yourGhana
Representing Ghana to the fullest
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Culture
Culture
Ghana has a diverse and very distictive culture. As the world becomes a smaller place and cultures and peoples converge and interact with each other many cultures and languages begin to dillute and die out alltogether. It is our intention to highlight and explore the culture of Ghana and provide readers with insight into the many cultural nuances of Ghana.
Asantes believe that they are made up of two elements, blood and spirit both of which they obtain from their parents. The blood which comes from the mother determines the clan, Abusua, and the spirit which comes from the father determines the Nton. Since Asantes, like most Akans, are matrilineal, a child is what his/her mother is.
Therefore a person can be Asante only by virtue of the fact that his/her mother is Asante. It is possible for an Asante not to have nton but impossible not to belong to an Abusua. At the time of conception or even before, the clan is already determined and once born, the child is stuck with it.
There is an Akan/Asante saying that the clan is not like a tune that you can change simply because you don't like it. It falls on the people within the clan to improve it. . The eight clans are Oyoko, Bretuo, Agona, Asona, Asenie, Aduana, Ekuona, and Asakyiri
Music
Proverbs
Like in most african cultures, proverbs are the main ingredients in the Akan language. Proverbs (ebe) are small words symbols, anecdotes or stories, which are represented in all respects of Akan culture. A proverb can be a metaphor, allusion, idiom, euphemism, and folk tale. It always has a didactic significance and it is given in context of the beliefs of the Akan people.
Proverbs act as a catalyst of knowledge, wisdom philosophy, ethics and morals. They cover themes about God, ancestors, human beings, marriage, family death, values, animals, plants and moves. In fact, all aspect of life of the Akanis embedded in proverbs.
The Akan is the major cultural group of the Ivory Coast, with a population of approximately 4 million. The Baule, the Akye, the Anye, the Dan, the Asante and the Aowin are all Akan peoples. Among the Akan-speaking peoples of southern Ghana and adjacent Côte d'Ivoire, ritual pottery and figurative terracottas are used in connection with funeral practices that date at least to the 1600s.African Ancestral Veneration & Christian Hagiography
The African devotion to his/her ancestors has been taken as the singular characteristic of African spiritual awareness, and so some early writers on African indigenous Culture referred to African Traditional Religion as ancestor worship. That is, African spirituality in essence is the worship of dead and gone great, great grand-parents.
Some early missionary writers on African traditional religion also confused African ancestors with spirits, and as a belief in spirit was considered superstitious, the veneration of the ancestors was seen as the cult of the spirits i.e. a form of animism.
Social organization in all Akan kingdoms is based on matrilineal descent. Each town or village has a royal family (the family that first settled there), and from this royal family the chief and the queenmother are selected by the elders of the royal family, the chief, or the queenmother.Â
The queenmother is the co-ruler and has joint responsibility with the king for all affairs of the state (Rattray, 1923; Meyerowitz, 1951; Busia, 1951; Aidoo, 1981; Arhin, 1983; Manuh, 1988). This important constitutional role of the queenmother is illustrated by the Asante political organization in which the ohemmaa adwa (queenmother's stool) is the akonnua panyin, the senior stool in relation to the ohene adwa (king's stool). When the ohemmaa and ohene sit in state together, the ohene is seated to the right of the ohemmaa.
The Akan calendar
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