The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  Just then, another Ashanti woman came up to us. “Ama, which are you going to buy?” she asked. “I don’t know what to buy. Last week, I ordered the tape of the puberty festival. Now I don’t know which of these to get.”

  The queen mother shrugged and said, “I loved the coronation party so much that I just have to buy both tapes.”

  Having a face that is television-friendly has never, as far as I know, figured in the Ashanti royal elections, but I have heard it observed during tape viewings that most people believe that the camera favors Nana. He is forty-eight years old, but looks ten years younger. He is about five feet eight and has short brown hair, smooth dark skin, a squarish mustache, small, bright eyes, and a large, well-formed head. On his left cheek is a peanut-size horseshoe-shaped scar—an Ashanti tribal mark given to him at birth. (The practice of tribal scarification is now mostly obsolete.) Nana’s voice is sleepy-sounding. The effect of his accent—a mingling of British clip and African lilt—on my midwestern ear has sometimes resulted in unusual conversations. This effect has occasionally been exacerbated by the fact that the Ashanti language has no pronoun genders; when speaking English, tribespeople tend to call everyone a he.

  Nana favors casual shirts and slacks when he goes in for Western clothing, but he looks more at home in traditional Ghanaian robes, called ntoma, which are worn either like togas, slung over one shoulder and wrapped around the torso, or like sarongs, rolled at the waist and draped to the floor. Most Ashanti I know wear tennis shorts under their ntoma in all weather, and heavy sweaters when it’s cold. I have never seen Nana wearing anything on his feet except leather thongs—flat soles with toe loops—from Ghana, but he confided to me recently that whenever it snows he wears Western-style shoes outside.

  Nana was born in September 1940, in Bekwai, a farming village in the Ashanti region, in south-central Ghana. Kwabena, his first name, is Ashanti for “Tuesday,” which was the day he was born. (There are only seven Ashanti first names—Monday through Sunday.) Many of the houses in Bekwai are made of mud and cement blocks and have bamboo roofs, and are without running water and electricity. The Ashanti region has roughly the same boundaries that it had when the tribe ruled over its own kingdom, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and amassed great wealth trading in gold, kola nuts, and slaves. The Ashanti have maintained an unusually complex royal hierarchy for almost three hundred years, beginning with Osei Tutu, the greatest Ashanti monarch, who was eventually killed by some members of the Akim tribe. The king holds office for life, but can be destooled for a variety of transgressions, including madness, leprosy, fits, excessive cruelty, blindness, impotence, disfigurement, not following the advice of the elders, or being too fond of disclosing the slave origins of some of his subjects. Even after Britain managed, with great difficulty, to colonize the Ashanti territory, in 1901, the monarchy stayed intact, and it has remained in place since independence.

  When Nana became king, his father observed that it was obvious even when Nana was a baby that he would be great someday. Nana’s family, however, wasn’t royal. His father had a small but prosperous cocoa farm, three wives, and twenty-five children. Like most Ashanti with multiple wives, he maintained a separate home for each of them. Nana’s mother, though, divorced him sometime in the 1950s, when she became a Christian and found his pantheistic ancestor worship unbearable. Nana is a baptized Anglican but an infrequent churchgoer; he is a fervent believer in the power of ancient spirits and in an omnipresent deity.

  After high school, Nana moved to Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana. He says he wanted to live where he could see electric lights. In Kumasi, he went to a trade school to become an automotive technician, and then in 1972 he came to the United States to visit a friend and decided to stay. He drove a gypsy cab in the Bronx for a while, got a job as a security guard at the World Trade Center, became the surrogate tribal chief of an informal organization of his kinsmen in Brooklyn, took a job in an electronics store on Canal Street, became a deputy chief of the Asanteman Association, chipped in with a friend to buy a cab medallion, and finally became king. As I spent more and more time with Nana, I came to realize that the hairpin turns in fortune and circumstance which he has experienced, instead of making him dizzy or frustrated, have given him an air of monumental calm. There are times when he seems to have the imperturbability of a very old man or of a visitor from another planet observing and recording impetuous earthling behavior. He is not impassive—he just finds reconciling seemingly unreconcilable things an abiding condition of life. Whenever he talks about the peculiarities of his personal situation, he throws his hands up as if something had just landed in his lap uninvited, and bursts into a laugh that is one part high-pitched wheeze and three parts thunder. “I know how strange this is,” he said one day, exploding into the laugh. “My life was one way, and then I turned around and everything had changed. I dream of the headline sometimes if I’m driving and I’m getting scared. Really, it just seems so funny! I think, How would that sound—KING KILLED IN CAB?”

  THERE ARE ALL SORTS of circumstances in which people find it necessary to call upon the king. Some are merely ceremonial, such as weddings and funerals, but many are potentially litigious. The Ashanti I met seem to have a pronounced lack of interest in using the American legal system to settle conflicts—a characteristic probably owing in part to their two-hundred-year tradition of having most matters decided by kings and elders, and in part to the more modern condition of living under a Ghanaian government where differences of opinion are sometimes resolved before a firing squad. As much as possible, the Ashanti call on Nana to sit in judgment for them, and this is the part of being king he finds most difficult—he likes to say that he finds argument an awkward exercise and rarely engages in it himself. So far, he has been called in to arbitrate eight major feuds, and he hasn’t enjoyed any of it.

  “It can be very embarrassing to work with these disputes,” he says. “It just becomes very embarrassing to me. Sometimes people can be so aggravating. Once, when I was still just a deputy, just an elder, a big fight arose. The king was in Ghana at the time, so I had to handle it. I finally lost my patience with the people who were arguing, and I decided to leave. I stepped outside, and I could hear through the door that they had started to fight with each other. I had to go back inside. Finally, I called the police, because I thought, This is no matter just for a king! I couldn’t stand it! There was just so much argument. I was really embarrassed. What aggravation! One man’s lip was bitten in the fight. I wasn’t scared for my own sake, because you can’t bite a king, or even a deputy king. The man wanted to take the guy who bit him to court. We didn’t want to see that happen, so the association paid him a thousand dollars for the lip. It was a lot of money, but it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t stand to see one of our people in jail in America.”

  Nana is so discomfited by feuding that he doesn’t like even to talk about it, but within the tribe his judicial temperament is widely admired. He is known less as a strict constructionist than as a legal realist—his is more a court of equity than a court of law. “What I like about Nana,” an Ashanti microbiologist named Victor Aning told me once, “is that he is a cool-mannered personality. When he judges things, he does it in a cool-mannered way.”

  One day not long ago, after Nana had just moved to Teaneck, I stopped by at his new house. It was a steamy afternoon; several elderly white men in shorts and undershirts were out mowing their lawns. Nana’s street curves through a pretty neighborhood and is lined with small brick bungalows that have peaked roofs and big picture windows; Nana’s was the only house with a yellow cab parked in the driveway. When he came to the door, he peered through the screen. “Oh, I have to do something about the neighbors,” he said before letting me in. “Some of the people in the club are upset that I haven’t let the neighbors know I’m a king. I just haven’t thought of how I’m going to tell them.”

  The house was still: Georgina Oppong was out shopping; their three chi
ldren, Dennis, Susie, and Mandy, were playing outside; and the Oppongs’ niece Florence, who moved from Ghana last year to live with them, was sitting in the den watching reruns of Lassie as she folded a pile of clean ntoma and socks. The air was full of the sound of cicadas, lawn mowers, and muffled barking. Nana had driven his cab all night—the Laundromat job had come and gone by this time, having proved convenient from his subjects’ point of view but barely lucrative from his—and earlier in the week he had attended two Ashanti events that wound up, as most do, around five in the morning. He was exhausted. We talked briefly about his move to New Jersey, and about the general status of the association, and then he told me that a dispute had come up recently that he wasn’t able to resolve. “It was a marriage,” he said, frowning. “But it was too broken to fix.” The question wasn’t whether the warring parties were willing to take Nana’s advice—the Ashanti who come to him seem prepared to accept his decisions—but whether he saw a solution that was by his standards reasonable. He didn’t, and it depressed him. So far, though, the other major disputes of his reign have been resolved more successfully:

  A man reported to Nana that he was leaving his wife because there had been no food in the house for two weeks. The wife reportedly answered his questions about the food by saying, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Nana: “I called the wife. She said, ‘It’s true, but I’m angry because my husband has been sending money home to Ghana without my knowledge.’ I called all the elders, and we decided that the woman was right—he shouldn’t have been sending the money home—but we had to go along with the man. We always give the upper hand to the man. In this case, though, I didn’t give a formal judgment. I said to them, ‘Cool down.’ In some cases I give a judgment, and in some I just advise a little patience. In our culture, to get a divorce you have to get permission from your parents, and I reminded them how embarrassing that would be. They did cool down when I told them to. They have to give their respect to me, because I’m the king.”

  A woman complained that she bought a newsstand for her husband, and the man was apparently working there, but still no money was coming in. Then the woman found a letter he had written to another woman.

  Nana: “I knew this was difficult, because they came to see me in separate cars. It was a Sunday evening. What are most arguments about? It’s mostly money, money, money. Ashanti who come here work very, very hard. They work harder than they would if they were still in Ghana. In Ghana, there’s nothing to buy—it isn’t so materialistic. You don’t even have to wear shoes. You have your family. They take care of you. Here you take care of yourself. You have no mommy and no daddy. The people have to earn money. Sometimes they’re sending money back home, so they need even more money. So they argue about money. When these two came to me, I took the man aside and told him to apologize. The woman started to cry. [In a woman’s voice] ‘Weee, weee, weee, now I feel so bad.’ I asked the man to compensate her fifty dollars because of her finding the letter he wrote to his concubine.”

  A man complained that his sister and his wife didn’t get along and were making his life miserable.

  Nana: “The man cited three reasons that he was upset. He said his wife was lazy, she had no respect for him and his sister, and she had to get along with his sister and wouldn’t. I called the wife, and she was so annoyed that the man had come to me! I fixed a deal for them when they came to my house, but the man was angry and decided to leave. I was upset with him. I said, ‘Why are you leaving? You come to my house and your wife comes to my house, and now you won’t accept my judgment.’ I guess, though, that they got themselves back together. I saw them later at a funeral, and the wife started screaming at me. Screaming at me! Everyone was laughing about it, that now she was picking on me, too! Later, the husband came over and apologized for her. I found it very embarrassing.”

  A man made a loan to a very good friend, who didn’t pay it back.

  Nana: “Oh, they were really fighting about it! They called me up, and I got the money back from the one. I said, ‘Why don’t you pay it back already?’ So he gave me the money, and I gave it to the other guy. I asked them to come over, so I could see them shake hands over it. They came over, but they wouldn’t shake hands! [In a low, blustery man’s voice] ‘I won’t shake his hand, no!’ You know, I know that people don’t mean to be aggravating, but sometimes they really are. Finally, these guys shook hands, and that ended it.”

  A wife went to Ghana and started building a house for her family without telling her husband. She said she was using her own money and so didn’t need his approval.

  Nana: “I had to call in the elders for this one. We sat with them for four hours. Four hours! It was so aggravating! We finally made an agreement. We advised the man and his wife to open a joint savings account.”

  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!”