn, carried in the street, and legally so — a new flag had to be shown to the chief before it could be flown, precisely because of what it would say.
And they competed in concrete. The posuban is an asafo company's shrine, and along the Fante coast they became something no other African architecture attempted: multi-storey painted structures covered in life-size figures — soldiers, Adam and Eve, lions, a ship, an aeroplane, Europeans in uniform, clocks, a whale swallowing a man. Number 2 Company at Elmina built theirs as a full ship in cement. They are magnificent, deeply strange, crumbling, and almost nobody photographs them.