An Unwavering Passion: Doran Ross's Scholarship on Asafo Flags

Abstract

| african arts SPRING 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 1 As many of the contributors to this issue have amply demonstrated, Doran Ross was a man of broad and diverse interests and intense loyalties. While he spent many decades researching the arts of Ghana, with a particular focus on the arts of the Akan-speaking peoples, he undoubtedly had a particular soft spot for the egalitarian and community-based art forms associated with the asafo companies of the Fante peoples of Southern Ghana. Asafo companies existed among all Akan groups, where they functioned as both army and police in precolonial times. However, among the Fante they became structured groups of particular importance, defined by a range of kinetic, performative, and monumental art forms that had been largely ignored by African art scholars. Always interested in multilayered and unconventional topics, Doran set off to study asafo flags in the mid 1970s when, as a graduate student at UCSB under the supervision of Professor Herbert M. Cole, he ventured to Ghana for the first time. The results of his early research were published in The Arts of Ghana, which he coauthored with Cole in 1977, and in the short but seminal pamphlet Fighting with Art: Appliquéd Flags of the Fante Asafo that accompanied a 1979 Fowler Museum exhibition. Quite fittingly, asafo flags were also the topic of Doran’s last major publication, a book he and I coauthored to accompany the exhibition Art, Honor, and Ridicule: Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2016 (Forni and Ross 2017). At the time of his passing, we were in the process of expanding the exhibition for the Fowler Museum; it is now scheduled for the fall of 2022. Colorful, performative, semantically layered, historical yet always current, infinitely reproducible, and often ironic, asafo flags constituted a very fitting subject for Doran’s detail-oriented and irreverently inquisitive mind. His earlier publication Fighting with Art outlined the complex setting of these art works, establishing their historical significance and social relevance while also identifying key individuals and families active in the main flag-making workshops of the Central Region at the time of his research. The scope of this first publication established the foundation for the research Doran carried out over the course of his life by regularly attending festivals and performances, visiting flag-making workshops, documenting shrines, paying respects to company leaders, and also keeping the pulse of the art market through frequent engagements with dealers and collectors.1 With his camera around his neck, he was a towering presence in large and small gatherings, perfectly at ease moving through the crowds recording official and unofficial displays of artistry and creativity in the ever-moving flow of asafo performances (Fig 1). As Doran’s research and publications have taught us, asafo flags are the rich and complex insignia of Fante military companies. These patrilinear organizations control different areas of a Fante city state, where they perform a number of military and religious duties and are in charge of the safety and well-being of the community. Each Fante village has between two and fourteen asafo scholarship on Ghanaian arts