Source Image
Title: Rites at the Funeral of an Ashanti Chief

Date: c. 1840s

Engraver: A. Thom

Original Publication: The Faiths of the World: A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Sects, Their Doctrines, Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs (London)

In The Passing of a Kingdom, Rita Mawuena Benissan reimagines a 19th-century European engraving that sought to depict the funeral rites of an Ashanti chief. Originally created by engraver A. Thom in the 1840s, the image was produced for The Faiths of the World, a Victorian-era encyclopaedia of global religions and customs. Like many such prints of the time, the engraving was filtered through a colonial lens—part documentation, part exotic spectacle—rendering African spiritual and ceremonial life as distant, unfamiliar, and othered.
Benissan’s reworking reclaims the narrative from this extractive gaze. Through digital recoloring and intricate embroidery, she transforms the flat black-and-white scene into a vivid ceremonial field—restoring not only colour but cultural charge to a moment once seen through the eyes of empire.

Throngs of mourners, ceremonial umbrellas, and ritual gestures animate the procession. Bold tones dominate: the deep reds of cloth, the lush greens of adornment, and the radiant golds of royal regalia. Each thread reasserts the emotional gravity of the event, returning dignity to a scene that was once reduced to an ethnographic curiosity.
Unlike many of the works in the exhibition that centre on individual figures, The Passing of a Kingdom foregrounds communal presence, ritual power, and collective memory. It reminds us that sovereignty is not only personal, but ceremonial and social—embodied in tradition, in gesture, and in the very act of mourning.

Through this act of visual translation, Benissan reframes what was once an outsider’s account into an ancestral vision—a reclamation of how a people choose to be seen, even in their moments of grief and transformation.