The Problem in One Sentence
Almost everything written about Asante before the twentieth century was written by Europeans who did not speak Twi, who spent their time on the coast rather than in the interior, who depended on interpreters with agendas of their own, and who were writing for employers, governments or publishers at home. That does not make the accounts useless. It makes them evidence of a particular kind, to be handled with the same care one would apply to any interested witness.
The Principal Authors
Willem Bosman
A Dutch West India Company officer at Elmina in the 1690s, Bosman published his description of the Guinea coast in 1704. It was translated quickly into English, French and German and became the standard European account of the region for a century. Bosman knew the coastal trade extremely well and wrote about it with unusual specificity. On the interior he was reporting hearsay, and on African religion and character he wrote with a contempt that was conventional in his time and is deeply misleading now. He was also defending the Company's conduct.
Olfert Dapper and the compilers
Dapper's Dutch description of Africa, published in 1668, was assembled from other men's reports; he never went there. John Ogilby's English "Africa" of 1670 drew heavily on it. These compilations were enormously influential and are still frequently reproduced for their engravings, but they are second-hand at best and should never be cited as eyewitness testimony.
Ludewig Ferdinand Romer
A Danish trader on the coast in the mid-eighteenth century, Romer published his account in 1760. He is valuable precisely because he was neither Dutch nor English: his perspective on the rivalries between the European posts is less self-serving, and he records commercial detail others take for granted.
Thomas Edward Bowdich
Bowdich accompanied the British mission to Kumasi in 1817 and published his account in 1819. It is the first substantial European description of the Asante capital and remains indispensable: the layout of the city, the scale of the court, the regalia, the music, the reception ceremonies. Bowdich was observant and interested. He was also young, there for a few months, dependent on interpreters, and engaged in a public quarrel with the African Company that shaped how he presented the mission.
Joseph Dupuis
Dupuis went to Kumasi as British consul in 1820 and published in 1824. He had Arabic and used Muslim informants at the Asante court, which gives him access to a stream of information Bowdich lacked, particularly on the northern trade and on Asante relations with the Islamic world. He was also in open disagreement with the Cape Coast establishment, and his book is partly an argument in that dispute.
The Dutch factors
The unpublished reports, day-registers and letters of Dutch officials at Elmina, now in the Nationaal Archief, are in many ways the most useful body of European writing about Asante. They were not written for publication, they cover a long unbroken period, and they record routine matters — messages received, envoys arriving, prices, quarrels — which travel narratives omit. Their bias is administrative rather than literary: they exist to justify decisions to superiors.
What These Writers Were Positioned to See
- Trade. Prices, commodities, routes and credit relations are usually reliable, because getting them wrong had consequences for the writer.
- Ceremony and material display. Descriptions of processions, regalia and scale are often good, because they could be watched from outside.
- Names and dates of diplomatic contact. When an envoy arrived and what he said he wanted is generally recorded accurately, even when its meaning was misunderstood.
What They Systematically Got Wrong
- Political structure. European writers reached for the vocabulary of European monarchy — king, emperor, nobles, provinces — and missed the offices, councils and lineage politics that actually distributed power in Asante.
- Religion. Asante religious practice was described as superstition or devil-worship almost without exception, and ritual acts were reported without the meanings that made sense of them.
- Violence. Executions at state ceremonies were reported at length, sometimes with numbers that cannot be substantiated, and the emphasis grew as the political usefulness of the charge grew. This is one of the areas where uncritical repetition of nineteenth-century figures still distorts popular accounts.
- The interior. Anything beyond the coast was mediated through informants who had their own reasons to exaggerate distance, danger or the wealth of rivals.
- Their own position. European writers consistently overstated European power on the coast, where in practice the posts held their ground by paying rent, giving gifts and staying on good terms with African authorities.
How to Use Them Well
Four working rules cover most cases. First, always establish where the writer was standing: what he could see for himself, and what he was told. Second, prefer the unpublished administrative record to the published narrative where both exist, because the incentive to entertain is absent. Third, read across national archives — the Dutch, British and Danish records describe the same events for different masters, and the differences are diagnostic. Fourth, set the written record against Asante oral tradition, stool histories and drum texts, which preserve exactly the political and genealogical detail the European sources are worst at.
Modern editions and commentaries do much of this work for the reader. The critical scholarship of the last half-century — Ivor Wilks and T. C. McCaskie on Asante, Larry Yarak and Michel Doortmont on the Dutch coast, Albert van Dantzig on the Dutch documents — is largely an exercise in exactly this kind of source criticism, and is the fastest way to learn how it is done.
