"Zimmermann's Quarter Report"

First part is a Ga traditional account of the McCarthy war - Zimmermann says in the same sentence that he had it from the mouth of an elder (not specified) and implies that it is a popular history. It is certainly fairly crude. The cause is given as a quarrel between an Asante merchant and a woman selling salt fish in Cape Coast....she refusing to bargain with him and when he threatened to take her to Kumasi by force asking whether the Asantehene wanted buy salt fish....The point of all this is explained in an aside that at that time the Asantes had authority over the Gua (Oguaa) and Ga people. The women fled to the fort the man returned to Kumasi where Osei imprisoned him and executed him, having asked him why he had not got himself executed on Oguaa rather than returning home with shame. The account of the diplomacy and war has nothing very remarkable about it...the warning is given to McCarthy by an old woman, and the fante play no glamorous role, shouting to each other when the powder runs out and thus betraying the situation to the Asantes. There is a paragraph's account of a Christiansborg church member who believed himself poisoned….an Ayigbe ex-slave named Aioo who had evidently worked on the farms near Christiansborg, because for a time he fled back to his old slave companions: His particular fears are explained it as being connected with the fact that he had been ‘given’ to a fetish, hence his name. One of the missionaries found him no mention being made of a long journey being involved - also he is said to have been simply on one of the “Plantagen”.

01.01.1853

01.01.1853

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