Boabeng-Fiema

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In the grove behind the twin villages there is a plot of ground set apart, and the graves in it are small. When a colobus dies of age or accident in the forest around Boabeng and Fiema, the body is not left to the leaf litter. It is carried to the okomfo, the priest who serves the deity Daworo; it is wrapped in white calico, the same undyed cotton in which the Akan shroud their own dead; it is laid in a coffin — a plank box, or, for a small one, an empty carton — and it is mourned and buried with the rites a person receives. The plot where it goes is a cemetery, and by local account the priests and priestesses of Daworo lie in the same ground, so that the monkeys and their human intercessors keep company under the trees. Once a year the okomfo performs a purification to settle the souls of the ancestors and the god, for the health of the villagers and of all the monkeys. A visitor is shown the graves as a matter of course. They are the plainest possible statement of what these animals are to the people who live with them: not game, not vermin, not even quite property, but kin.

Two villages and a covered pot

Boabeng and Fiema are two farming settlements in the forest-savanna transition belt of central Ghana, joined at the hyphen because the sacred grove they share has made them a single name. They lie in the Nkoranza North District of the Bono East Region — a district cut, in a recent reorganization, from the old Brong-Ahafo Region — about twenty to twenty-two kilometers north of the town of Nkoranza, at an elevation near 366 meters. The people are Akan, of the Bono (or Brong) branch that gives the region its name; the Akan are the matrilineal, Twi-speaking family of southern and central Ghana, and the sacred world the two villages inhabit is theirs. What Boabeng-Fiema offers is not that world in general but one small, geolocated corner of it, where a single deity and a single taboo have produced something visible enough to be counted.

The two villages remember themselves as slightly out of step in age. Boabeng is the elder; Fiema’s founders are recalled as migrants who came, around 1827, from Kokofu in the Asante heartland, moving by way of Nkoranza until they were granted land to settle and farm beside Boabeng. The grant is credited to Nana Damoah Kwaku, chief of Boabeng, acting at the request of the Nkoranza paramount, with a Boabeng sub-chief measuring out a portion close to the elder village for the newcomers’ security. That Kokofu origin ties Fiema, at one remove, to the Asante confederacy of the forest to the south — but only as a settlement backstory; the state history of Golden Stool and empire belongs to its own account, and it is not the reason the monkeys are sacred. That reason is remembered as older than any statute and younger than the villages, and it turns on a hunter.

The Akan kept no alphabetic writing before the coast, and the charter of the grove reaches the page the way such things do — through oral tradition, retold now in the guidebooks and the ethnographies. It is dated, in the local telling, to about 1842. A Boabeng hunter, recorded by name as Nana Kwabena Amoah, came upon an earthen pot in the forest, wrapped in calico and ringed by monkeys. The pot was no ordinary vessel; it was the seat of a spirit-power called Daworo (also rendered Dworo). The monkeys around it were of the two kinds that still inhabit the grove — the mona, called kwakuo in Twi, and the black-and-white colobus, called efo — and the hunter found, in the way these accounts run, that he could not raise his gun against them. When he carried Daworo home to the village, the monkeys followed. An oracle was consulted on the meaning of the thing, and the answer set the law of the place: the monkeys were the children of Daworo, sacred, never to be killed or harmed. As their numbers grew the hunter’s own fortunes were said to grow with them, and the bond has held from that day. Whether the date is exact or a story fitted to a remembered beginning, it is the kind of charter a place tells about itself, and it is best marked as tradition rather than dated fact.

Boabeng-Fiema is not, in this, unique in kind. The Akan forest is dotted with sacred groves — patches of old woodland left standing under the protection of a resident deity, a shrine, or a burial custom, and so spared the axe that took the forest around them. Botanists and conservationists have come to prize these groves as accidental refuges, islands of mature vegetation and of species long gone from the farmed land between. What distinguishes the grove of Daworo is the sharpness of its object. Most sacred groves protect a place and, with it, whatever lives there; here the protection falls on two named kinds of animal, followed wherever they go, out of the trees and into the streets, so that the taboo is portable in a way a mere sanctuary boundary is not. The forest matters because the monkeys need it, but it is the monkeys, not the trees, who are the children of the god. The grove sits in the transition zone where the southern forest thins into the savanna of the middle belt, a mosaic of woodland and grass that makes the surviving block of closed canopy around the villages conspicuous from the air and precious to the leaf-eating colobus that cannot live without it.

Children of Daworo

In the Akan understanding, a locality’s obosom — a lesser deity, one of the many beneath the withdrawn sky-god Nyame — can take up residence in a natural feature and lay ntaadeɛ, prohibitions, on the community bound to it. The full theology of the abosom, of the possession-priesthood that serves them, and of the taboos they impose belongs to the account of Akan religion; Daworo is one concrete instance of that machinery, a deity of a particular grove with a particular priest and a single, encompassing rule. The rule is total protection of the two monkey species as the god’s living children. Killing one, or even wounding one, is an offense against Daworo that requires ritual atonement; the animals are not managed as a resource but honored as relatives. They move freely — through the roughly 4.4 square kilometers of protected forest and out into the streets and rooftops of the villages, into the farms at their edges — and the people move among them.

The priest who mediates this relationship is the okomfo of Daworo. In the English of the tourist boards and even of the community’s own guides he is called the “fetish priest,” and Daworo the “fetish” — but the word carries a heavy freight. Fetish, from the Portuguese feitiço, was coined by European traders on this very coast to name West African sacred objects they neither understood nor respected, and it did real work in justifying the trade and the mission that followed. The object it names here is an obosom and its shrine; the man is an okomfo, a priest of a deity. The colonial label has stuck to the English signage, but it is theirs, not the tradition’s, and Daworo is a god with a cult, a community, and a law, not a curio.

The law’s most arresting expression is the burial. Monkeys that die naturally or by mishap are not disposed of; they are given the funeral of a person. Saj, Mather, and Sicotte, the anthropologists whose 2006 study made the grove a standard case in the conservation literature, describe the taboo as reaching back to an oracle’s instruction to “care for the monkeys” and note how thoroughly the animals are folded into the human order of death. The okomfo wraps the body in white cotton cloth, coffins it, and inters it in the dedicated monkey cemetery within the grove — the plot where, by local report, the priests and priestesses of the deity are themselves laid, so that the god’s servants and the god’s children share the ground. An annual purification rite pacifies the ancestors and Daworo together. These observances are set out here at the distance from which visitors and ethnographers report them: what is done and what it is understood to mean, not an operative instruction in the shrine’s own closed keeping.

Two monkeys at rest on a log in the Boabeng-Fiema grove, one carrying an infant; the mona and colobus move freely through the sacred forest and the two villages. Emmanuel Anin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The two species carry the whole cult between them. The first is the white-thighed or ursine black-and-white colobus, Colobus vellerosus, named by Geoffroy in 1834 and also called Geoffroy’s pied colobus — a long-furred, leaf-eating monkey, black with a white-framed face and a white-plumed tail, now ranked critically endangered. The second is the mona, of the guenon genus Cercopithecus; the population at Boabeng-Fiema is Lowe’s mona, Cercopithecus lowei (long treated under C. campbelli), a smaller, more omnivorous, more terrestrial animal that raids farms as readily as it forages the canopy. Fargey’s early assessment, published in Oryx, still used the older names Colobus polykomos and Cercopithecus campbelli; the taxonomy has since been refined, and the colobus of the grove is now firmly C. vellerosus, but the point of his survey holds — that a taboo, not a fence, was keeping two monkey species alive here. In all, the grove holds on the order of seven hundred monkeys of the two kinds together, the largest concentration in the villages’ immediate forest and the reason the place has a scientific literature at all.

The two temperaments make the coexistence uneven. The colobus keep to the canopy and to a diet of leaves, quiet, high, and easy to live beside; it is they whose numbers the censuses track and whose survival gives the grove its conservation fame. The mona are the harder neighbors — quick, bold, ground-going, omnivorous, and drawn to the ripening farms at the forest’s edge, where a protected animal that cannot be driven off with anything worse than a shout becomes a standing tax on the households nearest the trees. The same taboo that has saved the colobus obliges a farmer to watch a mona strip a plantain and do nothing. That the villages have kept the bargain regardless is the measure of how seriously Daworo’s law is taken; that the bargain costs most those who live closest to the grove is a strain the modern arrangements have never fully resolved.

The taboo that outperformed the fence

What lifts Boabeng-Fiema out of the register of local color is a set of numbers. The colobus of the grove have been counted, by complete census rather than estimate, across three decades, and the count has climbed. From 127 individuals in 1990 the population rose to 451 by 2020 — a growth of about 354 percent over the thirty years, roughly 11.8 percent a year — a trajectory documented in the long-run census work on the sanctuary’s colobus. An intermediate count, made over a single month in July 2003, found 217 to 241 colobus in fifteen groups. The line runs, in other words, steadily upward on ground where the animals are shrouded and coffined when they die.

Set that against the species’ fortunes everywhere else and the grove becomes remarkable. Colobus vellerosus is endemic to the Upper Guinean forests of West Africa, and across its range in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire it has collapsed — a decline on the order of 80 to 87 percent, driven by bushmeat hunting and the clearing of forest for logging, farms, and oil palm, until fewer than about a thousand mature animals are thought to survive in the wild. In 2019 the species was moved to the highest category of threat short of extinction. Against that background the villages of Boabeng and Fiema hold one of the last large populations of the animal — a stronghold matched, tellingly, only by other groves under other sacred prohibitions, such as the Kikélé forest in Benin. The taboo laid down by an oracle around 1842 has done, on its few square kilometers, what statute and enforcement have failed to do across a whole biogeographic zone.

The state came to the taboo late and layered law on top of it rather than replacing it. In 1974 the site was designated a sanctuary under Ghana’s Department of Game and Wildlife — the body now folded into the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission — and the killing of the colobus has been a national offense since the 1970s, so that a monkey harmed at Boabeng-Fiema now violates Daworo’s law and the republic’s at once. In 1990 the communities launched an ecotourism project around the grove; a modest guesthouse followed with international support in the mid-1990s. A Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary Management Committee took shape in the 1990s, and in 2008 it took over the collection and distribution of visitor revenue from the Wildlife Division, with backing from bodies such as Ghana’s Nature Conservation Research Centre. The grove is now among the most studied sacred natural sites in West Africa: the assessment by Fargey in the early 1990s opened a line of primatological work carried on by Saj, Mather, and Sicotte, by Kankam, by Wong and Sicotte, and by the census teams whose complete counts furnish the numbers above.

A white-thighed colobus, Colobus vellerosus, the critically endangered black-and-white monkey whose largest surviving Ghanaian population lives under the taboo at Boabeng-Fiema. Simon Tonge, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The temptation, given the numbers, is to package the place as a parable — traditional belief conserving nature, the monkeys that hug the tourists — and the promotional literature does exactly that. The record is more honest than the brochure. The taboo is not uniformly held: researchers document its erosion among younger residents and among Christian villagers for whom Daworo is no longer a binding authority, and the sanctuary’s protection rests increasingly on statute and on the tourism economy rather than on the old dread of the god alone. The monkeys, protected, press on the people who protect them — the mona in particular raid crops from the farms that ring the grove, and the provisioning of animals for photographs distorts their behavior and their diet. The infrastructure that would make the site a genuine draw is thin: the roads are poor, the guesthouse small, and the visitor numbers modest against the trouble of getting there. And there is a running argument, common to community-conservation schemes everywhere, over whether the revenue the monkeys bring in reaches fairly the households that bear the daily cost of living beside them — the raided fields, the roofs, the sleep-broken nights. To hold the grove up as a simple success is to flatten the bargain it actually is.

Still, the bargain has held for the better part of two centuries, and the graves in the grove are its ledger. A conservationist reads Boabeng-Fiema as a rare case where a belief, not a boundary, kept a species from going the way of its kin; a person of the two villages reads it as fidelity to Daworo and to the children the god left in their keeping. Both readings end at the same small coffin under the trees, wrapped in white cloth, laid down with the priests who served the god — a monkey given the dignity of a person, in the one forest in Ghana where that has kept the monkeys alive.

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