Abstract

This study employs artistic evidence to reconstruct the history of power and power relations among the Dangme and Ewe of Ghana and Togo from about 1800. It examines indigenous ideas about power and how these determine the nature of political authority and regalia at their most fundamental level, priesthood. It also documents some major artistic developments that followed the emergence of war and paramount chiefships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These structures borrowed widely from Akan, Sudanic, and European art. Their layers of imported forms, imagery, and materials chronicle stages in the recent political evolution of the Dangme and the Ewe. The contrasting interpretations of history conveyed in some contemporary ritual performances reflect not only tensions between old and new leaders, but also, the dynamic nature of the nexus of art and ideology