"A Large Clearing in the Forest": West African Ontology of Space in the Making of Kumase, 1680-Present

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Magaziner, Daniel

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intrinsic essence of Kumase, the capital of Asante, one of the most formidable empires in nineteenth-century West Africa. I demonstrate how the respect for the natural environment— primarily trees, rivers, streams, and creeks— and Asante vernacular systems of space inspired the autochthonous design, planning, and building of Kumase. As the capital of the Asante Empire, Kumase was established in a tropical rainforest in West Africa’s interior in 1680. Its inhabitants developed an urban form fundamentally shaped by the geography and shared socio-cultural values of the Asante, against the backdrop of Afro-European trading interactions along the Guinea Coast of West Africa. Thus, Kumase was already built as an urban center with sophisticated planning and administrative systems by the time Europeans made their first visit to the city in 1817. Yet the foundational story of the city is unstudied despite the impressive volume of scholarship about the Asante empire. Instead, it is usually associated with European imperial projects and urban theories, particularly with respect to nineteenth and twentieth-century planning concepts. This characterization has aligned with the pattern of global imperial studies where European conquerors are elevated as trailblazers, with Africans merely acting in response, as if created de novo by the act of colonization. But in this dissertation, I show how Asantefoɔ— the people or citizens of Asante— demonstrated power through the meticulous designing of communities around the natural environment of the city, which subsequently informed urban planning under British colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century. Ultimately, this dissertation not only underscores West African inventiveness and ontologies of space but also offers novel perspectives for understanding urban histories by pushing scholars to take the metaphysical concepts of the built environment more seriously.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS