Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante

"Forests of Gold is more a compilation of Wilks’s writing. It chronicles Wilks’s writing from the early 1960s into the very early 90s, and so what you have is three decades of work. One thing that’s clear about Ivor Wilks, whether you agree or disagree with his writings or his points of view or his framing devices, is that he did his homework. He was one of the early students at the University College of the Gold Coast—soon to be the University of Ghana in 1961—when it was linked to University College London. He was one of the earlier non-Africans at the University College, and cut his teeth working with African intellectual giants there and built up a very notable reputation for detailed research, and fine-grained writing. The articles really chart the growth of Wilks’s ideas over time, but they also spell out the wide-ranging fields he covered. For example, there are articles about using the Akan or Asante calendar to think about time and space. The Asante and the Akan people, broadly, have a calendrical system that uses time and distance to measure space and thus territory, but also rituals and a range of other activities ordered in definite patterns. He uses the calendar to think about time and space and distance in the Asante empire as a whole. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a really innovative approach. He thinks about agronomy and how that had an impact on how the Akan states came into being. In thinking about agronomy, he theorizes that the use of root crops would have led earlier agrarian people to build these societies using ecology as a framing device. There’s that and much more. There are essays on women. There’s a very notable woman, Akyaawa Yikwan of Asante, that he writes about, a biography of her, using a combination of oral and written sources. There’s a lot to offer there, giving you a package of Ivor Wilks’s career."