Woven, Inscribed, Enfolded, Encased: Adinkra from Kumase to the British Museum

In 1831 a group of objects acquired in the Asante Empire and Gabon entered the British Museum collections (fig. 1).¹ These items—perhaps the first art from sub-Saharan Africa to enter the British Museum—include clay pipes, colorful glass beads, an iron lock and key, an iron and brass blade and a brass-wrapped wooden sheath, a leather cushion with kapok fiber stuffing, a tasseled leather bag, a stringed instrument, sandals, a carved wooden stool, plain woven cotton, and stamped adinkra cloth. Although the British Museum formally added them to their collection only in 1831, these objects had been at the institution since 1818, when the Englishman Thomas Bowdich presented them to the museum.² Bowdich had acquired these items while on an 1816–18 “mission” sponsored by the British-chartered Company of Merchants trading to Africa—the African Company—centered on an 1817 journey to the Asante capital of Kumase (Coomassie).³

Located near the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, the Asante Empire was formed out of conquests and consolidation in the late seventeenth century. It was a multiethnic polity dominated by Twi-speaking Akan people—the Asante—with inhabitants from Hausa, Dagomba, other Akan, and additional ethnic groups.⁴ Asante’s capital, Kumase, was located in a forested region of the interior, at a geographical nexus of inland trade routes reaching northward toward the Sahel and east–west along the forest–savanna interface. Kumase was some distance inland from the Gold Coast. There, West African ethnic groups such as the Fante and Ga competed to dominate overseas trade in captive Africans, gold, ivory, and other goods.⁵ In the eighteenth century, Asante expansion from the forest toward the coast ousted many intermediaries, with the result that Asante representatives increasingly dealt directly with European coastal traders and Euro-African trade agents at ports such as Elmina, Cape Coast, and Accra.⁶ Furthermore, in the early nineteenth century, the de jure ending of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people by the Danish (1803), British (1807), and Dutch (1814) governments spurred efforts to transition to “legitimate commerce” across this region.⁷ In the wake of abolition, African and European entities sought new models for commercial relationships, reaching from Kumase in the interior and its Sahelian trade partners, through entrepôts along the Gold Coast, and overseas to Europe. It was in this context of shifting trade and diplomacy that Thomas Bowdich visited Kumase in 1817.

From the Asante point of view, selling or gifting objects from the cosmopolitan city of Kumase to European visitors could smooth diplomatic relations and lay the groundwork for future commercial transactions—building on long-standing regional practices of trade, diplomatic gifting, and pageantry.⁸ Moreover, the Asantehene (Asante ruler), Osei Tutu Kwame Asibey Bonsu, appeared to be motivated by the goal of placing objects on display in a European museum as a way to communicate Asante imperial power abroad, which paralleled his own local practices of collecting and display.⁹ When Bowdich informed the Asantehene of the British Museum, the ruler presented him with six items of goldwork for the museum; Bowdich noted that “I had interested the King [Asantehene], by my account of this national repository”.¹⁰ The Asantehene’s early nineteenth-century donation of goldwork contrasts sharply with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Museum acquisitions from the region, which were largely rooted in the punitive logic of the Anglo-Asante Wars.¹¹ Where Bowdich presented these items to the British Museum to establish his own capabilities as a colonial agent and scientific explorer, the Asantehene sought enhanced trade and the promotion of Asante imperial power internationally.¹²

This article traces the intersecting aims of dual imperialisms, with the Asante Empire’s practices of imperial collecting eclipsed by those of the British Empire, as the items collected in Asante entered the British Museum. The relocation of objects from the Asante Empire to the British Museum was both a political and economic maneuver by Asante elites and the Asantehene, and an ideological framing of museum collections through the lens of Britain’s emerging global empire. In the early and mid-nineteenth-century British Museum, the objects acquired in Kumase were labeled: “All from Ashantee. Presented by T. E. Bowdich, Esq. and described in his Travels”.¹³ While it is true that Bowdich obtained (most of) the items during his time in the Asante Empire, the phrase “all from Ashantee” conceals a great deal of complexity (figs. 2 and 3). For one, Asante Empire material culture and collections incorporated objects from across Europe as well as from West and North Africa, but Bowdich’s collecting process did not include European items.¹⁴ Additionally, the Asante Empire was culturally diverse. While recognizing the challenges of defining ethnic categories, we can understand the Asante as the coming together of several subsets of the Akan ethnic group who organized into a federation just before 1700.¹⁵ The Asante imperial consolidation across the forest zone went on to encompass diverse Akan and non-Akan groups, and Asante imperial arts overtly appropriated varied arts and material culture into a cosmopolitan visuality.¹⁶

By incorporating items from across a broad geographical range, the Asante Empire exemplified how “nineteenth-century imperial power structures provided a fertile breeding ground for cosmopolitanism”.¹⁷ As Malcolm McLeod, former keeper of the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum, and the art historian Fiona Savage have shown, Asante gifting and collecting practices reveal how royal authority depended on appropriating exogenous visual and material culture.¹⁸ While Asante strategies emphasized cosmopolitan appropriation, the early nineteenth-century British Museum display crafted a different geography for these objects. The British Museum obscured the multiethnic character of objects by Akan, Hausa, Dagomba, and other artisans behind the internationally known political entity of the Asante—and under Bowdich’s name. Extending the museum’s generalizing of categories, Bowdich further reframed these works in a second book that proposed a pan-African art history.

Adinkra exemplifies these simultaneous Asante and British imperial strategies. Adinkra cloth is a stamped textile that is regarded as a quintessentially Asante cultural form, yet its formal and material roots are in diverse communities throughout the Asante Empire. Adinkra cloth was originally made from cotton woven in long strips on small foot looms, and sewn together into large swathes decorated with repeated patterns arranged in a grid (fig. 4).¹⁹ The repeated patterns on the cloth, each of which was associated with an Akan proverb or saying, were traditionally stamped using small calabash gourds carved in relief, using an ink made from boiled badie tree bark and, sometimes, slag trailings left over from iron smelting or smithing.²⁰

As the art historian Allison Martino has noted, adinkra cloth was used as a mourning garment by elites, and then popularized across the social ranks in other contexts throughout the Asante Empire and in Akan areas of the British Gold Coast colony during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²¹ Initially handwoven and hand-printed by male artisans, adinkra textiles were later produced as machine-printed cloth by British companies (figs. 5 and 6).²² While oral accounts of adinkra’s origins center on textiles, the term adinkra is more broadly understood to mean the printed motifs on the cloth: adinkra symbols linked to Akan proverbs and other Akan oral expressions including songs, riddles, and prayer.²³

Developed in dialogue with Islamic talismanic calligraphy and metalwork, reliant on Dagomba textile expertise, and steeped in Akan orality, adinkra is quintessentially Asante because of its cosmopolitan composition.²⁴ However, emergent modern museological frameworks flattened the difference. At the early nineteenth-century British Museum, Asante works, like many other artworks from outside Europe, were understood according to an ideal of homogeneous polities. Adinkra was one of several items that stood in for the Asante Empire, alongside object sets from other sites where British “expeditions” were paving the way for imperial intervention. Once placed in the museum and abstracted from its diverse origins, adinkra could be reframed according to the logics of art historical study. Through formal analysis and reduction of the adinkra to constituent patterns, Bowdich’s second book reinterpreted adinkra through a comparative examination of what he called “arts common to the ancient Egyptians, Abyssinians, and Ashantees”—an early diffusionist proposal for the field of African art.

Adinkra fabric and other objects from Africa were decontextualized and reauthored in British Museum displays, then fragmented in the space of the printed page. Each stage of adinkra’s shifting geography offered a new comparative framework, from the Asante Empire and its borderlands to the cosmopolitan space of Asante’s capital, Kumase, to the imperial framing of the British Museum. The historian Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré has described similar modes of spatial reconfiguration as disenclavement, “that is, an act of ending the isolation of a given geographic zone—beyond the already familiar regions”.²⁵ Traoré’s focus is the opening up of an “ethnic state [in Africa] to a global economy (the Atlantic system)”, and how connections to the Atlantic Coast trade and beyond reshaped patterns of circulation around trans-Sahelian routes.²⁶ In the case of adinkra, this opening up to different circuits saw adinkra patterns move across the complex visual and material matrices of multiethnic trade centers, cosmopolitan Kumase, and the British Museum.

I take these Asante objects, especially adinkra, as a case study for understanding how art from Africa entered European collections under conditions of imperialism. I ask two intersecting questions. First, how can we connect African objects in European museum collections to their origin sites, understood not as static and unchanging but as dynamic and heterogeneous? This article thus takes up the model posed by Claire Bosc-Tiessé and Peter Mark to “articulate the process whereby the objects were removed from the society of their creation and, ultimately, redefined as ‘African art’”.²⁷ This requires an analysis of two different imperial projects—the Asante and the British—and an examination of distinct strategies for confronting and absorbing exogenous cultural forms. While Malcolm McLeod points out that “it has become a cliché … that much of Asante material culture had its origin outside Asante,” and he cautions that, “This view overlooks completely the fact that cultures have a preexisting system of classification and evaluation, a pervasive cosmology which influences the utility and attractiveness of the new items”.²⁸ The first half of this article thus traces Asante approaches to incorporating “foreign” cultural forms into imperial imaginaries, arguing that Asante imperial power was predicated on its ability to appropriate and mobilize diverse metaphysical and technical powers into an Asante imperial imaginary. Adinkra cloth and adinkra symbols were enmeshed in ensembles of visual, oral, and material culture that presented cosmopolitanism as a feature of the Asante Empire.

Second, how can we understand the processes by which institutions such as the British Museum and Western art history have constructed their objects of study? Adinkra textiles entered museum collections in the Global North when European museums were concluding their shift from a cabinet of curiosities model to the model of a modern disciplinary institution. At the British Museum early displays promoted an “expeditionary” narrative of explorers gathering fascinating objects from potential imperial conquests. However, the museum’s display practices and Bowdich’s publication would soon subsume these objects—including adinkra—under emerging definitions of “African art” and ethnography. The second half of this article analyzes how the British Museum and Bowdich’s books reinterpreted adinkra and other objects from the Asante. Following Bosc-Tiessé and Mark, studies of African objects in museums should bring together an understanding of how museums have conditioned interpretations and, at the same time, reject the notion of a pure and authentic origin.

This is not merely a question of ameliorating the decontextualization enacted by the museum, of deploying object biography to reverse an object’s journeys and return it to an “original” meaning. As Dan Hicks has written in an earlier issue of British Art Studies, “the notion of object biography has served to fix the boundaries of things rather too firmly by tending to overestimate physical constancy in the face of movement between shifting human contexts”.²⁹ At the same time, I contend that forensic practices for recapitulating the violences and losses of looting, advocacy for the return of discrete objects, and contemporary interventions in museums are insufficient. These approaches often limit historical accounts to European imperial points of view that reaffirm the problematic neglect of premodern African histories and art histories. However, this period also reveals intersecting imperialisms, including non-European imperialisms. Rather than defining Asante material culture as a coherent and timeless entity, we should instead recognize how imperial strategies within West Africa incorporated and transformed exogenous artistic traditions into distinctly Asante forms at a particular moment in Asante history. By understanding these dynamics, art historians can better account for empires where European powers were not the protagonists, and appreciate African agency as a force that shaped expansive material and artistic worlds—beyond the reactionary frameworks that are tied to European hegemony.³⁰ Where museums of the Global North have tended to emphasize exemplary, singular works of art authored by a single figure or ethnic group, these works demand to be understood in the context of arrays of visuality, material culture, and spatial orders from dynamic societies.

Throughout Asante campaigns of conquest and consolidation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Asante material culture and oral histories show an openness to “foreign” artisanship, an incipient cosmopolitanism at the root of Asante imperial rule.³¹ This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the Asante came together at a nexus of multiple key crossroads of regional and global trade. Prior to the Asante Empire, emergent Akan polities were poised at the heart of a gold- and kola nut-producing forest region inland from the Gold Coast, at a hub of trade routes from the Sahel–savanna interface to the forest in the south; from Assinie in present-day Ivory Coast in the west, through areas of Allada/Ardra (later Dahomey) into Benin in the east; and bridging the forest–coast divide (fig. 7).³² As the entry of European weapons into the area disrupted the regional political balance, Akan groups seeking to establish control over trade pushed both south- and northward.³³

Even before the Asante came together as a federation or empire in the mid-seventeenth century, some sources distinguished between Akan groups that were known for their martial and mercantile expertise and other Akan groups that were skilled in artisanship such as textile manufacture. An early seventeenth-century Dutch map, for example, enumerates dozens of West African polities, including “great acanij … rich in slaves”, the principal gold merchants of “acanij”, an undistinguished “akan” group, the “bonnoe” who are “simple” and have no forest, and a locale with no gold called “insoco” (fig. 8). The map label for Insoco describes how its “cloths woven like carpets” were highly esteemed by the “acanisten”—potentially encompassing all the various Akan groups to the south, including the pre-Asante Akan polities of Acanij and Great Acanij.³⁴ These distinctions in expertise—military, mercantile, and artisanal—were linked to particular trade and production centers. One such center was the inland market of Insoco, or Bɛo-Nsokɔ (historical Begho), active from around the fourteenth century through its abandonment in the late eighteenth century.³⁵

As a key junction between Saharan caravan trade routes and Akan forest regions to the south, Bɛo-Nsokɔ’s inhabitants included the Bono (Brong) Akan people, Mande-speaking Dyula traders (some of whom were Muslim), and diverse communities of craftspeople.³⁶ Linguistic evidence and archaeological evidence, such as seventeenth-century spindle whorls and dye tools, substantiate an inland center of cotton textile production at Bɛo-Nsokɔ, situated in the savanna–forest ecotone at the north-northwest boundaries of the region that would become Asante.³⁷ Additionally, around 1700, a French apostolic prefect visiting Assinie, farther west along the coast, noted that traders from inland brought “Turkish carpets”, along with “fine cotton fabrics striped with red and blue silk” from “Enzoko” (Bɛo-Nsokɔ).³⁸ Thus, from this early period, textile expertise is located northwest of the Asante heartland.

While the Asante would develop indigenous modes of textile production at the heart of empire no later than the eighteenth century—most famously, kente cloth—evidence points to a consistent practice of importing important textiles and textile techniques from the edges of empire.³⁹ Since cotton grows in the savanna region but not the forest, it is understandable that textile technologies would come to the Asante from the north.⁴⁰ Narrow band, or strip, weaving on small looms may have been introduced into Akan border regions such as Bɛo-Nsokɔ by Mande-speaking Dyula traders from even farther to the north, with the textiles produced there then traded south into Asante Akan areas.⁴¹ Asante weaving practices may also have been influenced by neighboring trade goods such as Quaqua cloth from the present-day Ivory Coast and strip-woven cloth from Ouidah, Allada, and Benin.⁴² Weaving was certainly firmly established by 1817, when Bowdich observed people in Kumase using a foot loom, an example of which he sent with other items to the British Museum.

Asante Akan ruling powers did not try to hide the foreign origins of their paradigmatic symbols. The Asante drew from the Denkyira Akan for a class of ritual executioners called tͻprɛfoͻ, who introduced musical instruments such as the tͻprɛ drum and aworobɛn horn, as well as forms of dance, to the Asante Empire.⁴³ The Denkyira diviner Ɔkomfo Anokye founded Asante’s Nsumankwaa division (department of medicines), a group of powerful spiritual advisers drawn largely from outside Asante, who were able to effect material transformation.⁴⁴ After the Asante war with Techiman in the 1720s, Osei Tutu’s successor, Asantehene Opoku Ware I, demanded that “fetish priests and medicine men” in Techiman join the Nsumankwaa.⁴⁵ As the art historian Ray Silverman has shown, the Asante appropriation of “exotic goods and ideologies [was] a strategy for enhancing social, political and religious presence and power”.⁴⁶ Asante power thus relied on appropriating esoteric knowledge from beyond its material boundaries—here Denkyira and Techiman—making the formation of the Asante Empire a spiraling process of drawing the edges in toward a center.

For the philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, this embodies an Akan understanding of creation—not as emerging from nothingness but as a process of continual transformation.⁴⁷ Similarly, to select Kumase as the location of the Asante capital, some oral history relates, the Denkyira diviner Ɔkomfo Anokye planted kum trees in three locations: Kumase was chosen because it was where the trees grew best rather than because it was an ancestral origin site.⁴⁸ Asante courtyard compounds would thus be anchored by a gyase dua (courtyard tree), or a representation of a tree, referencing settlement after a tradition of migration.⁴⁹ Asante narratives frame power in terms of a transformative appropriation of exogenous practices rather than of inception and autochthony.

The Asante interest in strategically absorbing external influence—an imperial incorporation of the periphery into the center at Kumase—is evident even in canonical stories of the Sika Dwa Kofi, or gold stool, the preeminent material sign of Asante kingship.⁵⁰ According to oral histories, Osei Tutu I established Asante Akan sovereignty (around 1700) with the support of Ɔkomfo Anokye, a priest-diviner from the Denkyira Akan kingdom and not from Asante (see Dankara in fig. 2).⁵¹ The outsider Ɔkomfo Anokye magically crafted, or called into being, a new royal stool for Asantehene Osei Tutu I that would unify the diverse groups that constituted the nascent Asante Empire.⁵² The creation of the gold stool exemplifies how Asante power emerged not from autochthony but from the strategic adoption of external expertise and ritual authority.

While ceremonial stools were a common emblem of political organization in many Akan states, this narrative of Asante and its royal stool is distinct for its explicit narrative of origins outside Asante.⁵³ In contrast, Bono Akan accounts describe their royal stool emerging from a hole in the earth along with the first ancestors, while the Denkyira Akan tell of a mother ancestor who discovered their stool or heralded its arrival from the sky.⁵⁴ The origins of these stools are narrated through stories of foundational figures to support place-based territorial claims and vertical arrival—from holes in the ground or descending from the sky.⁵⁵ In contrast, the Asante gold stool concretizes Ɔkomfo Anokye and Osei Tutu’s savvy post-conquest invention of collective symbols to exercise authority over diverse communities under Asante’s centralizing administrative state.⁵⁶

Asante imperial power lay precisely in aggregating diverse polities, ethnicities, and traditions without needing to completely erase their exogenous character, and absorbing them into emphatically Asante practices.⁵⁷ While this may be seen as drawing on the longer history of Akan matriclans, which absorbed outsiders through intermarriage and descent, these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century strategies emphasized esoteric and spiritual knowledge.⁵⁸ For example, Asante’s esteemed sheep wool, goat hair, or camel hair textile known as nsaa also originated outside the Asante heartland, in regional trade routes spanning the forest and Sahel.⁵⁹ On the advice of the priest Ɔkomfo Anokye that the gold stool should never touch the ground directly, the stool sat on an expanse of nsaa.⁶⁰ More generally, nsaa cloth has been used in Akan societies to mark the boundary between sacred and profane: beyond keeping the gold stool from touching the ground, it might cover the threshold of an Asante stool room, drape a royal palanquin, or provide a barrier between a sacred relic and the ground within a priestly shrine.⁶¹ Like the gold stool, nsaa fabric came from beyond the Asante heartland, thus binding a non-Asante group into the core of Asante courtly traditions as the empire expanded.

There are also examples of the Asantehene seeking to appropriate European techniques from the southern edges of the empire, although these lacked the sacred significance of objects and techniques from the north and west. In the early eighteenth century, a Danish merchant described how Asantehene Opoku Ware I sought to establish “factories” (Fabriken) for the production of goods in Asante.⁶² Seeing potential profits in alcohol, he solicited Dutch soldiers from Elmina Fort to initiate a brandy distillery in Kumase. The soldiers began collecting equipment and setting up the distillery, but were called back south to the fort to be punished for desertion. While the brandy distillery was thwarted, the Asantehene “had another idea”: to spin and weave cotton, incorporating unraveled European taffeta and wool to make patterned cloth in Asante.⁶³ Here too foreign materials and techniques were—literally—interwoven with Asante practices.

The invention of adinkra cloth demonstrates how the Asante Empire openly appropriated foreign technical expertise as a sign of imperial power. Oral histories surrounding adinkra fabric recognize, and even foreground, precisely these processes of overtly absorbing the margins of empire into the center. As the historical Asante Empire was consolidating—so Akan oral histories tell—artisans from defeated polities introduced designs and dye techniques for adinkra cloth to the Asante victors.⁶⁴ Some accounts date the Asante acquisition of adinkra textiles to the reign of Asantehene Osei Tutu I or perhaps Asantehene Opoku Ware I, in the early eighteenth century, as the Asante were in the process of establishing their militarily powerful empire.⁶⁵ One oral history of this early eighteenth-century period relates that the Asante under Osei Tutu I gained the knowledge of adinkra from the defeated Akan state of Denkyira, southwest of the Asante—the source of the gold stool.⁶⁶ Another oral history centers on the rule of Opoku Ware I, which began around 1720, with adinkra originating in the Bono (or Brong) Akan homeland around Bonomanso, northwest of the Asante core, along the forest–Sahel trade routes leading from Kumase toward the historical textile production site of Begho.⁶⁷ Perhaps the most commonly circulated account of adinkra today describes how the Asante acquired adinkra a century later, as a result of the Asante–Gyaman War of 1818.⁶⁸ Gyaman was a diverse state led by Bono Akans who had moved westward in successive displacements and migrations—northwest of Bonomanso, west of Begho—to center on the multiethnic town of Bonduku located at the edge of the savanna in present-day Ivory Coast (see Gaman and Buntooko in fig. 2).⁶⁹ Although Asante adinkra certainly predates this 1818 war, such narratives implicitly recognize the Asante Empire’s continued expansion and open incorporation of exogenous practices, particularly those from the north.

This absorption of the edges into a political center may seem a strategy characteristic of all empires. As a visual demonstration of the Asante Empire’s acquisition of exotic techniques, adinkra could be interpreted as a parallel to the British Empire’s acquisition of an object such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India and set into the United Kingdom’s Crown Jewels in the mid-nineteenth century. However, where the Koh-i-Noor is a singular, spectacular marker of conquest, a raw material recut and set within British imperial visuality, Asante rulership redeployed the Denkyira gold stool and rituals, Dagomba nsaa cloth, Techiman medicine, and European textiles as part of a cosmopolitan array. The power of the Asante Empire lay not simply in seizing goods and physically possessing them but also in acquiring esoteric knowledge and mastering the ability to deploy it in the service of imperial unity. Asante authority, therefore, extended beyond material conquest to epistemic dominion. The empire’s strength lay not merely in marking conquest through possession of singular trophies but in its ability to transform external influences into elements of Asante cosmopolitanism.

How did adinkra function as esoteric knowledge within Asante society? In other words, what significances are lost once objects such as adinkra cloth enter museums in the Global North as solely Asante, without acknowledgment of its complex, multiethnic genealogies? Adinkra emerged from a context of cultural exchange and appropriation within and beyond Asante society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certainly, adinkra is, ultimately, deeply Akan, with specific forms tied to Twi proverbs in a rich cross-medial matrix that combines orality, image, and materiality.⁷⁰ At the same time, oral history narratives situate the development of adinkra and other Asante textiles in border areas, through conquest of Akan polities including Denkyira, Bonomanso, Gyaman, and Techiman. Although these accounts are less explicit about the influence of non-Akan groups, northern and Muslim traders and artisans were also instrumental in the Akan development of adinkra and related visual culture.⁷¹

Located at a crossroads of trade, Asante Akan groups had engaged in exchange with Muslim groups to the north for centuries. In addition to the spread of weaving techniques from north to south (and across an east–west axis), Asante Empire artisans were familiar with Islamic ornamentation and Arabic inscriptions from Mamluk brassware and goldwork, Islamic calligraphic amulets, and other material culture traded across Sahel routes. As Raymond Silverman notes, Asante brass lost-wax kuduo basins and bowls feature ornamentation that echoes the compositions and Arabic inscriptions of fifteenth-century Mamluk metalware (figs. 9 and [10(#aanagnost-fig10)]), likely acquired through Asante conquest of a northern Bono Akan state.⁷² It is thus unsurprising to see visual similarities between floral motifs on Mamluk metal vessels, Akan kuduo decoration, and adinkra symbols such as ananse ntontan (spider’s web/shrewdness), or between Arabic calligraphy on Mamluk metalwork, curved patterns on Akan kuduo vessels, and repeated Ɔsram (scales/the moon/endurance) adinkra symbols (fig. 11).⁷³ Additionally, the adinkra symbol dweninmmen (ram’s horns / strength) visually resembles a ram’s head and references the northern Islamic festival Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) at which a ram is sacrificed, while the nsaa (artisanship) adinkra symbol refers to the northern textile used in Asante sacred spaces.⁷⁴ These parallels point to sustained Asante engagement with the north as a source of visual forms and sacred power.

Even as the expansionist Asante Empire was reorienting toward coastal trade and Atlantic networks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the north remained important as a place of potent esoteric learning and expertise, particularly around textiles.⁷⁵ Akan groups often regarded objects originating in the north as having sacred associations.⁷⁶ Throughout this period, the north had a specific valence in Asante culture, not simply as a borderlands area but with a sense of the exotic and ritually powerful. For example, the nsaa (artisanship) adinkra sign refers to the sacred nsaa wool cloth that came to Asante as tributes from sites in northern vassal states, such as Salaga in the Dagomba kingdom, and which was valued for its northern origins (see Sallagha and Dagwumba in fig. 2).⁷⁷ Additionally, oral histories recount the origins of the Asantehene’s wardrobe mistresses in the Asante conquest of the northwestern Akan kingdom of Techiman.⁷⁸ Furthermore Allison Martino points out that the materials for making adinkra stamps and dye also traditionally came from north of Kumase, reinforcing the association between adinkra and the north.⁷⁹ Oral histories of adinkra note that it was integrated into Asante culture on the direct say-so of the Asantehene, through the acquisition of textile technologies and their associated sacrality as a form of war booty.⁸⁰ We should also note that, like the British Empire, the Asante Empire was engaged in the trafficking of enslaved people—both domestically and through transatlantic routes—and key artisanal techniques were sometimes appropriated from the individuals enslaved by the Asante in conquered regions.⁸¹ Through conquest and migration as well as trade, Asante associations with the north encompassed goods, technical and artisanal skill, esoteric practices, and expert practitioners.

Beyond materials and techniques, engagement with the north also introduced visual forms, particularly Islamic motifs and talismanic structures, that informed adinkra cloth’s compositional logics. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the Asantehene invited Dyula (Juula) and Hausa merchants and artisans, Muslim scholars, and Islamic diviners to settle in Kumase, where the ruler relied on some of them as court scribes, advisers, and crafters of amulets and talismans (figs. 12 and 13).⁸² These amulets were often in the form of paper with Quranic inscriptions arranged in grids or other regular arrays, folded and encased in a pouch of leather, cloth, or embossed gold (fig. 14). Additionally, adinkra seems to draw on West African protective talismanic garments, which displayed Quranic verses as blocks of Arabic text along with magic squares and other protective diagrams (figs. 15 and 16).⁸³ Given that the north was the origin of these amulets and talismanic objects, the Asantehene was thus harnessing the power of associations with the north to absorb esoteric power from the fringes of empire into the center—within Asante cosmopolitan practice.

For Asante users, Islamic amulets were particularly useful as protective wear in wartime, supplementing Akan talismans and regalia to create visual arrays that expressed metaphysical power.⁸⁴ Even though these amulets had their origins in Islamic traditions, the archaeologist Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann explains that Muslim scribes “satisfied non-Muslim Asante concerns, needs, and desires, by tailoring Islamic talismans to market demands” in Kumase and elsewhere in the Asante Empire.⁸⁵ An image from Joseph Dupuis’s British diplomatic mission to Kumase in 1820 shows a caboceer, or Asante military leader, with a horse blanket covered in Arabic inscriptions (fig. 17). In one of Bowdich’s images, an Asante captain wears a cloth smock or vest “covered with fetishes and saphies in gold and silver; and embroidered cases of almost every colour … and they held a long iron chain between their teeth, with a scrap of Moorish [sic], writing affixed to the end of it” (fig. 18).⁸⁶ The Asante captain looks to be wearing a batakari, or Asante war shirt, with numerous amulets affixed to it in a rough grid formation (fig. 19). The protective efficacy of these objects lay in Islamic and Akan visualities in an imperial display.

This connection to Islamic motifs is not fundamentally about the significance of individual adinkra symbols, nor only about the transformation of script into abstract artistic forms, but about overall compositions. As Savage points out, the symmetric geometries of amuletic inscriptions inform the arrangement of amulets affixed to batakari shirts and adinkra cloth design.⁸⁷ Across Mamluk metalwork, kuduo vessels, inscribed amulets, gold amulet cases, and architectural relief, the motifs are contained by frames that situate each symbol—often repeated—within a broader matrix. With adinkra cloth too, the symbols are arrayed in meaningful juxtapositions, with narrower bands of repeated patterns between larger cells. Whether or not selected adinkra motifs can be traced to individual motifs in Islamic metalwork, scripts, or talismanic forms, these traditions share a gridded spatial logic, repetition, and emphasis on positionality in broader visual and material contexts.⁸⁸ This esoteric knowledge intersects with spatial ordering in that sacred effects derive from, and are reinforced by, compositional logics of the grid, geometries, and framing.

Adinkra motifs function as a reservoir of imagery deployed across textiles, amulets, goldwork, and Asante architecture.⁸⁹ In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kumase, red earth foundations and adampan reception rooms reflected traditional Akan architecture, while abstract wooden window screens (nkyimkyim) and architectural decorations originated in the Islamic north (fig. 20).⁹⁰ Hanging talismans signified Asante’s cosmopolitan connections to the foreign prestige of Dyula traders and court scribes, while the nkyimkyim screens puncturing Kumase’s earthen facades incorporated references to Islamic script to harness the “apotropaic power of foreign elements” on the scale of an entire building.⁹¹

Additionally, Asante architecture featured handmade decorative reliefs incorporating motifs that echo adinkra forms and Islamic ornamentation, juxtaposed with the gyase dua tree, marking Asante settlement (see fig. 17). In Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, Bowdich described the production of these reliefs:

The walls still soft, they formed moulds or frame works of the patterns in delicate slips of cane, connected by grass. The two first slips … projected the relief, commonly mezzo: the interstices were then filled up with the plaster, and assumed the appearance depicted. The poles or pillars were sometimes encircled by twists of cane, intersecting each other, which, being filled up with thin plaster, resembled the lozenge and cable ornaments of the Anglo-Norman order; the quatre-foil was very common, and by no means rude, from the symmetrical bend of the cane which formed it. I saw a few pillars, (after they had been squared with the plaster) with numerous slips of cane pressed perpendicularly on to the wet surface, which being covered again with a very thin coat of plaster, closely resembled fluting.⁹²

For the architectural historian Labelle Prussin, these “arabesque” surface motifs showed the Asante Empire’s emphasis on Arabic script as a way of visually reinforcing the architectural qualities of “enclosing arts”, or the building as a protective envelope.⁹³ For Prussin, the “visual, magical efficacy of the written word which historical development carried in from the north” was “incorporated into the existing wattle-and-daub structure” of Asante architecture and “became a catalytic agent in the transformation of an aesthetic”.⁹⁴ Similarly, Savage calls the transfer of talismanic forms from paper to earthen architecture and textiles a form of protective “social wrapping”.⁹⁵ Both scholars point to the protective power of amulets worn on one’s person, and of talismanic garments that enfold the body, expanding to the surrounding buildings. These enveloping principles also shaped Kumase’s imperial architecture.

As the Asante Empire consolidated, imperial power was materialized in ways that combined wrapping or enveloping techniques with public-facing architectural formats. Rather than Asante architecture’s traditional interior-facing, raised reception rooms, Prussin writes, Kumase’s adampan reception rooms began to face outward: “This architectural reversal, reflecting the increasingly complex functions of the capital … politically instituted festivals, and the ritual formalities associated with them, ushered in a new system of visual communication”.⁹⁶ As visualized in Bowdich’s drawing of Adoom street, the architectural historian Kevin Dumouchelle describes this as part of Kumase’s “hyper-Asante” architecture: buildings are “raised on a platform marked by its distinctive, ochre slip. A profusion of abstract decorative reliefs draws the eye across the surface of the buildings”, and the adampan are unusually public-facing and feature “exaggeratedly high roofs” (fig. 21).⁹⁷ In these overstated architectural details and atypical openness toward the city, Dumouchelle sees a performance of Asante identity in the service of establishing national unity: “Literal stage sets upon which political discourse and the administration of empire was daily performed, these structures served as architectural tools of national cohesion”.⁹⁸ Moreover, Prussin argues, like the Arabic script openly worn by the war captain, these architectural decorations bring secret, enveloped amuletic powers into open view.⁹⁹ Northern-inflected artisanship in architectural decoration, talismans, and textiles operate in cross-medial dialogue to show Asante cosmopolitan accumulation as a visual demonstration of imperial power predicated on formal strategies of surface composition. These strategies also unfolded at the scale of the city.

Through the streets of Kumase, varied aesthetic forms, craft expertise, and technical skills—displayed on the walls of its buildings, adorning the bodies of its inhabitants, and on show in the marketplace—demonstrated the geographical reach of the Asante Empire and its harnessing of exogenous powers. What was unique about the Asante Empire, as the historian Kwame Arhin has written, was not a specific innovation but the drawing together of diverse inhabitants, “and the consequential cross-fertilization of the skills imported from the different sources”. Arhin describes the objects that made up the visual and material culture of the city, including blacksmith’s wares, goldwork, leather sandals and sheaths, ceremonial whisks and cushions, dyed cloth, and vibrant umbrellas.¹⁰⁰ This was evident in the marketplace, as Bowdich’s book shows: his image of Adoom street features a man weaving, a “fetish woman” carrying horses tails, and a woman holding gold scales with clay pipes on her sales mat (figs. 22–25). Extending this imperial visuality to the city space, we can see nineteenth-century Kumase as a place where objects from the corners of the Asante Empire came together in a visual interplay that emphasized the city’s cosmopolitanism and the Asantehene’s imperial reach.

As a mourning fabric, adinkra cloth would presumably be present only intermittently in these urban contexts. Yet even if adinkra textiles were not everyday garments, they were present and visible enough for Bowdich to observe their production—albeit perhaps from a distance—as he claimed they were painted with a feather rather than stamped. Bowdich’s discussion of adinkra cloth, “principally manufactured in Inta [Gonja] and Dagwumba”, also suggests that he may have commissioned the painting of the adinkra design in Kumase: “There will be a very fair specimen in the British Museum, the price of painting which was one ackie”.¹⁰¹ This helps explain the limitations of Bowdich’s interpretations of adinkra, since he encountered the textile as a commodity rather than in the context of its use as mourning attire. Because commerce was the primary goal of Bowdich’s mission, he sought to acquire objects that exemplified technical developments and local manufacturing processes.¹⁰² Yet adinkra’s visual vocabulary extended well beyond portable commodities such as cloth.

Visible in molded decorations on buildings and other objects, adinkra’s broader image trove permeated Asante.¹⁰³ Prussin argues that the association of adinkra, architecture, and talismanic protective enveloping is supported by how adinkra symbols refer to architectural principles such as aban (two-story house, or seat of government) and mframadan (wind-resistant house).¹⁰⁴ The links between architecture, Islamic amulets, and adinkra fabric can be seen in late nineteenth-century photographs of the northern town of Bonduku (likely founded as a successor to the Dyula trade town of Begho, and located in the present-day Ivory Coast) that show an interplay of textile, architecture, gold weights, and practices of inscription (figs. 26 and 27). Individuals clothed in patterned textiles—including a man dressed in adinkra cloth—handle gold weights whose forms may echo the fabric on which they rest, or inscribe paper (perhaps with talismans) while sitting beside a stool with carved patterns, in architectural surroundings decorated with further permutations of abstract forms. Talismanic inscriptions came into being in dialogue with their surroundings, mapped out into orderly gridded squares before being concealed in folded and wrapped containers. Similarly, the adinkra symbol nsaa can be seen in an adinkra stamp, a nsaa-shaped goldweight used to sell gold, Kumase architectural relief, and a Dagomba-style leather bag that Bowdich collected—items that could have been seen in public places around Kumase (figs. 28–31; see fig. 2).

By the early nineteenth century, when Bowdich visited Kumase, the appropriation of foreign elements had extended to European practices. European guns hung on the Kumase palace walls, which Savage proposes were acting in parallel with amulets to cast a protective envelope around the royal residence (fig. 32).¹⁰⁵ The illustration shows European weaponry displayed as part of an ensemble of earthen architecture adorned with abstract designs, while the soldier standing before the building wears blue-and-white-striped cloth that may have originated in Benin, Bonduku, or India, or be a locally rewoven assemblage.¹⁰⁶ Since the Asantehene’s power was predicated in part on maintaining the ability to carry out trade, this abundance in the marketplace is also a form of imperial display.¹⁰⁷

Beyond the marketplace, palace architecture also demonstrated imperial reach. When Bowdich came to Kumase and spoke of a museum, an institution that gathered impressive objects from all over the world to place them on display at the center of the British Empire, it would have been intelligible to the Asantehene and in keeping with the cosmopolitan character of the capital city itself.¹⁰⁸ Perhaps prompted by Bowdich’s accounts of his homeland, the Asantehene began planning a European-style stone building, which would later house the Asante imperial collections. Bowdich remarked that “the King made frequent enquiries about the architecture of England, of which we gave him some idea by drawings”.¹⁰⁹ A few years after Bowdich’s visit, the British consul Joseph Dupuis observed the construction of Kumase’s new European-style stone palace complex. “I am building”, the Asantehene is quoted as saying,

a fort like Cape Coast Castle; but I shall make it very high that I may look out and see all the town … That building you see is to be made very grand. The inside shall be gold, ivory, and brass … all the black countries may know I am a great king here. Now white men know me, I must live in a great house as white kings do.¹¹⁰

The resulting multistory stone structure, named the Aban likely from the Mande term al banna (based on an Arabic term for builder), was built by (possibly enslaved) Fante masons contracted through Dutch middlemen. While one British visitor called it “Moorish in its style”, the Asantehene asserted that it emulated the European architecture along the West African coast.¹¹¹ As evidenced in text and images by British visitors, and reported statements by the Asantehene, the Asante imperial imaginary synthesized diverse forms of artisanship into a pageant of consumable objects.¹¹²

By the early nineteenth century, Kumase’s urban and architectural landscape was demonstrating how the Asante Empire had gathered and synthesized diverse artisanship, material forms, and protective symbolism—from Islamic talismans and northern strip-weaving to European firearms and architectural models—to project authority, unity, and cosmopolitan reach. These objects and visual practices were not only performative within the city but also circulatory: they could be mobilized, displayed, and exchanged beyond Asante territory. The Aban drew not only on northern and Islamic influences but also on European ones along the Atlantic Coast and beyond, and its contents would ultimately include items from North Africa and Europe as well as from closer neighbors. This was a cosmopolitanism akin to Traoré’s disenclavement.¹¹³ Reorienting away from the north, and toward the Atlantic Coast and beyond, Asante’s empire building expressed its shifting imperial geographies visually and materially.

Bowdich’s mission to Kumase, aimed at acquiring local artisanship for potential European trade, reveals how Asante material culture was already legible as both a marker of imperial power and as a commodity within global networks. Once these objects entered British possession, however, they were reframed according to a different logic of empire, transformed from instruments of Asante authority and cosmopolitan display into objects of curiosity at the British Museum.

On returning to England in 1818, Bowdich presented many of the objects he had collected in Asante and Gabon to the British Museum, where they were installed in glass cases alongside items collected on other expeditions or military operations across the globe (figs. 33–35). It is not clear how, or even whether, the objects from Asante were displayed immediately after they entered the collection, but by 1832 they were housed in Room 1 of the generically named Upper Floor of the British Museum at Montagu House. On the lower floor was the Gallery of Antiquities, then expanding with the construction of a tailor-made room for the Parthenon marbles, alongside the museum’s collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures; ancient and modern coins and medals; and prints and drawings, including the Cracherode collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works by Dürer, Claude, Holbein, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Marcantonio, among others.¹¹⁴ There was a clear spatial division between the artistic items in the Gallery of Antiquities and the natural and artificial “curiosities” and minor arts in the section labeled simply “Upper Floor”.

Within this Upper Floor, there were further divisions, with collection categories including “Artificial Curiosities from different Countries”, as well as botanical volumes, ancient seals and bronzes, and collections of reptiles, fish, and corals (fig. 36).¹¹⁵ The items from Asante were located in Room 1, alongside other “artificial curiosities”, meaning human-made items (as opposed to “natural curiosities”) from far-flung locations.¹¹⁶ Asante items were displayed in cases between a Fula cloak, Kawésqar or Yahgan birch bark-and-reed baskets from Patagonia, and other items organized according to the donor, many of them ship’s captains or named explorers such as Captain Cook. These displays presented objects as evidence of far-flung exploration in the service of British imperial expansion. Room 1 case labels sometimes noted the ethnic or group identities of the objects’ creators, while in other instances only the collection location was given. Many of the individual donors mentioned were officers in the Royal Navy on “expeditions” in the Arctic, South America, or South Pacific; this demonstrated the links between British museum collections and British military operations.¹¹⁷ Others were connected to one of the English mercantile companies, including Bowdich, who aspired to a position with the Africa Company in Asante, and G. A. Princep, a business owner and the son of an East India Company shareholder in Mumbai.¹¹⁸ The “artificial curiosities” room offered a geographic snapshot of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the early nineteenth century, with Asante as one node of the nascent empire.¹¹⁹

The “artificial curiosities” in Room 1 were differentiated from other objects not only by geography, but also according to the primitivizing organizational logics of the British Museum. Art from India, for example, was more easily assimilated to antiquarian art objects, such as Egyptian, Greek, and Roman items in “lesser” materials such as terracotta, glass, and metal.¹²⁰ In contrast, an 1832 guide to the British Museum called Room 1’s contents—including the Bowdich donation—“artificial curiosities from the less civilized parts of the world”.¹²¹

This foregrounding of origins was somewhat different from a parallel project occurring at the Musée Napóleon in France around the same time. In addition to the well-known plunder of North African sites such as Dendera, the Napoleonic army’s military looting led to the acquisition of myriad objects for the French state from European sites such as Kassel, Spanish Naples, and The Hague.¹²² As the art historian Bénédicte Savoy has concluded, the inventory at the Musée Napóleon—perhaps the first modern museum database—worked to obscure the origins of objects. Rather than geographic origins, cultural authorship, or aesthetic categorization, the inventory emphasized the site of military confiscation, thus naturalizing the objects’ appropriation and nationalization by the French state.¹²³ In the British context, however, guidebooks and synopses of the collections did not conceal so much as blur the longer provenances of objects with their far-flung origins, highlighting how the nascent empire was being stitched together.

As the British Museum expanded its collection in the early nineteenth century, each addition provoked a new configuration of objects, with categories reconceptualized according to the shifting geographies of natural history, ethnography, and fine arts. Changing categorizing systems and understandings of objects unfold across different editions of Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum spanning the first half of the nineteenth century. Across this time, objects from West Africa, as well as human-made objects gathered on expeditions and “artificial curiosities from the less civilized parts of the world”, were included among minerals and fossils.¹²⁴ Beginning in the 1840s, objects obtained in Asante were housed in what was newly labeled as the “ethnographic room”, alongside cases with objects from China, northern India, Afghanistan, French Guiana, and (Indigenous) North America, among others, and by 1860 Asante items were rarely mentioned.¹²⁵ This shift simultaneously shows Britain’s imperial expansion and the shift in framing of African works from curiosities to ethnographic objects.

By moving from a cabinet of curiosities model toward a museum with distinct zones for ethnography and the fine arts—later divided between different museums—the 1840s British Museum display was catching up with Bowdich’s 1819 book, Mission, which combined ethnographic attention and mercantile assessment of craft, and pointed to the excellent examples of artisanship he was setting aside for the British Museum. Images in the book reaffirmed this frame by showing a weaver at his loom (artisanship) and a woman with wares set out at the market (commerce) (see fig. 22). Bowdich also discussed the potential for gold mining in the interior, noted the local demand for guns and powder, and suggested that Manchester cotton might fulfill a market niche in Asante.¹²⁶

As Savage and McLeod point out, the range of objects that made their way from Kumase to the British Museum were artificially narrow—excluding items of European manufacture commonly owned and traded in Kumase at the time.¹²⁷ Yet they also revealed the Asante Empire’s links across the Sahel and Sahara to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Bowdich explained in his book that many of the objects he had obtained were produced wholly or in part outside the Asante Empire, or were crafted by non-Asante artisans in Asante; for example, “The locks they use are from Houssa [Hausaland] … one will be sent to the British Museum … White cloths, which are principally manufactured in Inta and Dagwumba [Dagomba], [the Asante] paint for mourning with a mixture of blood [sic] and a red dye wood … There will be a very fair specimen in the British Museum”.¹²⁸ (Additionally, the dagger and sheath, also included in “all from Ashantee”, may actually be items Bowdich purchased from Ongom/Bakele artisans in Gabon on his way back to England from Kumase.¹²⁹) During his travels, Bowdich did not simply document everything he encountered in Kumase but actually omitted European objects in favor of Asante’s complicated geographical entanglements within Africa. Once these objects entered the British Museum, however, they were reduced to “all from Ashantee”—first as evidence of an expeditionary framework related to “negotiation with our new allies, the Ashantee”, and then as an ethnographic museum strategy.¹³⁰

In addition to contributing the first substantial group of works from sub-Saharan Africa to the British Museum, Bowdich also produced what is perhaps the first proposal for a pan-African history of art—albeit with a problematic diffusionist narrative. Just two years after his first book, Bowdich published An Essay on the Superstitions, Customs and Arts, Common to the Ancient Egyptians, Abyssinians and Ashantees, in which he seeks to historicize Asante arts as an outgrowth of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia (Abyssinia): “this little Essay will prove, by a variety of curious evidence, that Abyssinia is not the only part of Africa which has been partly civilized by an intercourse with colonists and emigrants from ancient Egypt”.¹³¹ Notwithstanding the pejorative diffusionist framework, namely the idea that Asante culture originated with “the civilized Ethiopians of Herodotus and Diodorus”, Bowdich seriously considered the art of multiple African cultures and their histories across an expansive geography.¹³²

To make his argument, Bowdich needed to move away from the ethnographic style of Mission, which depicted the objects from Asante within a complex web of visual and behavioral associations.¹³³ Instead, Superstitions adopted the conventions of early-nineteenth-century scientific illustration.¹³⁴ Through his wife, Sarah, Bowdich enlisted the artist Jane Landseer to visit the British Museum and produce close-up watercolors of the objects “from Asante”, after which Sarah Bowdich redrew them in preparation for print.¹³⁵ The result is a page spread of objects floating on blank backgrounds.

The formal arrangements of the Superstitions images foreshadow the standardized, neutral backgrounds of modern museum photography, as seen in twenty-first-century images of these same objects in the British Museum collection (fig. 37). Scattered across a blank page at disparate scales are lithographic images of these items, plus a design labeled as “part of the pattern of a painted mourning cloth”, that is, adinkra (annotated in the image with a “13”).¹³⁶ The following pages depict “Ashantee Architectural Ornaments” as linear forms, with gradations of line weight to suggest slight relief on a blank background (fig. 38). (The book illustration omits several additional items Bowdich presented to the British Museum, including gold discs and amulet cases, additional lengths of cloth, a foot loom, a parasol, and arrows.)

This decontextualization of objects from Asante is most blatant in the case of the adinkra cloth. As Savage has shown, Sarah Bowdich composed the lithograph in Bowdich’s book by combining Landseer’s watercolor images of single isolated objects.¹³⁷ In Landseer’s watercolors objects are oriented horizontally or vertically as if placed on a table or shelf, and usually include shadows. However, in the book the objects float askew at various scales, with shading omitted to remove any sense of the objects’ spatial context. The adinkra textile, for example, is not only plucked from its setting, but becomes a fragmented set of isolated forms applied directly to the page, with no edges, denied even the semblance of materiality. The adinkra design is also removed from any relationship to the bodies of people who may have worn it, just as the architectural decorations are excerpted from larger patterns on buildings.

In one sense, Bowdich’s book enacted a familiar process of modern Western scholarship, of withdrawing objects from their lived context and placing them against a supposedly neutral backdrop to appreciate their scientific data or their formal, aesthetic qualities. The philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe has described the integration of “primitive” art into the “Western tradition” as precisely this two-step process: first, ethnologization, “isolating a datum from its real context” and analyzing it, which renders it capable of being “subsumed to the grids of ethnographic study”; then, aestheticization, whereby a work is “localized on a chronological scale determined by Western experience”.¹³⁸ For the art historian Kobena Mercer, African objects in Western collections are continually undergoing a “process of decontextualization set in motion by colonial uprooting”, which is perpetuated in the space of the museum.¹³⁹ Mercer focuses on the aestheticization of the modernist white cube museum space, but this decontextualization had already begun in the earlier institutional spaces of the museum and the (proto-)art history book.

The objects from the Asante Empire entered the British Museum prior to a hardening of conventions of collection and display for “non-Western” objects.¹⁴⁰ At the early nineteenth-century British Museum, objects were clustered in the museum’s glass-fronted wooden cases, sometimes according to their function but often according to geography and even specific expeditions, more in line with a cabinet of curiosities model than with the emerging modern museum.¹⁴¹ These objects entered the space of a British Museum that was still being formed, with collections not yet divided into orderly categories of natural history, ethnography, and art, each with its own internal conceptual logics, partitions, and exhibition design. The objects set against the neutral background of Bowdich’s blank page did not anticipate a white cube museum space—the British Museum was then housed in a building adapted from a seventeenth-century aristocratic mansion—nor did they match the clusters of objects on shelves in the British Museum cases.¹⁴² Instead, Bowdich’s book functioned as one proposal for how these objects might enter British intellectual life. Still, Bowdich relied on the museum’s decontextualizing logic: foregrounding his authorship of the Asante collection allowed for the label “Asante” to assume greater importance than the individual attributions.

Formally, Bowdich modeled his book on contemporary archaeological reports such as Frédéric Cailliaud’s investigation of Thebes, which removed isolated objects from their settings and depicted them at disparate scales on blank backgrounds (figs. 39 and 40; see figs. 37 and 38).¹⁴³ Bowdich was particularly struck by Henry Salt’s voyage through Abyssinia, which served as a direct model for his investigation of architectural ornamentation in Asante (figs. 41 and 42).¹⁴⁴ Bowdich followed Salt’s model in page spreads of decontextualized architectural ornaments, and in Superstitions he laid out a typology of Asante architectural motifs, which he compared to an array of inscriptions in stone at Axum, Ethiopia, in the lower part of the image (see fig. 38). While it was most likely Sarah Bowdich who composed the individual images, Bowdich’s text shows that he thought strategically about how images could be used as evidence and was instrumental in crafting the overall book structure. Generally, he sought to emulate Salt’s studies and to contribute to broader intellectual debates around cultural diffusion across Africa. To do so, he proposed this formal argument about the relationship of Asante ornamentation to Egyptian precedents:

The freedom and simplicity of the larger ornaments of the Ashantee architecture are truly Egyptian, originating from the calyx or corolla of a flower, as Denon suggests, or from the young leaves of those immense palm-like filices, representing, at their birth, the voluta of the Ionic capital, of which they are supposed to have furnished the idea.¹⁴⁵

While Bowdich emulated expeditionary journals by archaeologists, his discussions of patterning also seem to presage the decontextualized modes of nineteenth-century Western design theory and the formalist art history later formulated by Alois Riegl, among others.¹⁴⁶ In Riegl’s theoretical text Stilfragen (1893), for example, in which he advanced a theory of stylistic development, much of his evidence is offered as decontextualized line drawings of forms excerpted from relief sculptures and architectonic complexes (fig. 43).¹⁴⁷ Bowdich used the tools of formalist art history, avant la lettre, to support a historical lineage from Ethiopia to Asante.

Bowdich’s Mission, the objects he presented to the British Museum, and Superstitions thus broadly map out the museological and art historical trajectory described by Mudimbe and Mercer. Where non-Western works were first reframed by the modern museum according to imperial cataloging and systems of display, decontextualized forms were later widely disseminated in pattern books. Nineteenth-century designers and architects assembled repertoires of “exotic” forms for deployment as isolated motifs and in formalist art-historical methodologies. Contrary to some conventional understandings of formalism, this is not simply a path toward the neutralization of origins and identities in favor of a universalist interpretation of form. As Margaret Olin, Éric Michaud, and others have shown, formalist methods of comparison are contingent on attributions according to perceived origins or identities (e.g., “Greek” versus “Egyptian” approaches to foliage), which often have racial implications.¹⁴⁸

While Mission carefully discerned the creator of each object across the Asante Empire’s multiethnic subjects, Bowdich’s next book, Superstitions, simply credited everything he saw in Kumase to Asante Akan makers within an argument about pan-African cultural forms. Admittedly, Mission similarly genericized the individuals using, wearing, or making the objects but, still, it showed objects in use with some identifying details.¹⁴⁹ In contrast, Superstitions removed objects from the social, political, economic, and environmental contexts in which they had been produced and used, and even from their underlying material matrices of woven cloth and plastered wall. While the earlier volume had worked to promote his successes as an Africa Company bureaucrat, the second was published after he had left the company. Even while it reiterated his expertise on the Asante Empire, it was intended to position him as an independent scholar working at the nexus of the museum and the field.

Bowdich’s argument relied not only on works being removed from their origins and entering the European museum, but also on the museum’s reshuffling of categories toward simplified geographical origins. Subsequently, Bowdich worked from images of the objects, reproducing them as disembodied forms in the pages of a book—in support of a unified history of African art. This is perhaps most evident in relation to the geometric patterning found as architectural details and on adinkra fabric, whose repeated iconic forms are particularly vulnerable to material mutability and spatial mobility. Recognizing that origins and identities are themselves constructed and contingent, we can understand the displacement of these objects from Kumase to the British Museum as only one in a sequence of recontextualizations.

The early nineteenth-century translocation of Asante objects, particularly adinkra cloth, from Kumase to the British Museum does not only exemplify a shift from one imperial context to another, but also shows how “African art” was invented through the collision of multiple imperialisms. From Kumase to London, imperial collections evinced changing political conditions in both the Asante and British empires. In the early nineteenth century, the Asante Empire leveraged intra-African networks and external connections to elevate its profile on the global stage. British imperial officials recognized the Asante Empire as a trade partner, if not as a potential equal. This dual imperial dynamic meant that, while Bowdich’s collected objects exemplified the multiethnic Asante Empire, the British Museum’s classification systems tended to restrict Asante objects to ethnographic rather than artistic categories. By the late nineteenth century, however, European expansion in Africa was threatening Asante authority. This would come to a double climax in 1874, when British forces invaded and burned Kumase, and in 1896, when British forces deposed and exiled the Asantehene.¹⁵⁰ As trade goods, spoils, or collections, the objects “from Ashantee” demonstrate dual imperial aspirations and legacies.

The cosmopolitanism of Asante, even during its transition to the British Gold Coast colony, continued to challenge the notion of a static, monolithic African culture assumed by British imperial forces. For example, the Aban that the Asantehene had discussed with Bowdich and Dupuis in the 1810s and 1820s, was serving as what we understand to have been the Asantehene’s imperial museum (fig. 44). The Aban housed Asante’s heterogenous imperial collections and was open to visitors to Kumase, including European visitors to the city—until English imperial invasion and looting beginning in the mid-1870s. One account by a British participant in the 1874 Anglo-Asante War described the contents of the Aban:

Books in many languages, Bohemian glass, clocks, silver plate, old furniture, Persian rugs, Kidderminster carpets, pictures and engravings, numberless chests and coffers. A sword bearing the inscription “From Queen Victoria to the King of Ashante”. A copy of the “Times”, October 17, 1843. With these were many specimens of Moorish [sic] and Ashante handicraft, gold-studded sandals such as only the king and a few great chiefs may wear, with, strange to say, Arabic writing on the soles; leopard-skin caps lined with yellow velvet and adorned outside with beaten gold like that of Cashmere, and a plume of the same precious metal; saddles of red leather, magnificent canopies or state umbrellas of velvet and satin, baskets or cradles in which Ashantee chiefs are accustomed to be carried on the heads of slaves, with other curious and tasteful things too numerous for me to describe or even catalogue.¹⁵¹

As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues, this was a “splendidly cosmopolitan” collection.¹⁵² Asante’s practice of empire building encompassed a city and a collection that expressed its imbrication with counterparts across North and West Africa and Europe visually and materially. Yet, just as Bowdich ignored the European material culture present in Kumase when he gathered objects “from Ashantee” for the British Museum, the looters and recipients of Anglo-Asante War indemnity were not interested in Asante cosmopolitanism. Indeed, they had an even narrower view than Bowdich and valued only Asante goldwork.

Over the decades of British repression of Asante forces and the absorption of Kumase into the British colony of the Gold Coast, the British Museum reframed Asante objects yet again. British Museum guidebooks from the 1870s and 1880s almost completely omitted the objects Bowdich had collected, naming only a single wooden stool or “carvings, cloths, etc.”, leaving out adinkra cloth entirely.¹⁵³ By the late 1890s, after British looting and the beginning of punitive compensatory payments of gold imposed on the Asante, British Museum guidebooks separated a vague account of Asante “carvings, cloths, etc.” in the Africa ethnological gallery from “gold and silver ornaments … from Ashanti” in a room of “ornaments from various countries”.¹⁵⁴ Adinkra cloth and other forms of Asante material culture were displaced by dazzling—and fungible—goldwork in British Museum presentations of Asante.

As Asante transitioned into a de facto British colony, the framing of adinkra fabrics shifted again as it was shaped by missionary activities. By the early twentieth century, the Basel Mission had been in the Gold Coast region for almost a century, and had been collaborating with the British colonial administration for much of this time; it provided some supplies and support for the British penetration into Kumase in 1874.¹⁵⁵ Thus, in the early twentieth century, adinkra cloth would still have been on display in Europe but not in the art museum. At the 1911 Exposition of the Basel Mission in Geneva, a Swiss missionary to Asante stood before a table and wall brimming with objects of all kinds, including several carved gourd adinkra stamps and an adinkra textile (figs. 45 and 46).¹⁵⁶ Here, we return to the visual logic of the cabinet of curiosities, in which functional items such as pots and combs intermingle with examples of wood carving and textile work.

However, there is an additional piece of visual information. Tacked onto the center of the adinkra cloth is a photograph of the cloth being stamped (see figs. 5 and 6). Adinkra is no longer a potential commodity as it was in Kumase, nor is it an isolated formal motif as in Bowdich’s Superstitions, nor an intriguing object at the British Museum. The photograph, taken by a Swiss missionary, foregrounds artisanal creation within the missionary’s framing of the region as premodern.¹⁵⁷ The Basel Mission exposition thus adopted a similar framework as Asante performances of culture at the 1886 Liverpool International Fair and in the “Ashanti Village” that toured the United Kingdom in the 1890s, staging seemingly guileless performances of cultural practices that presented the Asante people as susceptible to British intervention.¹⁵⁸ Yet, in addition to these public entertainments, the Basel Mission was also collecting.¹⁵⁹ In the same decades that British looters and colonial agents were obtaining Asante goldwork that would enter the British Museum, while largely ignoring ethnographic objects, the Basel Mission was acquiring ethnographic objects in the service of missionary work, many of which were later donated to Swiss ethnographic collections. In both cases, the effect was to deny the Asante access to modernity—to deny the Asante both modern artisanship, despite the growing prevalence of British machine-made adinkra-patterned textiles, and access to its own resources of culture and capital, its gold.

The inclusion of Asante objects at the British Museum was not merely the result of British acquisition through purchase or gift; it was also a calculated strategy by Asante elites and rulers to assert the empire’s presence on a global stage. Asante rulers deliberately curated artifacts as expressions of cosmopolitan identity and imperial ambition. However, the British Museum subsumed such works under categories that reduced dynamic political and cultural negotiations to static representations of “Ashantee”, and later “African”, art. The translocation of adinkra cloth—with its deep connections to Akan funeral practices, collective memory, and symbolic communication—serves as a striking example of imperial collecting practices. Such practices not only appropriate material culture but can also distort and oversimplify dynamic interplays of culture and identity. This story is not just about the movement of objects but also about the power to define how histories are remembered and told. From Kumase to London, and from the Aban to the pages of Bowdich’s books, objects and practices brought together in Asante traveled along networks of empire, commerce, and scholarship—reminding us that the story of African art is not fixed but remains in flux between geographies and interpretations. As the legacies of these imperial entanglements persist in contemporary museums, we must ask: How can we reimagine museum spaces to reveal histories that colonial frameworks have obscured?