Toward a new understanding of Akan origins

Abstract

AbstractRecent evidence from archaeology and human population biology indicates two major demographic periods in the prehistoric and early historical settlement of the forest of southern Ghana. The earlier period began during the early part of the Common Era. The greatest material problem confronting early forest populations in West Africa was the need to counteract extraordinarily high rates of infant and childhood mortality and adult morbidity. This demographic drain resulted from the new disease ecologies—the relationship between the pathogens, notably malaria, their hosts and their mutual environment—that had confronted prehistoric and early historical peoples in the forest. The heavy price they paid in lives and productivity led these new forest communities to value the reproductivity of foreign women (slaves). The second period of demographic adjustment came between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries CE as West Africans responded to slaving, wars and Eurasian viral, bacterial and spirochetal diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis, by developing a defensive clustering pattern of settlement. It was during this period, when refugees were being incorporated into forest communities in large numbers, including slave women brought in as reproducers, that the tradition of outsiders falsifying Akan genealogies probably became widespread and thus helped ensure the social reproduction of Akan lineages.