On ceremonial ritual occasions and festivals, the companies come out with their uniforms and flags, the most shifting and creative performative embodiment of Asafo power. The most important appearance of the flag is when it comes out with the Frankaatunyi, the flag dancer, and it’s performed during rituals. That whole part is really about dance, it’s about choreography, it’s about performance, and it’s about the connection of the flag with the body of the dancer—which is completely lost in the museum environment. Flags are sometimes hung or strung in towns, especially if a company has many flags, then they could decide to string lines across town and usually connect it to their shrine, and hang a number of flags there during the ritual days. That is a way
to make a strong claim of importance and wealth and relevance in the urban environment.
Every company has a range of flags, and they choose what to display depending on the occasion and the message that they want to convey. Flags are usually messages of pride and boastfulness, whereby one company is communicating to the public, to other companies, to their enemies, to bystanders ways in which they consider themselves to be superior or to be important. Asafo companies can have between eight to sixty flags, depending on how many new flags have been introduced, how good they’ve been in continuing to maintain and reproduce older types of flags, and overall the wealth and size of the company. Every time a new captain is installed, they have to produce a flag, and they can choose whether or not they’re reproducing an old symbol and an old motif or creating a new motif. There are different types of flags that companies use. Some reference proverbs or sayings or symbols that have been historically associated with the companies. In other cases, there can be new ideas and new iconography that is introduced based on recent events or interests that the company has developed or specific roles that the company has assumed.
There are specificities of the format used by Asafo companies. There are some figures and ideas that are quite specific. There is usually a pointing figure that indicates what people should be paying attention to. Sometimes the pointing figure is a captain or is a leader, and one can recognize the leader of the Asafo company because usually he or she is wearing a whip at his or her wrist, and so that is a clear sign of leadership. The leader or another Asafo member is somehow indicating what the main topic, what the main message, is on the Asafo flags. And that’s not necessarily something that is found in other forms.
Flags convey a specific sense of identity, even though they’re much less formalized than the kind of flags we may be accustomed to in the West, whereby there’s no possibility of shifting interpretations. In Asafo flags, there is a greater level of variability, but there are certain things that are strictly codified, and if people use or misuse colors and symbols, it can be a source of great tension and sometimes conflict. Asafo companies would challenge one another or find ways to upset other companies by intentionally manipulating the use of symbols and colors to create fights or to send very defiant messages to other companies. There’s no Asafo flag that is created by chance. The colors are always regulated and the symbols are always mandated by the company. The artist who produces the flag can shape the composition, but they would not be able to decide the color of the background, for example, or the iconography.
Each one of these examples at the Tang connects with a specific company history and a specific company iconography. However, the colors and the symbols change from town to town, from village to village. So what is tricky with Asafo flags is that unless you know where it has been collected, it’s very, very difficult to trace back a flag to a place. The red background in Cape Coast would clearly identify No. 1 company, Bentsir, but in Gomoa Dago, it would be No. 2 company, Tuafo, and in another town, it could be any other number of companies. The connection between colors and symbols is always site specific.
The earliest accounts that talk about flags and companies are from the late 1600s, early 1700s. However, we really don’t know the way the flags looked then. These types of flags were probably in this format that developed increasingly under British colonial rule, probably in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. There are many similarities between this format and British colonial flags, in the sense that they had the British flag in canton, and then a narrative space in the mainframe of the flag. Whether the British colonial flags were inspired by local flags or the other way around, I don’t think there is anybody that has assessed that for sure. There is definitely an intersection.