The Demonisation of Voltarians and Bishop Agyinasare

I had tried my best to keep away from the brouhaha emanating from Bishop Charles Agyinasare’s foray into old, murky waters of the perceptions that undergird the prejudices and bigotry expressed against Voltarians, Ewes in particular, in Ghana. I wanted to see how it unfolds, but the sheer level of nonsense spilt out due to the ignorance or hypocrisy of many, and the inconclusive way it was handled, are just too much for me to leave the matter alone to continue to fester. I refuse to be ignorantly silent myself, when I have been foremost in denouncing same in others as ignorant idiots, having reached the revealing conclusion that ignorance is the most pernicious of the cogs in the vicious cycle of underdevelopment and backwardness bedeviling us. Together with its twinned sister, Superstition, they present us with a most lethal dose of stultifying obscurantism that stymies scientific, rational and logical thinking and development. I am therefore coming out of my shell to tell it as it is in order to reduce my own idiocy of a person who suffers the ignorant idiocy of others in stoic silence; silent ignorance being the most vicious of the three main forms ignorance takes. The other two are blissful and bloody ignorance. As a life-long student of philosophy, my reading of Prof. Maxime Rovere’s most illuminating book, How to Deal With Idiots (AND STOP BEING ONE YOURSELF), must bear some fruit, even if a bitter one. Yes, stultitia delenda est – stupidity must be destroyed, but how in this case?

Without much ado, I posit that Bishop Agyinasare simply repeated a major, lingering common prejudice of a large segment of fellow Ghanaians from mainly the Akan ethnic group towards Voltarians, specifically the Ewes of the Gbe ethnic group stretching beyond the borders of Ghana. Most non-Voltarian Ghanaians cannot distinguish between the various Ewe linguistic groups, not to mention the varied ethnicities within the VR before it was truncated, for example the Guans and central Togo linguistic groups, that fall foul of the prejudices too. I had met many Akans who were surprised to learn that Akans were part of the old VR (now mostly in Oti Region), and there are several other linguistic groups in the VR besides Ewes; something that confounds others too, including Voltarians.

This stereotypical prejudice is by no means limited to members of the Akan ethnic group alone. It is held by some Ga-Adangmes too, although to a far lesser degree by the Dangmes, if at all, because of their close filial and affinal affinity with the Ewes with whom they are coterminous or share same homeland from Ghana to Togo. Just as we have Ga-Adangme clans among the southern Ewes in particular, so do we have clans with Ewe origins among the Ga-Adangmes. As shall be seen, some shrines and their priests among Ewes are actually Dangmes in origin, or autochthonous gods of the Phla-Phera (or Egun people), meaning deities Ewes got from the original inhabitants they joined. Among the Anlos, these are called the “dzokpleanyi” gods; not brought from Notsei and Adza (Tado). Of these autochthonous gods, this piece will be incomplete without mentioning Yewe, the god of thunder from the Middle Slave Coast in south-eastern Togo and southern-western Benin Republic, which some Anlos have lately been wrongly claiming to be the biblical Yahweh and using that to falsely claim that Ewes are the original Hebrews. It is biblical fundamentalism gone haywire!

Interestingly, it is even an intra-Ewe perception, with some Ewe tribal units or settlements being perceived as spiritually more powerful than the others. Bishop Agyinasare is thus hardly the first to express such a view. After all, Bishop Dag Heward Mills too was at it a while ago with a repetition of an early common Ewe saying, “bokee vide, xorse vide,” that is, a little talismanic protection and a little [Christian] faith. This is a recognition associated with early African Christians that they could not do away entirely with their traditional practices, e.g., patronising traditional healers or herbalists, and incorporating that into their new belief systems, especially with the rise of syncretic sects in the 1930s. These sects have morphed into the charismatic or Pentecostal churches Heward Mills and Agyinasare are self-acclaimed bishops of; so is Agradaa too, and all those who consult Kweku Bonsam for “powers”. The late Rev. Prof. Emeritus C.G. Baeta coined the phrase “Christo-paganism” to describe this phenomenon. The fakirs of this new-fangled Christianity are today’s respected Men of God, Prophets, Bishops and the assorted titles they bestow on themselves to match the equally colourful names of their churches or cults, some of whose preaching outrival the Coca Cola cults of the Pacific islands and the syncretic sects of the inter-wars years in Africa. Since their superstition easily outflank that of the traditional religion practitioners, they spend several days in the week casting out demons and praying for good fortunes in all kinds of fields.

The prosperity Christianity which these new snake oil sellers ply to their ignorant and gullible followers, with some posturing to be able to conjure miracle money into the bank accounts of followers, heal people through prayers, and drive out demons is nothing more than this mix of African religious beliefs with Christianity. The mass of Ghanaians, irrespective of their level of education, just like other Africans, are pre-Enlightenment in their thought processes and beliefs, as they are yet to undergo the evolution of their cosmology and cosmogony from the primitive, substantive rationalisation of matter and phenomena infused in them by their traditional African beliefs systems, reinforced by the model missionary education which does not enculcate in them the scientific and rational-legal explanations or rationalities, for the existence of the cosmos and phenomena. It is something one just learns in order to pass exams and then discard. Rather, pupils and students are beaten, punished and indoctrinated in our schools with the Christian or Islamic religious doctrines espoused by ecclesiastical knowledge, which is wrongly elevated to the status of Absolute Truths. This lethal infusion of religious [false] dogmas into uninformed and gullible young people thus, undoubtedly, represents the most debilitating cog in the vicious cycle of underdevelopment and backwardness. Unfortunately, intense scholarly attention has not been focused on this by African scholars, most of whom, themselves, are under this spell. Some Professors aspire to become deacons or reverends instead of emerituses, free at last to speak the truths they could not as lecturers.

Civil society rationalist groups, for instance, the rational humanists, are only in their embryonic stages, weak and frightened. With the capture of the supposedly secular state by adherents of these Christianity peddlers, with Dr. Lawrence Tettey declaring that, if necessary, President Akufo Addo could demolish all the houses in Accra in order to build even a bigger cathedral for God, we must admit that Reason had long fled the Ghanaian space. It is into this quagmire of a country caught in religious ferment and superstitious beliefs, with most being zealots - the first in their families converting to Christianity - that we have been thrust by Bishop Agyinasare, one of the successful miracle peddlers we have on the block feeding off the gullible and ignorant population. A fuller discourse of this phenomenon is beyond this brief response to a particular provocation, which I turn attention to.

Now, let us put things Agyinasare said into perspective. First, some important background information.

Nogokpo is not a shrine but the name of a small town in the Ketu South District of the VR in which the shrine called Zakadza is located. It is a settlement actually founded by the Dangmes from within the Genyis on land given to them for coming to the help of the people of Keta and Kedzi (Agudza) in 1792 at Dzenunyekpodzi. Former President Mahama recently referred to the incidence in the speech written for him at the Sometutuza of the people of Somey. (The Genyis, one of the four divisions of the Gbe ethnic group, are descendants of Ga-Adangme and Ane or Anyi fugitives from Elmina and the Ewes they intermarried with, centred around Glidzi and Anexo. They are also referred to as the “Mina Ewes” by the Europeans). This incidence marked one of the schisms that afflicted the Anlo kingdom when a plot to pretend to fight each other in order to deceive the Danes went wrong. The people of Keta and Kedzi subsequently received land from Klikor to form the new settlement of Somey, with Agbozume as their capital, with a portion of the land going to the Genyis to settle at Nogokpo. I referred briefly to this piece of history in my article, How Some “Ewes” Became Part of Present Ghana, which dealt with the often-repeated claim of Ewes being Togolese and its associated taunts and prejudices. The link is provided under references.

Professor Emeritus Amenumey had, of course, covered this civil war in his The Pre-colonial Ewes. So, the shrine at Nogokpo actually has a Dangme origin, just as trokosi and fiasidi, not to mention the potent Anlo war god, Nyigbla, ( the “cousin” Gbogbla is still at Prampram {Gbugbla}), the Adangmes brought to southern Eweland. It must be noted though that, the Anlos helped to settle the Ga-Adangme fugitives at Glidzi, now just across the border in Togo, when they started fleeing from the Akwamus in 1670. Accordingly, all those areas, were originally under the jurisdiction of Anlo historically and remains so today despite the emergence of new conflicts.

I have to bring out all this in order to buttress what I earlier wrote about the affinity of the Dangmes to Ewes. Also, to show that these shrines and their practices are unknown to the northern Ewes of Weme, that is, the Ho, Kpando, Peki to Hohoe (Gbi) areas, but they are also smeared with the ethnic prejudices they invoke from fellow Ghanaians. Of course, many southern Ewes who do not subscribe to them too are smeared. In view of this, we cannot have an overarching Voltarian religious belief system and culture. It’d be an oxymoron to assert so.

There are Christians and their places of worship too in Nogokpo. And, I bet there are some in Nogokpo who do not believe in any gods like myself. Therefore, it is unfortunate to equate the name of the town to the shrine and demonise the whole town as the “headquarters of the demons in the VR”. It is tantamount to smearing all the people of Nogokpo, irrespective of their religious persuasions. Even if others had made Nogokpo synonymous to the shrine, it is wrong for Bishop Agyinasare to add pepper to the injury by doing same. He was plainly thoughtless and foolish in his utterances.

Now, Agyinasare said more than the demonisation of the people of Nogokpo, which he made the “headquarters of the demons” in the VR. The able Spokesman of the Nogokpo Town Council had spelt that out very clearly. Agyinasare built up a case stigmatising and vilifying the whole VR and only singled out Nogokpo and Keta (this got lost in the brouhaha surrounding Nogokpo) for special treatment. He narrated how his father was against his marrying an Ewe from Keta because "there was an idol in front of every house", etc. That was 38 years ago. Is it really true that the people of Keta had idols in front of their houses 38 years ago? Did he Agyinasare travel there and saw the idols in front of those houses and so informing the world now? If not so, why did he not say so in order to clear the misconception that beclouded the mind of his father? I suppose many of those houses had been consumed by the sea erosion but some are still standing; are idols still standing in front of them? I got to know Keta from the 1960s but I had never seen a single idol in front of any house there before, granted that I did not conduct any town survey for them. But, the opposite of that was the image Bishop Agyinasare’s father painted for his son, an imagery the mass of Akans and others who have not visited the VR before share in about the VR, because it was passed on to them by their parents and kin and kith. This image was created several decades ago during the inter-war years when southern Ewes started migrating to the coastal Gold Coast in order to fish or seek paid employment. This development has been captured in publications, some of which I used in one article on the ethnic imbroglio in Ghana; link provided below.

Sandra Greene, in discussing the rise of the Anlos’ identification with other Ewes and the Ewe unification movement referenced R.W. Wyllie’s account of the images Fantis had formed of Anlo fisherfolk in the inter-wars period. It is worth quoting at length.

‘After World War I, numerous groups of Anlo men and women traveled to other coastal areas, including the Fante area of the Gold Coast, in order to pursue their commercial fishing activities. For many, this was probably the first time they had traveled outside their home area, and/or to a district where they were a distinct linguistic minority. In these new locations, they conducted themselves as they had in their own home villages, but those among home whom they came to live – often temporarily, just for the fishing season – came to view the Anlos’ prosperity with jealousy and suspicion. Stories circulated that associated the Anlo with “blood-curdling” crimes . R. W. Wyllie indicates, for example, that from at least the 1930s “Fanti [children] learned to view the Anlos as thieves, kidnappers, sorcerers and ritual murderers.” The social tensions that accompanied these beliefs – and the very fact that these beliefs were held by a non-Ewe speaking people – must have heightened the Anlo’s awareness of their linguistic and cultural background and generated some sense of identification with other Ewe-speaking peoples whom they would have encountered in the Gold Coast” (Greene 1996: 148).

The Fantis were not among the Akans who used to either dominate and plunder or raid a part of Eweland for captives and ivory, but being arguably among the biggest African factors (wholesalers of slaves) in the Gold Coast who made fortunes selling slaves, they no doubt came into contact with Ewe captives and developed some pre-colonial prejudices, which were reinforced later in their encounter with the Anlo fisherfolk. After all, those from the Elmina area who fled to Togo and founded Anexo in 1701, after the defeat of Ntim Gyakari by his rebellious subjects, remained in touch with their place of origin, so Fantis did not meet Ewes first time in the C20th. Such prejudices have not died out. It was therefore no surprise that when a Fanti coconut plantation owner surprised a Fanti coconut thief and the thief killed the owner during Mills regime period, suspicion quickly fell on some Anlo fisherfolk nearby. Their settlement was attacked, leading to loss of properties and casualties among innocent people. I wonder if any justice was done and compensation paid out to the victims and their relations.

I had had the opportunity to listen to an informed Fanti student in Norway whose nickname I only remember. He told me a lot: about how stupid they were to share in those prejudices as children; how they thought Anlos were crazy trying to farm on salty land by the lagoon because they did not know about reclamation through mulching, the normal practice along the Keta Lagoon, and, of course, our “obsession” with education. He said there was one man who carried his child on a bike to primary school while he went to the middle school they used to shout at when riding by.

I will not narrate the adventures of “Sikaxoxo”, the nickname given by Anlos to the son of an Asante goldsmith I met here in London who knew better than me the nooks and crannies of Anlo. He went about buying old gold and silver jewellery for his father in the early 80s. He did not spare even the shrine houses he came upon. He took off his shirt and entered them! We had a lot of laugh together. However, I’d like to mention one more personal anecdote which, together with the earlier two, illustrates how the removal of ignorance makes people to think and behave differently.

Our Commerce and Account Master (a Nigerian descent, born and bred in Ghana), whose family owned hotels in Ghana until the Aliens Compliance Order robbed them of their assets, told of same fears of voodoo when posted to Anloga. He therefore came down just to view the place and go back same day without any preparation to stay. He was surprised to find a well planned, clean and developed township of friendly people with some Ga and Akan teachers already there having a great time. He did not see idols all over the place and had to ask to be shown one, having not seen “alegba” before. He said he ended up spending four days wearing the same pant and dresses before going for his things. He stayed for years and only joined the rush to Nigeria too after 1975.

It is impossible to repeat here all the instances of the rich repertoire of prejudices of Akans against Ewes. For that, we may have to turn to MyJoyFm’s library of the late Kobla Dumor’s “Ayigbe Jokes” from the late 90s before he joined the BBC. It certainly can serve as a rich data source for a scholarly Images of Others treatise. This field of study should not be left to whites alone, beleaguered as we are too with ethnocentrism and tribalism in Africa, Ghana not excluded.

I had written about my intention to tackle more robustly the bigots in a series of articles, something I had already started doing, as this one, The Kind of Nonsense We Live With, (see link below). In this article, I denounced those who do not know that cocoa is grown in the VR too, and, therefore, are prone to making disparaging statements portraying Voltarians as parasites on their aged cocoa farming parents; demand to know why Voltarians get CMB scholarships too, and why President Mahama chose to build with the Cocoa Fund the portion of the Eastern Corridor Road which go through the former VR. Meanwhile, cocoa is not even the major contributor to agric GDP in Ghana. It is far from it, as shown in the article.

My intention is not to attempt the daunting task of demystification and demagification of fellow Ghanaians, though tempted. Ignorance of fellow Ghanaians, including even the victims, is a major breeding ground for these prejudices and actions based on them borne out of superstitious beliefs too. As observed in the article on how some Ewes became a part of Ghana, until the school curricula take up these issues scientifically and rationally, demystify ecclesiastical knowledge and African religious practices, we shall continue to breed the ignorant and prejudiced individuals who crawl out of some worm-woods to spew their vile bile on us much too often. Their stupidities must be destroyed!

Yes, we must go to the bottom of this ethnic bigotry some Akans still exhibit. Besides my published articles on Ghanaweb and modernghana on the subject, I had written a 9-series article, abridged from a manuscript on the subject, which are yet to be published. I would therefore not go into any further examination of the issues thrown out so far. This is just to give notice, again!

In conclusion, Bishop Agyinasare simply repeated the general perception of Voltarians, Ewes in particular, by most ignorant and prejudiced Akans because they are more superstitious (something some Ewes know and take advantage of), as they are more ignorant about Ewes and the VR than Ewes are about them, and are less informed and conversant about African traditional religious practices than Ewes. They are thus, generally, unduly fearful of Ewes because it is weaned into them from childhood, with all kinds of fearful and awful tales about Ewes; a fate immigrants everywhere seem to endure.

Andy C. Y. Kwawukume
[email protected]

References

• D.E.K. Amenumey, 1986. The Ewe In Pre-colonial Times, Sedco Publishing Limited.
• Maxime Rovere, 2021. Translated by David Bellos: How to Deal With Idiots (AND STOP BEING ONE YOURSELF), Profile Books.
• Sandra E. Greene, 1996: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. Heinemann and James Currey.
• Robert W. Wyllie, “Tribalism, Politics and Eviction : A Study of an abortive Resettlement Project in Ghana,” Africa Quarterly (New Delhi), IX, 2(1969), 132-33.
• Read More: How Some "EWES" Became Part Of Present Ghana
• Read More: The Ethnic Imbroglio In Ghana: The Origins, Part 1
• Read More: The Kind Of Nonsense We Live With - PART 1