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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Time and the Calendar in Nineteenth Century Asante: An Exploratory Essay |
Author: | McCaskie, Thomas C. |
Year: | 1980 |
Periodical: | History in Africa |
Volume: | 7 |
Pages: | 179-200 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Ghana |
Subjects: | time history Ashanti polity Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171661 |
Abstract: | Time in nineteenth-century Asante, in a number of its aspects, is the subject of this paper. Specifically, the author seeks to effect, for the nineteenth century, a reconciliation between Asante calendrical time and European linear chronological time thereby (1) constructing a more truly indigenous history by supplying the specifically ordered Asante division (and memory) of the past with the buttress of an exact and continuous chronology; (2) illuminating Western understanding of the temporal constraints and priorities underpinning certain aspects of Asante behaviour; (3) partially explaining those obscurities in the European sources which are the product of a rude incomprehension of the imperatives embedded in Asante calendrical time; and (4) indicating by example one way in which historians might redress the sovereign dominance of the Gregorian calender over the African past. Notes, tab. |