Akan

Akan religion rests on a clear hierarchy. Above all stands Nyame, also honored as Onyankopon, the supreme being who made the world and needs no shrine, because, as the proverb behind the Gye Nyame symbol says, no one living saw its beginning and no one will see its end, except God. Beneath Nyame work the abosom, deities of rivers, lakes and forests who take up residence in shrines and speak through their priests, the akomfo, trained mediums who dance the deity in possession and deliver its counsel. Nearer still are the asamanfo, the ancestors, who watch their lineages, receive libation at every gathering and are seated, in a real sense, in the blackened stools kept in the stool rooms of chiefly houses.

Kwame Gyekye's study of the Akan conceptual scheme shows how much of this theology lives inside the Twi language: a person is composed of okra, the divine spark of life sent from Nyame with its destiny, sunsum, the personality-spirit, and mogya, the mother's blood that fixes clan membership in the matrilineal line. Philosophy, religion and kinship are one fabric.

The tradition's storyteller is Ananse the spider, whose cycle of tales, including how he obtained the sky god's stories from Nyame himself, carries Akan wit and moral teaching; carried across the Atlantic, Anansi became a folk hero of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Libation prayer, drummed praise poetry and the festival calendar, above all Akwasidae on the sacred day cycle, keep the relationship among Nyame, abosom, ancestors and the living in constant repair.

Around 1700 the Asante kingdom united the inland Akan states under Osei Tutu, and tradition holds that his priest Okomfo Anokye called the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, down from the sky to rest on the knees of the new king: not a throne to be sat upon but the vessel of the soul of the whole Asante nation. Ivor Wilks' history of nineteenth century Asante shows a sophisticated state ruling from Kumasi through roads, tribute and diplomacy, its power felt from the savanna to the coast. Ancestral stools, blackened and fed at the Akwasidae festivals, made the same theology of seat and soul work at every level of society.

The British fought Asante through the nineteenth century and exiled its king in 1896; when the governor demanded to sit on the Golden Stool in 1900, the queen mother of Ejisu, Yaa Asantewaa, led the war that followed. The stool itself was never surrendered, and the Asante monarchy, restored in 1935, continues today within the Republic of Ghana.

Adinkra symbols are the Akan's most traveled inheritance. Stamped in black on funeral cloth, each condenses a proverb: Gye Nyame, the supremacy of God; Sankofa, the bird reaching back for what was left behind, teaching that it is no shame to return and fetch it; Adinkrahene, the concentric chief of symbols. W. Bruce Willis' dictionary catalogues scores of them, and they now mark buildings, books and bodies across Ghana and the diaspora, a visual language of Akan thought.