A Short Genealogy of Ersatz Love

Over the last century hundreds of appliquéd Ghanaian flags have found their way onto the market of the large western auction houses. In this paper, Augustus Casely-Hayford traces the trajectory of these objects as they have changed hands and value, to reveal how significance and meaning are traded, how the reading of these Asafo flags has profoundly altered over time and across cultures, how Western epistemologies can re-categorise and re-define other cultures to make them like their own and how the commodification of these objects has not only obscured their meaning for people in the West, but has changed the meaning of these flags for those who create and use them.