The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (27 page)

ALTHOUGH THE RESOLUTIONS
that Nana orchestrates—Solomonic reasoning with overtones of tribal protocol and a shrewd sense of damage control—don’t always result in perfect harmony, he has become known as a peacemaker, and his attitude toward squabbling, which is similar to most people’s attitude toward the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, has gained popularity in Ashanti circles. Partly, this may be because Nana has preached harmony as not just an appealing state of being but one that can have tangible results. In an address to the association, for instance, he once plaited together the threads of peaceful coexistence and economic rationalism so intricately that he left the audience breathless. “I have started looking into business opportunities for minorities,” he told the group. “This does not rule out the Asanteman Association. An example of this is Korean and Chinese immigrants who have flooded the fish, fruits, and small grocery shops.” After a pause, he added, “If we can love ourselves, we may help ourselves to achieve such great business status.”

Nana’s emphasis on unity and on positive vibrations is a notable change for the Asanteman Association, whose first few years were marked by intense bickering over rules and regulations. The club was formed in 1982, by Adum Bawuah, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who while working on his doctoral dissertation came to the conclusion that the Ashanti people who had emigrated to the United States had, as he put it, unwisely flung their culture into the melting pot. He decided that a social organization could help fish the culture out before it was too late. The club would be dedicated to preserving the use of the Ashanti language, educating young Ashanti about tribal history, observing traditional ceremonies and holidays, and bringing kinspeople together; and members would be entitled to, among other things, death benefits and the use of the association mailing list for party invitations.

A few other Ghanaian tribes had fraternal organizations in the United States—among them the Ewe Unity Club, the Akan Association, the Okuapeman Association, and the Kwahuman Association—but those clubs had Western structures, headed by chairmen or presidents. Bawuah decided that the Asanteman Association, which now has several branches across the country, would be better off using an American variation of the traditional tribal system—dynastic succession would be replaced by election. Candidates for king would make their cases before the membership, and then a council of elders would vote on a final selection. This curious hybrid of African tradition and democratic process was instantly popular with the Ashanti whom Bawuah approached, and in 1982, with the blessing of Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, the Ghanaian Ashanti king, the club was formed.

Bawuah wanted the American Ashanti king to be chosen from among the common people. “I didn’t want the group to be dominated by the intellectual elite,” he told me not long ago. “In Ghana, many of the chiefs don’t know how to read or write, but they know how to bring people together. My first choice was to have the king be an older person, sixty-five or seventy. The kings have ended up being younger, which has worked out just as well.”

As monarchies have long been racked with upheaval and intrigue, so was the Asanteman Association. An early and especially lively disagreement involved the length of the king’s tenure. I have heard countless versions of what happened, but, as near as I can make out, one of the first two kings liked the job so much that he proposed he be kept on for life, confirming an observation Bawuah once made to me—something along the lines of “In Africa, once a person takes office he really likes to die in office.” Some of the club members thought that the king-for-life concept was a good one, and others thought that it was approximately as good an idea as, say, indentured servitude. Sides were taken, and many prominent members walked out. For a while, it looked as though a rival Asanteman Association might be formed. “A conflict of power, I would call it,” one of the junior elders, Johnson Owusu-Manu, has said. “Or, I would say, a struggle for power, or a dispute over power. The main thing definitely was the power.”

Nana never really intended to run for king. He had shown a natural capacity for leadership, having founded and headed an informal organization of his clan, the Amansie, before the Asanteman Association was formed, and he served as deputy chief in the early years of the club. When it came to being king, though, he had reservations. “I didn’t want to come in, to begin with,” he told me. “I had reasons. I thought, You don’t get paid to do this. You don’t get anything to be the king. Do I want to waste my time? I’m busy with my family and my cab.” But the woman who was then queen mother thought that Nana would make a good king, so a few months before the election she approached him and told him he should run. He refused. She came back. He refused again. Then, to make her point, she sent one of her advisers to see him every three days. Finally, Georgina Oppong started to worry that people would think she was keeping Nana from being king. Georgina is also Ashanti—in fact, her family happens to be royal—but, between the children and her night-shift job as a nurse at a Manhattan nursing home, she has never had much time left to participate in the association. “It wasn’t Georgina,” Nana said. “I just didn’t know if I wanted to be so involved. But”—he threw his hands up and started to laugh—“I finally changed my mind!”

Once convinced, Nana campaigned actively on a love-and-peaceful-accord platform. He vowed that he would postpone his formal coronation until the disgruntled ex-members agreed to return to the club. The elders caucused and voted, and in the end Kwabena Oppong became the third king of the American Ashanti. The next day, he went to the house of the ex-king who had been denied permanent status, talked to him for three hours, pleading tribal loyalty and democratic philosophy, and left satisfied that the ex-king and his partisans would rejoin the club. Eventually, they all did. It was a maneuver so deft that it is still discussed by members of the association. After I heard the story of this negotiation, I asked Nana whether he had any ambitions in the greater political arena.

“I’m not a politician,” he said.

“Isn’t this politics?”

“Oh, no, this is just what a king does—it’s different from politics. It’s for the people, for our culture. I don’t pay much attention to politics. In Ghana, because of the military government, no one wants to think about politics. A lot of Ghanaians left home because of politics.” Then he looked at me and beamed. “I did love campaigning, though,” he said. “I tell you, it was so exciting! When you’re campaigning, you can really express your views and no one gets angry with you.”

AS NANA OFTEN SAYS
, maintaining peace and harmony—in other words, avoiding aggravation—in this world is a job in itself. It also happens to be one that at times seems largely incompatible with his jobs as cabdriver and as king. He puts a great deal of stock in the soothing word and the deep, so-it-goes sigh, but they have on occasion failed him. Last winter, the elders of a new Asanteman Association chapter in Los Angeles asked Nana and a few of his deputies to come out to California for a formal induction ceremony. One cold Sunday evening, members of the New York chapter gathered in the basement of the Calvary United Methodist Church in the South Bronx to discuss the trip, as well as other tribal matters. When I arrived at the church, close to fifty people were inside. About half were in Ashanti traditional dress, and the rest were wearing things like leisure suits, shifts, and slacks. Ten of them were in a corner practicing on the talking drums for an upcoming performance, and ten more were dancing behind a chalkboard. Everyone else was sitting around in groups, chatting in Ashanti or passing out party invitations and announcements. I was given invitations to two outdoorings and one funeral. A stout woman wearing a turban circled the room selling World’s Finest Chocolates for her son’s Boy Scout troop. “Nana’s going to be late,” she told someone. “He had to pick up some of the elders and couldn’t fit them and both loudspeakers in his car.”

At last, Nana walked in. He was wearing a cinnamon-colored robe over a heavy brown sweater. A line of people formed in front of him before he could sit down. The conversations were all in Ashanti—the association rules require that meetings be conducted in the native language—but I could tell by watching that about ten people were talking to Nana for every one he was able to listen to. Eventually, Nana made his way to a long table in the center of the room and sat down. The chief linguist gave an opening prayer, and a libation of Stolichnaya vodka was poured. Nana began to speak. He first reported on the success of the Christmas dance, then he announced his recommendation that a man who had argued with and insulted an elder and later bumped (maybe intentionally) into a female member of the association be suspended from the club for six months. Then he said how delighted he was about the new Asanteman chapter, and asked the association to pay half of his travel expenses so he could go to California for the induction ceremony. He reminded the members that, as officers of the club, he and the elders received no compensation for their time and expenses, and that the trip was important. “I want to see the new chapter spread its wings,” he said.

A few people asked questions, and then the group voted to honor Nana’s request. Suddenly, a short man in a red robe, who had the bunchy muscles and thrusting jaw of a boxer, stood up and started talking loudly and with mounting agitation. Nana answered him in a low, reassuring voice. The man grew more upset, and eventually jumped up, shouting and shaking his fist, knocked his chair over, and stomped out of the room. The man’s outburst and the sound of the metal chair crashing down on the floor were so shocking that they seemed to linger in the air. Nana sat for a moment with his head bowed. Then he looked around at his elders and sighed. They sighed back. After a long, quiet interval, Nana looked at the rest of the association members and swept his hands into the air as if he had been ordered to surrender. The gesture had the effect of a starter’s pistol on the stunned members, who immediately broke into excited conversation and laughter. Nana himself eventually began to laugh. “This is the life of a king,” he said to me. “You have to understand that this is the way some people have to be.”

Since the argument had been conducted in Ashanti, I had understood only the phrases “
New York Times,
” “Braniff Airlines,” “Atlantic City,” and “five dollars.” I wanted to know the substance of the argument, so a few minutes later I asked Owusu-Manu, who often translated for me, what all the yelling had been about. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure exactly what yelling I was referring to. Then he nodded slowly and said, “Ohhh,
yes,
” took a notepad, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. The note said, “A Discussion was going on. The King was beseeching his people.”

Forbearance of this order is actually at odds with the Ashanti tradition, which in the course of history has generally weighed in on the side of ferocity and belligerence, but Nana says that it is just as well to let some traditions fall by the wayside. “Some of what we do here is real,” he says, “but some of it is just imitation.” One evening after that meeting, he invited me to his house for a gathering of the elders. Nana had wanted to have them describe to me how the association was founded, but within a few minutes the conversation had turned to the subject of the legendary warlike spirit of the Ashanti people. One chief elder, an energetic, gregarious man named Emmanuel Kofi Appiah, who is a child-services caseworker for the city, said, “The Ashanti are fighters, you know. In the olden days, we loved to go to war.”

“We were the only tribe to defeat the British. We fought them and won many times,” another elder said.

“We fought them
seven
times and defeated them
five
times,” Appiah said.

“That was the olden days.”

“Those were
good
days.”

“Oh, yes, we
loved
to go to war.”

Another elder leaned over and said, “Our symbol is the porcupine. It is the wildest little animal in the bush. It has a skin of spears. If you pull out one of the spears, a thousand will grow in its place.” He sat back and said, “That means if you kill one Ashanti a thousand will spring up to take revenge.”

Nana hadn’t said anything all this time, but now, looking slightly distressed, he inched forward in his chair and made some portentous throat-clearing noises. “We love our culture,” he said once he had everyone’s attention. “Parts of it have changed, though. We’re not warlike anymore. We also used to have another tradition we don’t follow anymore. It used to be that when the king died his entire entourage was killed, so it could accompany him to Heaven.” The elders looked down sheepishly.

A gentle temperament was probably Nana’s to begin with, but I have been told that it has even been softened since he became king; if so, this is surely one of the few times when a sensational improvement in a person’s status in life has resulted in an equivalent upswing in his modesty and self-restraint. No one I spoke to could remember Nana ever getting cranky or harsh, or seeing him swagger around. In many months of spending time with him, I only once saw aggravation get the best of him.

Last winter, the association had been invited to appear at the opening of an exhibition of antique Ashanti goldweights at the Montclair Art Museum. First, the club’s cultural group was going to play the talking drums and do traditional dances in a nearby auditorium, and then Nana and his entourage were expected to attend a cocktail party at the museum. Montclair is a forty-minute drive from Brooklyn and the Bronx, so Nana had hired a van and driver to take some of the Ashanti to the show. About two hundred people were in the auditorium for the performance, but forty-five minutes after it was supposed to begin the van had not appeared.

Nana was dressed that day in his most resplendent
ntoma,
which has gold embroidery on dark gold silk; a gold-beaded royal headband called an
abotire;
thick gold armbands and rings; and dozens of strands of gold-colored beads. The outfit was splendid, but Nana looked distraught and was pacing around backstage, ignoring the rest of the club members, who were clustered behind the curtain. His daughters, Susie and Mandy, dressed in bright skirts and also draped with gold-colored beads, were across the stage, practicing for the performance of the
adowa,
an Ashanti dance that involves mincing forward slowly as you sway and scoop the air with your hands.