The University of Wisconsin Press

---

African Studies / History / Political Science

---

 

The Quills of the Porcupine Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana Jean Marie Allman “Like the quills of the porcupine, if you kill a thousand, a thousand more will come.” —Asante aphorism 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. “As a microcosm of a larger state of affairs (that is, the political process almost anywhere) this study will be of interest not only to Ghanaianists or even to Africanists, but to others interested in Third World politics (and even, without too much imagination, those interested in First World politics).”—David Henige, University of Wisconsin–Madison Jean Marie Allman is assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri. Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

August 1993 LC: 92-045198 DT 278 pp. 6 x 9 Paper $24.95 x ISBN 978-0-299-13764-9 ADD TO CART   “Allman’s work far transcends other published efforts to comprehend the NLM. Not only does she provide a broader, more compelling historical perspective on the origins and nature of the movement, her richly detailed narrative simply has no equal in any of the existing scholarly accounts of Ghana’s march to independence, especially in the way it moves the focus beyond the political elite and onto popular mobilization and consciousness.” —Larry Yarak, Texas A&M University

Home | Books | Journals | Events | Textbooks | Authors | Related | Search | Order | Contact

If you have trouble accessing any page in this web site, contact our Web manager. E-mail: webmaster@uwpress.wisc.edu Updated June 21, 2013 © 2013 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System