As many of the contributors to this issue have amply demonstrated, Doran Ross was a man of broad and diverse interests and intense loyalties. While he spent many decades researching the arts of Ghana, with a particular focus on the arts of the Akan-speaking peoples, he undoubtedly had a particular soft spot for the egalitarian and community-based art forms associated with the asafo companies of the Fante peoples of Southern Ghana. Asafo companies existed among all Akan groups, where they functioned as both army and police in precolonial times. However, among the Fante they became structured groups of particular importance, defined by a range of kinetic, performative, and monumental art forms that had been largely ignored by African art scholars.

Always interested in multilayered and unconventional topics, Doran set off to study asafo flags in the mid 1970s when, as a graduate student at UCSB under the supervision of Professor...

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