Re-evaluation by Dennis M. Warren
Dennis M. Warren re-examined the writings of Eva Meyerowitz on the Techiman-Bono (Brong) people and found serious methodological and chronological problems in her reconstruction of Bono history. Meyerowitz had proposed that the Bono-Manso kingdom was founded as early as 1295 CE and had linked Akan civilization to North African and later Egyptian-Middle Eastern origins, claims that Warren and other scholars regarded as unsupported by evidence.
Warren argued that Meyerowitz’s precise dating and extensive kinglists rested on weak field techniques, linguistic errors, and unverified oral data. He noted that her alleged list of thirty-seven Bono rulers from 1295 to 1950 could not be corroborated by Techiman elders, and that even her informants denied supplying the names she published. Physical checks of the Techiman stool rooms revealed only eight ancestral stools, none dating earlier than the eighteenth century, and no evidence of the “gold-nugget containers” she claimed were used to record reign lengths.
Warren also demonstrated that many of Meyerowitz’s names were duplicated under variant spellings, her translations inconsistent, and several chronological sequences impossible—for instance, chiefs she dated to the fifteenth century actually ruled after the Asante-Bono wars of 1722–1723. He concluded that her data represented isolated oral statements rather than genuine oral traditions, and that her reconstructions introduced invented “traditions” such as Bono migrations from Timbuktu that are unknown in local accounts. According to Warren, these inaccuracies had wider effects, since later school textbooks and popular histories repeated Meyerowitz’s conjectures, thereby shaping misconceptions about Akan origins. He recommended that Techiman-Bono chronology be re-established only from verifiable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evidence.
Reevaluation by Colin Flight
Colin Flight later conducted a systematic re-evaluation of Meyerowitz’s Bono-Manso chronology using statistical analysis and corroborating Arabic and colonial records. He confirmed that Meyerowitz’s fieldwork at Techiman in the 1940s relied heavily on the cooperation of Nana Akumfi Ameyaw III, who sought to use her publications to strengthen Techiman’s political position within the Ashanti Confederacy. Flight noted that Meyerowitz’s data were based on an alleged ritual system in which each king annually deposited a gold nugget in a brass vessel (kuduo) and each queenmother placed a silver bead or cowry in a decorated pot to record the years of reign. These were reportedly counted in 1945 by Kofi Antubam, Meyerowitz’s interpreter, and the results sent to her as numerical data for reconstructing the Bono-Manso dynasty.
Although Flight accepted the authenticity of the tradition itself, he demonstrated that the early portions of Meyerowitz’s chronology were statistically and historically unreliable. His analysis showed that the reign lengths for the earliest kings and queenmothers followed artificial units of roughly thirty to thirty-six years—corresponding to a generational estimate of “three generations per century”—indicating that the early part of the list had been retroactively systematized. Using later and more credible segments of the data, along with corroboration from the Kitāb Ghunjā and known Ashanti campaigns, Flight redated the foundation of Bono Manso to the early fifteenth century, around 1400–1420, rather than the thirteenth century proposed by Meyerowitz. He concluded that the “gold-nugget chronologies” were genuine cultural mechanisms of recordkeeping introduced only in the late sixteenth century under Muslim influence, and that earlier reign-lengths had been later inventions designed to magnify Bono antiquity.
