Sasabonsam

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In a case among the British Museum’s West African holdings sits a figure of dark hardwood a little over half a meter tall. It has a human face and a pair of horns, a long beard, a torso whose ribs stand out over a hollow belly, and a set of membranous wings folded close like a bat’s. Its legs do not stand; they loop down and coil back on themselves, as if the whole creature were caught mid-grip on a branch that is not there. The catalog number is Af1935,1212.1. The figure was carved in 1935 by Osei Bonsu, the finest Asante carver of his century, in Kumasi, some 5,000 kilometers from the case it now occupies — and it has done more than any text to fix, for people who have never stood under the trees it depicts, the shape of the thing it represents.

Osei Bonsu (1900–1977) worked in the same decade R. S. Rattray, the British government anthropologist at Kumasi, was setting down what the colonial administration filed as Asante “forest monsters.” The winged silhouette on that shelf is where the outside world’s picture of Sasabonsam tends to begin. It is not where Sasabonsam begins. To find that, one has to leave the case and go up into the canopy of a living forest, to the top of an odum or a silk-cotton tree, and look at what an Akan hunter has long known to watch for.

The ghost of the male witch

The name is Twi, and it is a compound. Sasa is a spirit of a particular and dangerous kind: the restless, vengeful residue that certain slain creatures, felled trees, or wronged persons leave behind — a vindictive charge that lingers where a death was violent or improper and that must be pacified before it does harm. Bonsam, or ɔbonsam, is the Akan word for a male witch, an evil power, the standard antonym of a beneficent one; its plural is abonsam. Put together, the whole is glossed roughly as “the ghost of the male witch,” though the sources are careful, and so should a reader be: the precise etymology is not fixed, and the second element carries the general weight of malevolent, ungoverned spirit-power as much as any single translation. The name announces a thing made of two fears at once — the aggrieved dead who will not settle, and the human being who turns power against his own kind.

The belief belongs to the Akan-speaking peoples of the forest belt of West Africa — the Asante of the interior, the Fante of the coast, and their many kin across present-day southern Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo, whose shared language is Twi. It is not the property of a priesthood or a shrine. It is common knowledge, the kind carried in the warnings given to a boy before he first goes into the deep bush, and it is current still, not a relic of some superseded past.

Almost everything the alphabetic record holds about it runs through one man. The Akan kept no pre-contact writing; their knowledge lived in the spoken tale, the drummed text, the proverb, and the carved and cast object. Robert Sutherland Rattray (1881–1938), stationed at Kumasi during the years of British indirect rule, transcribed a great deal of it across three volumes for the Clarendon Press — Ashanti (1923), Religion and Art in Ashanti (1927), and Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930) — and it is in the second of these that Sasabonsam, the little forest people, and the witch are set down together. Rattray is indispensable and compromised in the same breath: a sympathetic listener with a genuine ear, and an instrument of the administration he served, who reached for the vocabulary of his moment. He filed the little forest people as “fairies” and the protective charm as a “fetish” — that last word coined by Portuguese traders on this very coast, feitiço, to name Guinea religious objects, and pressed into the long argument that helped justify the trade and the mission. Rattray’s own writing edges away from it, toward the Akan terms; the reader who uses him has to make the same move, and further.

What the hunter watches for

Rattray’s Sasabonsam is covered from head to foot in long hair. It has large, blood-shot eyes and long legs, and its feet point in both directions at once, so that no track it leaves can tell which way it went. It sits in the highest branches of the tallest trees — by preference the odum, the African teak (Milicia excelsa), and the onyina, the silk-cotton or kapok (Ceiba pentandra), the two species that overtop the forest canopy — and there it waits. Its favored method is patience and reach: it lets its long legs hang down from the branch, and with them it hooks up the unwary hunter who passes beneath. The image is exact to the danger it stands for. The odum and the silk-cotton are precisely the trees a person cannot see the top of; the ogre is the deep bush itself, the ungoverned distance past the last cleared field, rendered as a body with a face.

A large silk-cotton (kapok) tree, Ceiba pentandra — the onyina, one of the two canopy trees in which Sasabonsam is said to wait. via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

Placing Sasabonsam within the Akan sacred world means placing it at the far margin. The ordered cosmos — Nyame the withdrawn creator in the heights, Asase Yaa the earth underfoot, the abosom the deities of river and force with Tano chief among them, and the honored ancestors, the nsamanfo — that cosmos, surveyed in full under Akan religion, is centered on the village, the shrine, the compound, and the settled hierarchy of the living and the dead. Sasabonsam stands outside all of it. It is not one of the abosom; it holds no shrine; no libation is poured to it and no festival keeps its day. It is the wild pole against which the settled world defines itself, and it is not worshiped but warded against. Rattray recorded that it is held to be at particular enmity with the priestly class — the wild power set against the ordered one.

Sasabonsam does not keep the forest alone. Its nearest kin are the mmoatia, the little folk: forest beings scarcely a foot tall whose feet, like the ogre’s, point backward, so that their footprints lead the tracker the wrong way. They speak to one another by whistling, and to whistle idly in the bush is to invite their attention. Rattray recorded three kinds, distinguished by color — the black mmoatia, largely harmless, and the mischievous white and red — and credited them with a deep knowledge of the medicines of the forest, the herbal cures that an herbalist is said to receive from their tutoring. They are guardians of the wilderness and its pharmacopeia, closer to tricksters than to monsters, and yet of the same wild order as the thing in the tree. Rattray, characteristically, once offered money for the capture of one, a detail that says more about the collector and his confidence than about the being he hoped to buy.

The third of the kindred is the ɔbayifo (plural abayifo), the witch. Bayi is witchcraft, and the ɔbayifo is its practitioner — most often imagined as an ordinary person by day, a neighbor, frequently an older woman or a person with the herbalist’s knowledge, indistinguishable in daylight from anyone else. At night the witch’s sunsum, the part of the self that carries personality and force, is said to leave the sleeping body and fly out as a small phosphorescent light, and in that form to feed: on the blood, the vitality, the life-substance of others, and above all of sleeping children. The predatory logic is intimate rather than remote. The ogre in the far tree preys on the hunter who leaves the village; the witch preys from inside the village, on kin.

Rattray drew the three together. The mmoatia, the ɔbayifo, and Sasabonsam are, in his account, the powers that stand behind the suman — the protective charm or amulet an Akan person may carry against exactly such dangers, a thing the tradition treats on its own terms and the traders called a “fetish.” That such charms are made and worn, and what Rattray recorded of them, is a matter of public record; how they are made is not something to set down here, and was not his to give freely either. In the same passages he called the ɔbayifo the “servant” of Sasabonsam — while noting, in the same breath, that the two terms were sometimes used as though they meant one thing. It is a point to hold lightly. The relation between the master-ogre and the servant-witch is real in the record but not tidy; where the categories blur, they blur, and the tradition is under no obligation to keep them as separate as an outsider’s diagram would like.

Knotted together, the three name a single fear in three registers: the predatory forest, the illegitimate spirit-power loose in the world, and the witch who devours her own kin. And there is a rule attached. A widely reported taboo forbids hunting or entering the forest on certain days — a Thursday above all — and it is Sasabonsam who is said to enforce it, tracking down whoever breaks it. In the story-cycle the ogre plays a different part again: it is the devouring wild power that Kwaku Ananse the spider outwits, the boundary against which human cunning proves itself, not a deity to be petitioned but an antagonist to be got past.

The carved thing and the borrowed one

Sasabonsam’s most concrete afterlife is the object in London with which this began. Osei Bonsu carved it in 1935, and it reached the British Museum that same year; he is thought to have first cut the figure a decade earlier, around 1925, as the finial of a linguist’s staff — one of the carved-topped staffs an okyeame, a chief’s spokesman, carries to embody a proverb. Bonsu was no anonymous “native craftsman,” the phrase the period reached for. He was born in Kumasi, the son of a court drummer and carver, and served as chief carver to three successive Asantehene — Prempeh I, Osei Tutu Agyeman Prempeh II, and Opoku Ware II — restoring and making the regalia of the Asante court through the decades of colonial rule and its aftermath. His hand is now recognized in works long shelved as unattributed; the art historian William Fagg began the reattribution in 1968. That a named, documented Ghanaian master made this figure is the first correction to be made to almost everything said about it downstream, and recent scholarship — a University of St Andrews study pointedly titled Uncovering an Archival Cage — has turned the question around, asking not what the carving tells us about Sasabonsam but what the museum’s framing of it, and the museum’s continued keeping of it, tell us about the archive.

An Akan cast-brass gold weight in the form of a hunter or warrior with a musket, southern Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire. Unknown authorUnknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The wings are the tell. Bonsu gave his Sasabonsam a bat’s membranous wings, and it is that detail — carried out of the museum and into print — that let the figure be reclassified in the twentieth century as an “African vampire.” The blood-drinking, twenty-foot-wingspan creature that circulates under the name owes far more to this lineage than to Rattray’s hair-covered, long-legged ogre. A Dictionary of World Mythology gave it iron teeth and wings “nearly twenty feet wide”; the popular vampire encyclopedias of the 1990s filed it among the world’s blood-drinkers; and cryptozoology annexed it, the genre’s founder Bernard Heuvelmans guessing in On the Track of Unknown Animals that the thing was really some large unrecorded bat. From there the trail runs to a “blood-sucking tree cryptid,” to the long-limbed West African ghoul that role-playing games borrowed, and to the viral “African mythology” reels of the present internet, where the figure is reliably introduced as a vampire and reliably given the wingspan. This is reception, and much of it is accretion; the “African Dracula” is a thing largely built abroad, out of a carving and a shelf of encyclopedias, and it is worth naming as such rather than repeating.

Some of the borrowing runs deeper than a wingspan, and it runs across the ocean the wrong way. The Gold Coast was a heartland of the Atlantic slave trade, and the belief traveled the Middle Passage in the memory of enslaved Akan — sold and shipped through the coastal castles and the long inland routes, past the river of the last bath at Assin Manso — into the Caribbean. In eighteenth-century Jamaica the Sasabonsam is reported among the enslaved Akan, and the witch that serves it left a longer mark: the Jesuit scholar Joseph J. Williams argued that the Jamaican word obeah itself descends from ɔbayifo, the Akan witch. The silk-cotton tree came too, or was found waiting — the same Ceiba stands in the Caribbean forest as in the West African, and the spirits contacted at its roots in Jamaican practice are of a piece with the ones the tree held at home. This is not migration and should not be softened into it. It is the record of people carried off, who kept what they could carry in the mind.

Two more recent readings deserve to be kept distinct from the record they interpret. The first is a Christian one: as the missions advanced, Sasabonsam — the ɔbonsam, the evil power — was mapped onto the Devil, and the Twi word did duty for the imported figure, so that a forest ogre and a scriptural adversary now share a name. The second is ecological, and modern: commentators, the travel outlet Atlas Obscura among them, have read the Thursday forest taboo that Sasabonsam enforces as an indigenous mechanism of renewal — a day on which the bush is left to rest and recover, conservation enforced by dread. It is an appealing reading and may capture something true about how the taboo functions; it is also a modern interpretation, not a claim traceable to Rattray or to the tradition’s own account of why the ogre wants the forest empty, and it belongs in the column marked interpretation rather than fact.

Against all of this — the vampire, the cryptid, the reel, the archival cage — Ghanaian voices have pushed back by pointing, precisely, at the carving. Where foreign framings sensationalize, outlets at home foreground Osei Bonsu’s figure as heritage: a named master’s rendering of a being from his own people’s world, made in Kumasi, kept in London. The object cuts both ways. It is the source of the misreading and the correction to it in the same block of wood.

So there are two Sasabonsams, and they do not quite meet. One hangs on a shelf 5,000 kilometers from the odum forests, winged and horned and half a century into a career as the world’s African vampire. The other has no wings at all — it is covered in hair, its bloodshot eyes fixed on the ground, its long legs already lowering from the top of a silk-cotton tree toward whoever was careless enough to come into the deep bush on the wrong day. The first sits behind glass, wings folded, going nowhere. The second is still up in the canopy — and the hunter who reaches the foot of a silk-cotton tree on the wrong day still takes the long way around it.

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