African Art in an Imperial Center

Abstract

edge and reputation’ (14) by writing several books based on Dɔnkɔ’s lexica of herbal remedies. Konadu’s language then becomes checkered with commentary about Warren’s ‘interracial’ marriage (166), and the implication that some of the records of Dɔnkɔ’s interaction with Warren went purposely missing (172). There is evident bitterness here, as Konadu uses Warren’s work to argue that Dɔnkɔ, like other citizens of the newly independent nation of Ghana, was ‘still exposed to the exploits of capitalists, neocolonialists, and the coming-of-age-of African Studies’ (165). Such complications aside, the section on Warren appropriately problematizes the harvesting of anthropological knowledge in the postcolony. It is also worth noting that the Dɔnkɔ/Warren encounter, despite what might have been waylaid, did leave a trove of field notes that enabled Konadu to provide a beautiful reflection on Kofi Dɔnkɔ’s daily healing activities. The Dɔnkɔ/Warren records bear witness to the modest blacksmith as someone in full control of his clinical practice and spiritual world, healing a wide array of illnesses in patients from Takyiman and abroad. There is no getting around the intellectual intensity that the author has invested into Our Own Way in this Part of the World. There are some side arguments going on that I can’t cover here, and perhaps wouldn’t be able to even if I tried. And at times, the book gets dense, making it a tough ethnographic slog in parts, especially when the author drags the reader a bit too far into the weeds of everyday Bono life. But there are also some lovely passages too, such as when Konadu thoughtfully suggests that the caricature of ‘fetishism’ might be reframed as a ‘broader agreement between the spiritual forces of nature and the world created by human culture’ (92). The most important thing is that Konadu’s thesis holds. Kofi Dɔnkɔ represents the type of bounded personhood that ‘stretched across two empires, national borders, ecologies, polities, and racial and religious ideologies, signaling a non-national decolonized possibility’ (232). By revealing Dɔnkɔ’s story, Konadu has accomplished something innovative, a book worth reading for anyone who wants to challenge themselves to rethink the field of African Studies.