In my Fathers' House:Africa in the philosophy of culture

My first memories are of a place called"Mbrom,"a small neighbourhood in Kumasi, capital of Asante, as that kingdom turned from being part of the British Gold Coast colony to being a region of the Republic of Ghana. Our home was opposite my grandparents's house- where scores of her kinsfolk and dependents lived under the direction of my stepgrandmother," Auntie Jane,: who baked bread for hundreds of people from Mbrom and the surrounding areas down the street from many cousins of various, usually obscure, degrees of affinity. Near the center of the second largest city in Ghana, behind our hibiscus hedge in the "garden city of East Africa," our life was essentially a village life, lived among a few hundred neighbours; out from that village we went to the other little villages that make up the city. We could go higher up the hill, to Asante New Town, to the palace of the Asante king, Prempeh II, whose first wife, my great-aunt, always called me"Akroma-Ampim"(the name of our most illustrious ancestor)or "Yao Antony" (the name of the great-uncle and head of the family from whom i acquired my Anglicized name, " Anthony"). Or we could travel in another cultural direction to the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology-known always as "Tech"-where i went to primary school, and where many of my friends' parents were professors. Some worlds-the world of the law courts where my father went, dressed in his dark European suits, carrying the white wig of the British barrister (which he wore after independence as in the colonial period), a rose from the garden (my mother's garden) always in his buttonhole;the world of parliament, where he went in the first years i can remember, an opponent now of his old friend Nkrumah-some worlds we knew of only because our parents spoke of them. Others-the world of the little church, Saint George's, where we went to Sunday school with Baptists and Copts and Catholics and Methodists and Anglicans, from other parts of the country, other parts of the continent, other parts of the world - we knew inside and out, knew because they were central to our friendships, our learning, our beliefs. In our house, my mother was visited regularly by Muslim Hausa traders from what we called (in a phrase that struck my childhood ear as wonderfully mysterious, exotic in its splendid vagueness)" the North." These men knew she was interested in seeing and, sometimes, in buying the brass weights the Asante had used for weighing gold, gold weights they had collected from villages all over the region, where they were being sold by people who had no use for them anymore, now that paper and coin had replaced gold dust as currency. And as she collected them, she heard more and more of the folklore that went with them; the proverbs that every figurative gold-weight elicited; the folktales, Ananseasem, that the proverbs evoked.