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| Title: | On Mentally Mapping Greater Asante: A Study of Time and Motion |
| Author: | Wilks, Ivor |
| Year: | 1992 |
| Periodical: | The Journal of African History |
| Volume: | 33 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 175-190 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Ghana |
| Subjects: | Ashanti polity time History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/182997 |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the way in which Greater Asante (in present-day Ghana) was 'mentally mapped', thereby enabling government to regulate the movement of couriers, and others, along the great-roads. Lacking clocks, speed was reckoned anthropometrically, by reference to 'don': rhythmic walking at a normal pace. Computing this against the determinate parts of the day, from dawn to dusk, on which travel (as oppossed to eating and resting) was customary, it became possible to estimate the location of a courier at a given point in time. Greater Asante was 'mapped' as a circle, the diameter of which was the Asante month of forty-two days (of travel). The circle embraced the most distant of the territories over which the Asantehene claimed authority; these were in fact more or less twenty days from the capital. Superimposing the reckoning of travel times on the matrix of the forty-two days 'imperium', the Asante government was able to establish a ('Monday') timetable for the conduct of business. The record shows that it worked remarkably well. An understanding of 'traditional' practices and procedures has much importance for the understanding of 'modern' ones: the past is encapsulated in the present. Notes, ref. |
