Academic literature on the topic 'Ewe (African people)'

There are no unethical people on earth, and indigenous Africans are no exception. Ethics is a people 's way of life whether good or bad. In this paper, a reflection is done on the indigenous African ethical values with the Akan and Ewe as reference points. The paper then goes on to discuss the foundation for the two societies ’ ethical behaviours. The paper discusses the principles behind their ethical making process, the ethical making process itself and their ethical values. The paper concludes that the two societies, Akan and Ewe, have developed an ethical system that has helped to sustain their societies.

ABSTRACTThe idea that mission Christianity played a pivotal role in the creation of modern African ethnic identities has become paradigmatic. Yet, the actual cultural and social processes that facilitated the widespread reception of specific ethnic identities have been under-researched. Suggesting that historians have overemphasised the role of Christian schooling and theology in ethnic identity formation, this article examines how the Anlo people of south-eastern Ghana came, over the twentieth century, to recognise themselves as part of the larger Ewe ethnic group. Although Christian missionaries were the first to conceive of ‘Ewe’ as a broad ethnic identity, a corpus of non-Christian ritual practices pioneered by inland Ewe slave women were crucial to many Anlos' embrace of Eweness.

AbstractFocusing on the mid-nineteenth-century encounters between missionaries from the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) and the Ewe, this essay shows that the NMG employed a romanticist, Herderian notion of culture and nationhood to establish order and impose power, and sought to prevent Ewe converts from adopting Western influences in their own way. Through an analysis of the NMG's attitude to language and the nation, its linguistic and ethnographic studies, which were devoted to turning 'scattered Ewe tribes' into one 'people', and the education of Ewe mission workers in Westheim (Germany), it is argued that, rather than denying African converts their 'own culture', attempts were made to lock them up in it. Missionary cultural politics, the essay argues, thrived on a paradoxical coexistence of appeals made to both the new notion of the nation as a marker of 'civilisation' and an 'authentic' state of being. Thus, the NMG used the notion of the nation as a means to exert power, to assert the superiority of the West and to control converts' exposure to foreign ideas.

In this paper I explicate polyrhythm in the context of traditional West African music, framing it within a more general theory of polyrhythm and polymeter, then compare three approaches for the visual representation of both. In contrast to their analytical separation in Western theory and practice, traditional West African music features integral connections among all the expressive arts (music, poetry, dance, and drama), and the unity of rhythm and melody (what Nzewi calls “melo-rhythm”). Focusing on the Ewe people of south-eastern Ghana, I introduce the multi-art performance type called Agbekor, highlighting its poly-melo-rhythms, and representing them in three notational systems: the well-known but culturally biased Western notation; a more neutral tabular notation, widely used in ethnomusicology but more limited in its representation of structure; and a context-free recursive grammar of my own devising, which concisely summarizes structure, at the possible cost of readability. Examples are presented, and the strengths and drawbacks of each system are assessed. While undoubtedly useful, visual representations cannot replace audio-visual recordings, much less the experience of participation in a live performance.

The Gulf of Guinea, home to numerous ethnic nationalities, stretches from the Republic of Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east. There have been population movements and socio-economic interactions within and across the coastal belt over the past millennium. In response to their environment, the people have been engaged in fishing, salt-making, commerce and boat making. Fishing, the pivot of their economy, has taken the leading fishing groups – the Fante and Ewe (Keta) of the Republic of Ghana, and the Izon (Ijaw), Itsekiri and Ilaje of Nigeria – all over the entire West African coastline, where they have established many settlements.

The brilliant and erudite scholar and public intellectual of the state, genocide and ‘wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch, beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970’, which he aptly designated as ‘the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post (European) conquest Africa’, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, who passed in 17 October 2019, was one of the select slate of scholars who were invited to contribute to this Special Issue of the journal. Characteristic of him and his dedication to the seriousness of purpose in scholarship, he was the first to complete and submit his contributed piece, which appears here in the Special Issue under the title, ‘Africans had no business fighting in either the 1914–1918 war or the 1939–1945 war’. That was a mere 4 months prior to his passing. This is a deserving tribute to him that captures his scholarship in all of its essence and complexity – Ekwe-Ekwe wrote more than 15 insightful books and published numerous articles in top-ranked academic journals and general interest publications in both the English and Portuguese languages, all of which are well-received in the communities of scholars and lay people. Rethinking Africa is the ‘forward looking blog’ that he founded and ‘dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are’. It is indeed a medium that he used to provide ‘rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world’. He was until his transition a ‘visiting professor in graduate programme of constitutional law at Universidade de Fortaleza, Brazil’.

AbstractThe rise of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement in African countries like Ghana has inspired new ways of dealing with the challenges of life. A critical area of operation for the movement is the 'healing and deliverance' ministry. One of its main aims is to help people deal with inherited guilt through rituals for healing the past. The worldview of mystical causality that underlies a system of shrine slavery among the Ewe of Ghana called Trokosi, offer one example from traditional religions, of how such traditional institutions may stigmatise victims and generations after them, sometimes perpetually. Vestiges of such stigmatisation still remain even in places where shrine slavery has been abolished by law. In keeping with the prophetic declaration by Ezekiel that the sins of the fathers shall no more be visited on their children (Ezekiel 18), the Pentecostal/Charismatic ministry of 'healing and deliverance' provides a Christian ritual context in which the enslaving effects of generational curses resulting from the sins of one's ancestry may be broken. Pentecostals believe that it is through the 'deliverance' that the born again Christian may experience fullness of life in Christ.

Abstract: Wool from the Massina sheep was used to create a dozen or so kinds of textiles patterned by extra (supplementary) weft and tapestry weave in the Niger Bend region. This constellation makes the region the foremost center of technical and visual diversity in West African treadle-loom weaving traditions. Two major categories of wool textiles can be identified: kaasa and arkilla , both heavy covers of different sizes. Whereas the visual appearance of kaasas changed greatly over the twentieth century, that of the ceremonial marriage covers, arkilla, stayed the same. A third category, with wool ornamentation on a cotton ground, was woven in the northeastern part of Burkina Faso. The history of these woolen textiles is intimately linked to the social system of the Fulani people who own the sheep. Highly specialized male weavers called maabuuɓe, who form a kind of “caste,” made the kaasas and arkillas. The wool-cotton covers were made by weavers of enslaved status. The abolishment of slavery by the French in their West African territories in 1905 had profound consequences. A generation or more later, weaving traditions started to change in the Niger Bend: formerly enslaved weavers versed in traditional techniques started their own weaving businesses supported by women who bought industrial threads. New cover types came into being, with new combinations of colors and patterns, which were woven in the same techniques as with handspun wool. This is how extra-weft patterns and tapestry weave were slowly introduced to the huge region to the east, stretching from the eastern part of the Niger Bend to Lake Chad, and also how the rich Zarma weaving of the Republic of Niger came into being and Hausa weavers in Nigeria “discovered” tapestry weaving. Another, albeit much older, line of influence goes straight into Ewe weaving of Togo and Ghana. For several hundred years, these so-called wool covers were traded to the Akan kingdoms of southern Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, 1000 kilometers to the south, where they were called nsaa : there, they were reused and attained great ritual significance. This article seeks to correlate loom and weaving technologies with terminology to better reveal this diffusion of pattern weaving throughout important parts of West Africa. As most weaving was originally done with cotton—but mostly without extra weft—the tradition of wool weaving might shed new light on ornamentation in other West African weaving traditions.

The term “Mina,” when encountered as an ethnic designation of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, has commonly been interpreted as referring to persons brought from the area of the “Gold Coast” (“Costa da Mina” in Portuguese usage), corresponding roughly to modern Ghana, who are further commonly presumed to have been mainly speakers of the Akan languages (Fante, Twi, etc.) dominant on that section of the coast and its immediate hinterland. In a recently published paper, however, Gwendolyn Hall has questioned this conventional interpretation, and suggested instead that most of those called “Mina” in the Americas were actually from the “Slave Coast” to the east (modern southeastern Ghana, Togo, and Bénin), and hence speakers of the languages nowadays generally termed “Gbe” (though formerly more commonly “Ewe”), including Ewe, Adja, and Fon. Given the numerical strength of the “Mina” presence in the Americas, as Hall rightly notes, this revision would substantially alter our understanding of ethnic formation in the Americas.In further discussion of these issues, this paper considers in greater detail than was possible in Hall's treatment: first, the application of the name “Mina” in European usage on the West African coast itself, and second, the range of meanings attached to it in the Americas. This separation of African and American data, it should be stressed, is adopted only for convenience of exposition, since it is very likely that ethnic terminology on the two sides of the Atlantic in fact evolved in a process of mutual interaction. In particular, the settlement of large numbers of returned exslaves from Brazil on the Slave Coast from the 1830s onwards very probably fed Brazilian usage back into west Africa, as I have argued earlier with respect to the use of the name “Nago” as a generic term for the Yoruba-speaking peoples.

Disposal of obsolete computers (DOC) in higher institutions in Africa poses a major environmental problem to many African people. The question of how to dispose obsolete computers and computer technologies in a safe manner has become a cause of concern to many African people, especially when toxic emissions pollute the air, water, and soil posing a serious health and environmental hazard to the community. This study investigates the methods of disposing and recycling of obsolete computers, and its environmental effect on plants and animals in Africa. A case study approach is used. Participants were selected from three African countries Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa based on their historical background in Africa regarding e-waste. Semi-structured, open ended interview questions were used to gather evidence from the participants regarding how obsolete computers are disposed from their institutions and the possible effect of the disposed computers on the environment. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded. The findings revel that the most common method of disposing obsolete computers is through dumping, dismantling of parts for resale by children and open field burning of unwanted parts. This burning process produces toxic material which is associated with high health risks. Based on the findings, a proposed Disposal of Obsolete Computers Framework (DOCF) was developed to guide higher institutions in Africa to opt for appropriate methods of disposing computers. The framework will not only assist higher institution in selecting a better option of disposing obsolete computers, but also will improve the hazardous environmental conditions which animals and plants find themselves