HERE AND THERE
73
We continued under a banner saying
"Nana Akwaabd'
(Welcome to
the Chief) which was stretched between two streetlamps on the edge of
town. Julius compared the traffic to the approach to the Triborough
Bridge at 5: 30. I waved to some Young Pioneers who started shouting
"abruni"
at me and laughing. An elderly woman, half my height and
twice my weight, evidently one of those few score market mammies who
control the country's petty commerce, walked past the car leering at us,
saying:
"Akwaaba, akwaaba."
Julius, who had been suggesting that we
break out of the procession and take another route to the Palace, finally
veered off at a round-about onto a side street by which, honking con–
tinuously, we reached the grounds of Mahyia Palace while the Asante–
hene's Mercedes, surrounded by screaming women of the royal family,
dressed in white silk, was still half a block away.
Outside the inner compound of the Palace there were, at one
time or another, about 5000 Ashantis, and the cameras Julius and Judy
carried kept us from moving freely among them. As we approached a
wide rectangular building where someone was beating the talking drums,
an old man, authoritative-looking, with a younger man walking behind
him
holding a rainbow-colored umbrella over his head, stepped in front of
us and raised his hand. Since we weren't Ashantis, we expected that this
gesture meant we weren't
akwaaba,
but then several other dignified old
men, obviously all of them experienced with white men, gathered around
the first and, raising their chins at the proper angle, smiled with the
folklore of Ashanti in their faces. Julius took a picture, and they
accepted our thanks for their having posed; evidently they had no notion
of ever seeing the developed prints, or else they presumed we were
anthropologists and that next year they would be featured in one of the
books on sale at the Government Catering Rest House.
The building we were heading for was a compound which was only
an adjunct of the Mahyia compound. It was constructed like a garage, or,
to account for its size, like a motor-pool for the U.S. Army, but there
was only one car inside. Against a wall were piled four or five cobwebbed
talking drums, some gong-gongs, and various others instruments of cele–
bration. I spent ten minutes poking my head through windows looking for
the remnants of Sir Charles Macarthy, a Governor of the Gold Coast in
the early 1820's, out of whose skull other Asantehenes had drunk palm
wine. I also hoped that in the fever of festivity they might make more
accessible the Golden Stool of Ashanti, the traditional throne of the
Asantehene, which at the end of the seventeenth century had come out
of the sky into the arms of Okomfo Anokye, Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu's
fetish priest who was the Richelieu of the Ashanti Confederacy. nut
