You are the music while the music lasts': Kwame Tua between the Asante and the British

Abstract

This article is an interpretive biography of Kwame Tua (c.1865-1950), one of millions of Africans born into an independent society that was overtaken by colonial conquest and overrule. Kwame Tua was from Asante, now in the republic of Ghana, and held the ascriptive status of a royal servant (ahenkwaa) who might have expected a specialist career as a royal hornblower. He was musically very gifted. However, after ruinous civil wars in the 1880s, the Asante king was sent into exile in 1896, and from 1901 to 1957 his kingdom was a British Crown Colony. This article discusses Kwame Tua's responses to these radically altered circumstances and his efforts to forge a place and identity for himself between the new imperial order and his Asante inheritance. It is argued throughout that the pursuit of detail is all in such a study so that we can get as close as possible to the personality of the individual in interaction with the times he lived through.