This article focuses on the history of an anti-witchcraft movement, Aberewa , which spread round and which was to revive and strenghten a former movement called Sakrobundi , already widespread in the Kingdom of Gyaman in Ivory Coast. Aberewa attained its pick in the ss and expended to Asante kingdom by proposing an alternative and higher authority than hat institutionalised in and dispensed by Asante office holders.
The author provides a detailed reading of Aberewa and recounts and explores the crucial links between Aberewa and the earlier nti-witchcraft movement, Sakrobundi. In that paper, I discussed Aberewa , which enjoyed a brief but spectacular success in the early s 1 I now revisit Aberewa in the light of a mass of evidence that was unavailable to me two decades ago.
First, I provide a more richly detailed reading of Aberewa than I was able to give before. Second, I recount and explore the crucial links between Aberewa and the earlier anti-witchcraft movement known as Sakrobundi. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I furnish a life history of the hitherto overlooked but remarkable Sie Kwaku of Welekei in Gyaman, the leading actor in both Sakrobundi and Aberewa and a significant figure in the still understudied history of Akan belief.
I continue to think that what is needed to recuperate that history in meaningful terms is close focus on detailed evidence, a common enough priority in many fields of historical endeavour, but less so in African historiography where sustained, long-term investigation of individual societies is still not as common as it might be. There is much to be said for seeing the Akan whole, so to speak, over and above the contingent divisions imposed on them by European imperialism and perpetuated by postcolonial states.
One significant but regrettable consequence of these partitions is a continuing degree of estrangement between English and other language scholarship about the Akan and their neighbours. On this point, I place on the record here the fact that this paper would not have been possible in its present form without the studies of French and Italian researchers on the western Akan and surrounding peoples.
