The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana

by Jean M. Allman

Bearing the historic symbol of the Asante nation, the porcupine, the National Liberation Movement (NLM) stormed onto the Gold Coast’s political stage in 1954, mounting one of the first and most significant campaigns to decentralize political power in decolonizing Africa. 
    Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) was the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to secure political independence from Britain.  The struggle for full self-government was led by Kwame Nkrumah, the leading advocate of African nationalism and Pan-African unity in the post-World War II era.  The NLM threatened the stability of Nkrumah’s preindependence government and destroyed prospects for a smooth transition to full self-rule.  Though NLM demands for Asante autonomy mobilized thousands of members, marchers, and voters, the NLM was unable to forestall plans for a unitary government in a new nation.  Under Nkrumah, Ghana became independent in 1957.
    Marginalized politically by 1958, the NLM has at times been marginalized by scholars as well.  Cast into the shadows of academic inquiry where history’s losers often dwell, the NLM came to be characterized as a tribalist ghost of the past whose foreordained defeat was worthy of some attention, but whose spectacular rise was not.
    Today, when it is far harder to dismiss decentralizing movements and alternative nationalisms as things of the past, Jean Marie Allman’s brilliant The Quills of the Porcupine recovers the history of the NLM as a popular movement whose achievements and defeats were rooted in Asante’s history and in the social conflicts of the period.  Allman draws skillfully on her extensive interviews with NLM activists, on a variety of published and archival sources in Ghana, and on British colonial records—many of them recently declassified—to provide rich narrative detail.
    Sophisticated in its analysis of the NLM’s ideology and of the appeals of the movement to various strata within Asante society, The Quills of the Porcupine is a pioneering case study in the social history of African politics.  An exciting story firmly situated within the context of the large theoretical and historical literature on class, ethnicity, and nationalism, its significance reaches far past the borders of Asante, and of Ghana.

278 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1993

Reviews

[David]

In the history of contemporary Africa, the countless inter-ethnic conflicts and wars are perhaps the greatest source of well-meaning head shaking. To put ethnic, tribal identity interests above those of the country (or even the continent!) is seen as betrayal, as wrecking. But that’s not quite fair, and one of the tragedies of colonialism is that the various ethnic groups that make up the African content did not have the chance to evolve naturally, in the absence of outside compulsion. I’m being very ahistorical and general, but France, or the UK, or Spain, or whatever, these countries had the chance to slowly coalesce over the centuries. This is not to say that these places don’t have inter-ethnic conflict, or that other parts of the world would necessarily trend towards the nation-state on the European model, but simply to make the very banal argument that the state of nationalism in contemporary Africa is put under pressure from its history and from the willed confusion of the international borders.
This is a dumb review but this was also a tough book. Very short for what it offered. A lovely work of class analysis and a fruitful source of confused and unfinished thoughts.

[Ebba · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the whole, The Quills of the Porcupine is a very extensive and captivating and Allman provides convincing proof in support of her arguments. It is not just a book but a well researched case study illuminating new aspects of a movement often forgotten about by scholars. Whilst much attention is given to the CPP, few have looked at the Asante’s NLM as thoroughly as Allman does in The Quills of the Porcupine. However, it could have benefitted of broadening its perspective a bit in certain areas and regarding some of the different groups that impacted Ghana’s ascension into an independent state.