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E. A. Ammah’s Ethnographic
Vision
By Marion Kilson
In 2016 Sub-Saharan Publishers will publish Kings, Priests,
& Kinsmen: Essays on Ga Culture and Society by E. A. Ammah,
edited by Marion Kilson. This essay is based on Marion
Kilson’s introduction to the volume.
E. A. Ammah (1900-1980) gained renown as an authority on Ga
culture and society beginning in the 1930s. He was the first
Ga person to speak on the radio aboutHɔmɔwɔ and he published
a number of essays in the Ghanaian press over the years. As
the head of one of three Ga royal houses, he was an active
participant in the proceedings of the Ga Royal Council for
many years. As a devout Anglican, he sought to demonstrate
the correspondences between Ga religion and Christianity as
well as other world religions including Judaism, Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Islam.[1] His interests in Ga cultural studies
were wide-ranging including social organization, political
history, life transition ceremonies, and religion.
A close reading of E. A. Ammah’s essays reveals that his
ethnographic vision had two principal components. The first
was ensuring the accurate recording and interpretation of Ga
institutions and the second was positioning Ga culture
within the context of other world cultures. The first was a
concern from the time that he began researching traditional
Ga religion in the 1930s and the second seems to have
emerged in his writing in the early 1960s.
Ga-focused Ethnographic Vision
In pursuit of ethnographic accuracy, E. A. Ammah not only
took meticulous interview notes like those enshrined in his
1937 field diary but took to task others who did not record
the ethnographic facts as he understood them. He wrote a
blistering 1941 review essay of M. J. Field’s book,
Social Organization of the Ga People. In it he ridiculed
the first major British ethnographer of Ga society for her
misinterpretation of the Ga political system. His critique
begins: “Some of the disclosures are as startling as they
are vexatious. The theory that she so remarkably attempts to
develop is that (1) the Gas are not one people either in
origin or organization; (2) that each town is an independent
republic with its own territory and its own unique set of
customs; (3) that there has never been any political
association between the towns and they have never had a
paramount chief… (4) that the stool is not a monarch’s
throne…and (5) that the Government of every town is a
gerontocracy.” With this opening salvo, Ammah proceeds to
challenge each of these “vexatious” formulations pointing
out his perception of Field’s errors of fact and
interpretation. Mr. Ammah was not the only one who objected
to Field’s characterization of the Ga polity, for two months
later a newspaper editorial stated “Readers will remember
that following the release of the book for sale critical
reviews and protests began to appear, particularly from the
Ga State Council in the press. A representative of the same
Council submitted objections to the Eastern Provincial
Council of Chiefs…This was accompanied by the slaughter of
sheep to remove…the stigma of insult brought on the Stools
and the tribe by the statements published and asked that
representation be made with a view to the withdrawal of the
book.” Despite the barrage of Ga-inspired criticism, the
book lives on!
E. A. Ammah’s own recording of Ga ethnography covered a
broad institutional range. He wrote about social
organization in general, beliefs in ancestors, inheritance
customs, and forms of marriage as well as land tenure
procedures. He wrote about the Ga Constitution and political
structure, he wrote about royal history, and he wrote a
poetic lament about the removal of the old Ga town of Tema
to make way for the modern port of Tema in 1959. He wrote
about Ga life transition ceremonies—the passage from thing
to kinsman of a week old infant at its naming ceremony,
puberty rituals, and funeral customs. He wrote about Ga
religion and world view, about religious songs, about water
in ritual, and about the compatibility of traditional Ga
social mores with Christian practices. In all of these
ethnographic writings he envisioned that he was creating an
accurate record of Ga cultural mores.
Among these Ga-focused ethnographic writings, several pieces
stand out as exceptional contributions to Ga studies. In
1965 E. A. Ammah wrote a paper entitled “Sixty Years of Ga
Politics” which represents a unique insider’s perspective on
Ga royal politics. Chronicling the history of Ga kingship
especially from 1900 on, the essay essentially recounts a
story of multiple enstoolments and destoolments within a
colonial framework of changing political and economic
opportunities. As head of one of three Ga royal houses, E.
A. Ammah was an active participant in electing and
enstooling a new king in 1964. As a stickler for tradition,
he was concerned by the political and ceremonial errors that
he perceived surrounding the enstoolment of the new Ga king.
Rival candidates for the kingship, plotting electors,
multiple votes, absent electors at voting time marred the
selection process. Then the midnight enstoolment of the king
was rife with ceremonial errors—too many people in the stool
room, some who should have been inside the room were not,
while others who should not have been inside were; the king
was not given all the appropriate insignia of office during
the ceremony; oaths of allegiance between the king and
individual chiefs and elders did not follow the prescribed
order. So concerned was E. A. Ammah by these departures from
established custom that he concludes his essay by writing,
“The events and circumstances surrounding the election and
enstoolment of Nii Taki Amugi II suggest that the exalted
position of the Ga stool became a toy in the hands of the Ga
people, an unprecedented situation in the history of the Ga
royal family.” When this essay was posted on The Ade Sawyerr
Blog in 2014, readers commented on how Ammah’s analysis
helped them to understand the stool disputes during the past
decade following King Taki Amugi II’s death after a forty
year reign.
To the study of Ga traditional religion, I think that E. A.
Ammah made two singular contributions—one a methodological
innovation, the other a remarkable document.
His methodological innovation was to demonstrate the
richness of traditional Ga religious songs for understanding
Ga religious thought. Because the language of these songs is
linguistically complex—often combining Ga and other African
languages within a single hymn and even a single line, the
meaning is not always readily intelligible. Previous
scholars like M. J. Field had written that “the songs were
full of life” but “gibberish.” E. A. Ammah in his writings
has shown that the songs are not gibberish, that deciphering
them can be difficult, but that the texts reveal much about
the world view and society of Ga people.
The remarkable document that E. A. Ammah created was a “Ga
Calendar” in which he records the annual cycles of religious
observances for all the major gods and chiefly stools in
each of the nine Ga towns strung along the southeastern
Ghanaian coast from Accra to Ningo—some 217 ceremonies
extending from twenty weeks in Accra to three weeks in Ningo.
The calendar is more than simply a listing of ceremonies in
relation to one another, for it incorporates an explanation
of the calculation of the lunar-based ritual year which may
vary from 357 days to 371 days, descriptions of some
rituals, and recordings of a few religious songs. This
amazingly complex yet coherent document is an invaluable
resource for anyone interested in Ga religious rituals as
practiced in the mid-20thcentury.
Comparative Ethnographic Vision
Important as E. A. Ammah’s essays on Ga polity, kinship
structures, life transition ceremonies, and religion are,
the truly remarkable essays are his comparative ethnographic
essays in which he examines correspondences between Ga
thought and that of other cultural traditions. The most
impressive of these comparative essays is “Ghanaian
Philosophy” which was published in six successive monthly
issues of The Ghanaian beginning in October 1961.[2]
Although E. A. Ammah titles his essay “Ghanaian Philosophy,”
his exposition is an exploration of Ga philosophy as
revealed primarily in Ga religious hymns. In comparing Ga
thought with other traditions, he draws upon a wide variety
of sources including the Bible, articles in The Hibbert
Journal, classic anthropological monographs on African and
Latin American societies, various encyclopedias, as well as
Islamic, Indian, Judaic, and Buddhist teachings.[3] The
essay begins “Ga thought unlike Greek, but like Hindu is
three in one, and one in three, namely philosophy, religion
and science. It must be remarked in passing that Indian
‘religion and philosophy are one’, and that, ‘For India,
then, there can be no real conflict between science and
religion, between religion and thought.’ This is exactly the
content of Ga thought; the sole difference is that, India
stresses pantheism, while Ga upholds theism, God’s
transcendence or revelation.” Ammah identifies three schools
of Ga thought—the God’s School which celebrates the primacy
of a Supreme Being in the universe, the Wisdom School which
is concerned with theology and religious practices, and the
Sceptic School which emphasizes the philosophy of doubting.
In developing the characteristics of these philosophical
schools, Ammah discusses correspondences between Ga beliefs
and practices and other traditions including parallels
between Ga and Christian trinities, between Ga concepts of
deities and the ministry of angels in the Roman Catholic
church and in Muslim theology, parallels between ancient
Greek thought and ideas expressed in Ga circumcision and
naming rituals, the centrality of the concept of God for
Immanuel Kant and for Ga thinkers, and so on. This paper is
truly a tour de force; moreover, it is remarkable that a man
whose formal education ended with Standard VII should have
had the intellectual curiosity and acumen to explore
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Marxism in
relation to Ga concepts and practices.
Roots of E. A. Ammah’s Ethnographic Vision
What are the roots of E. A. Ammah’s ethnographic vision? Why
was it so important to him to insist on the accurate
recording of his own culture that he was willing to
sacrifice his career advancement for it? What did he hope to
achieve by showing correspondences between Ga philosophy
enshrined in religious songs and those of major world
cultures? Although I can only conjecture the roots of his
ethnographic vision, I think his pride in his cultural
heritage, his awareness that Ga culture was less studied and
less well known than other Ghanaian cultures such as those
of the Ashanti and Ewe, and his wish to demonstrate the
sophistication of African thought contributed to his years
of research, reflection, and writing. The forthcoming book
of E. A. Ammah’s extant papers will serve as a tribute to
the vision of a man who once proclaimed:
Why go to ancient Greece,
And other far off lands,
In search of golden fleece?
’Tis here, where Ghana stands.[4]
[1] E. A. Ammah remembered being a fisherman before he went
to school. He completed Standard VII and then began his
career as a clerk in the national railway department
stationed in Accra. He said that he refused to accept
positions outside Accra lest he lose opportunities to study
his culture. He said that throughout his life he spent any
spare money that he had buying books.
[2] This essay was published on The Ade Sawyerr Blog in
February 2014.
[3]The Hibbert Journal was a liberal Christian periodical
published in Britain from 1902-1968.
[4] E. A. Ammah, “Ghanaian Philosophy,” The Ghanaian
(October 1961), p.1.
From Ade Sawyer
http://adesawyerr.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/adesawyerr
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