According to E. Meyerowitz, the origin of Akan were descendants of Dia Where Za, from Berbers of Libya and the Gara, who were settled in the Tibesti region. Around the 11th century, they would have emigrated towards the South, under the influence of the Tuareg, themselves pushed back by the Arabs during the conquest of North Africa. These first ancestors first settled in the loop of the Niger, where they made their home and mingled with the native Negroes. However, after the Islamization of the Berbers, the first core of the Akan group had to once again go into exile even further south, among the Grusi.
The story of the origin of the Akan is as follows:
For Baumann and Westermann, the civilization of these peoples was imposed on them by groups of a dominant matriarchal race from the North who conquered this part of the coast; These conquerors were visibly related, firstly, to the matriarchal dynasties of the great Sudanese states, and secondly, to the Libyco-Berbers (matriarchy) of North Africa.
Let us note in passing that Meyerowitz and Baumann do not give the reasons which make them say that the Akan descend from the Dia and Za Berbers. For J. Ki-Zerbo: “Around the year 500, says another legend, Berber princes or Arabs or Yemen would have arrived on the banks of the bend of the Niger and they would have rid the local residents (Sorko fishermen and Gabibi peasants) of the terror of a fetish fish, which the Sorko fishermen used to extort substantial offerings to their fellow farmers, the Gabibi.
These clans seem to have gone up from the Dendi downstream of the Niger, where they had baptized the two western and eastern banks, respectively the Gourma and the Hausa; they would have originally come from the surroundings of Chad... Given the thinness of this external contribution, three characters according to the legend of Yemen, a few groups of traders, according to Al-Bakri, had to be quickly assimilated by the Songhai ".
L’opinion de Meyerowitz et de Baumann repose sur le fait que des populations d’origine berbère, connaissant le matriarcat, seraient descendues au Sud; Et comme les Akan connaissent un régime parenté à peu près similaire, ces auteurs n’ont pas, un seul instant, manqué d’affirmer que ces purs nègres étaient des descendants des Berbères.
This conclusion is debatable insofar as it relates on the one hand to only one fact, and on the other hand matrilineality is not the kinship regime of the Akan alone; Indeed, outside the forest region, populations of the Ivorian savannah (Djimini, Tagwana, Koulango and Lobi) know this system of filiation. Further afield in Central Africa, the large Bacongo (Bantu) family is also matrilineal, as are smaller human groups.
History and sociology show that while animist populations easily change their religion, lifestyle and name, this is not the case for Christian and Muslim communities. Nowhere in West Africa have we reported the presence of long-standing Islamized populations (Berbers, Tuaregs and Moors) who have returned purely and simply to animism.
The populations of Fulani origin integrated into the Negro communities of Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Niger and Burkina Faso have retained their language, their names and their religion. Twi, the language of the Akan, is different from the Semitic languages of North Africa; The vast majority of Akan populations and their leaders still remain animists.
The Akan people, until proven otherwise, are not the product of any racial mixing, unlike the Fulani, Tuaregs and Moors. The opinion of the Akan, as to their origin, remains different from the versions mentioned above; their oral tradition nowhere mentions that these people descend from white populations. They recognize, however, that their ancestors came from the north, from a region or country called Agniwan-gniwan. Many localities bear this name both in Ghana and in Ivory Coast... Others believe that if these localities bear this name, it is in memory of the country of origin located further back in time and in the space.
The Akan acknowledge having experienced numerous movements in West Africa. We do not know when the first Akan settled in the Gulf of Guinea, but we know for sure that mining researchers from SODEMI in Abidjan uncovered, in the lagoon regions of Ivory Coast , non-pygmoid human remains associated with gold art objects of Akan origin. These archaeological elements were sent to Sweden, to Upsala, to be studied: carbon 14 revealed that certain human elements were several centuries before our era (around -1200) which shows that the Akan ethnic groups therefore already existed in Côte-d 'Ivory 2000 years ago.
