The first full-length study of the musical pasts of Asafo warrior
associations based on the author's "ways of walking" with local scholars
along the Ghanaian littoral.
What is Asafo ndwom (music)? How and when is it performed? What is the
state of this warrrior tradition that once served as the bedrock of the
Akan, Ewe, and Ga societies in Ghana? How does Asafo enact the past and
serve as an archive for the people? In an attempt to answer these
questions, Walking with Asafo in Ghana investigates the musical pasts of
Asafo. The book is an ethnography of walking, organized into eight
chapters. Each chapter ends with a piece of creative writing in the
author's "ethnographic voice," in which she sums up the main ideas. It
is Aduonum's attempt at an anticolonial and decolonialist African
musicology, one that subverts and decenters white racial framing of
research, analysis, and presentation, disrupting how Euro-American
concepts frame our ways of telling and experiencing ndwom.
Aduonum's goal on this trajectory is to tell her story, create something
new, and chart a new path. Through this fluid and complex book, she
repositions African Elders' knowledge as "epistemologies of
decolonization and de-coloniality" and centers the stories shared by
local Fante scholars. The text is polyvocal, multimodal,
multiperspective, performative, reflexive, and dialogic, informed by the
structure of Asafo ndwom, appellations, proverbs, her mentors' tellings,
and "embodied" calling and responding. It is a performative scholarly
discourse, ndwom-based: a performance. As a celebration of Asafo, those
warriors who insisted their lives matter, the text is meant to be read
and performed.
This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous
grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
