Akan people

The Akan are a West African people living mainly in southern and central Ghana and in parts of Ivory Coast. They speak closely related languages of the Tano branch of the Kwa family, and include many groups, among them the Asante, Fante, Akyem, Akuapem, Akwamu, Bono, Denkyira, Nzema, Anyi and Baoulé. What unites them above all is a shared culture in which royal descent, property and high office pass through the mother's line.

Colonial-era writers suggested that the Akan had migrated from ancient Ghana, Egypt or the Near East. Later historians, linguists and archaeologists, including Peter and Ama Shinnie in 1995, found no evidence for such journeys and argued that Akan societies developed locally in the forest and the forest–savanna borderlands. The farming villages of the Kintampo complex, dated to roughly 2000 to 500 BCE, mark the shift to settled life in the region. Iron-smelting sites at Bonoso have radiocarbon dates between 660 and 1068 CE, and Adansemanso and Asantemanso in the southern forest were occupied from the first millennium CE.

Bono Manso, remembered as one of the first Akan states, took shape between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Nearby Begho grew into a busy market town of perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 people, with quarters for Mande-speaking Muslim traders and workshops for brass and iron. Gold was the basis of this prosperity: the Akan goldfields were linked by Dyula merchants to the trans-Saharan trade, exchanging gold, kola and ivory for brass, cloth and horses. In the south, Adanse is remembered in tradition as the place "where God began creation" and as the first of five founding states, with Akyem, Assin, Denkyira and Asante.

Portuguese ships reached the coast in 1471, and the Portuguese built forts such as São Jorge da Mina to tap the gold trade, though the Akan states kept control of production. From the seventeenth century Dutch, British, Danish and Brandenburg traders competed along the coast, supplying muskets, powder and cloth. Warfare grew, and militarised states such as Akwamu and Denkyira rose; Akwamu took Accra by 1681. Many war captives were sold into the Atlantic slave trade. In the Americas, people of Akan origin, called Coromantee in British colonies, played leading roles in revolts such as Tacky's Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760.

Osei Tutu, working with the priest Anokye, united the Asante clans around the Golden Stool, and in 1701 Asante defeated Denkyira at the Battle of Feyiase. The Asante Empire became the leading power of the forest, while the coastal Fante formed a confederacy and allied with the British. A long series of Anglo-Asante wars ended after the War of the Golden Stool of 1900, led by Yaa Asantewaa, and Asante was formally annexed in 1901. Akan lands were divided between the British Gold Coast and French Ivory Coast.

Akan societies are built on matrilineal clans, or abusua, of which eight main clans are widely recognised. Each state is ruled by a king chosen from an eligible royal lineage, with a queen mother who proposes candidates and may rule herself. Akan art is famous for brass gold weights cast by the lost-wax method, and the trickster spider Kwaku Ananse stars in the folk tales known as anansesem, which travelled with Akan captives to the Caribbean and the Americas.

On 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast, under Kwame Nkrumah, became independent as Ghana, and Ivory Coast followed in 1960 under Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a Baoulé leader. In Ivory Coast, Akan peoples make up about 40 per cent of the population. Akan is the main language of Ghana's Ashanti, Central, Eastern and Western regions, taught in early primary school and widely broadcast on radio. Traditional kings retain a largely symbolic but locally important role, and many sit in Ghana's regional and national houses of chiefs.

Our 1492, 1500, 1530, 1600, 1650 and 1700 maps draw an approximate Akan territory in southern Ghana, inland from the Gold Coast. From the 1715 map the area is shown as part of the Asante Empire.