Tano

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At Tanoboase, a few miles north of Techiman, the great river does not begin as a stream. It seeps out of a cleft in a mass of standing rock, in a wooded grove the Bono hold to be the god’s own house, and the priests know one of its names from exactly this: Obomuhene, king within the rock. Where the water pools they perform, at set times, a rite of bailing — a stretch of the river emptied with care so that the sacred bearded fish are brought briefly into the open air, fish that a person may look upon but must never eat, and which, once exposed, may not be allowed to touch the ground. The god can be walked up to at his source. He is a river with a temper and a lineage, and the first thing the tradition teaches about him is not a doctrine but a taboo: this water is a person, and there are things one does not do to it.

The Tano River flowing through the Tanoboase Sacred Natural Site near Techiman, in the Bono East heartland of Ghana. Kwabena Kwabi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The names of the river-god

Among the abosom, the lesser deities of river and force through whom the withdrawn sky-god’s power reaches the working world, Tano stands first. He is reckoned king of the abosom, the greatest of their number and second only to Nyame himself, and the family of shrine-gods that descend from him bear his name across the whole northern forest. In the Akan of the shrines his cult-name is Ta Kora — the form the colonial anthropologist R. S. Rattray recorded in the 1920s as “Ta Kora” and “Taakora” — while the Fante of the coast call him Tando. The single word Tano names three things at once that the tradition does not trouble to separate: the god, the river that is his body, and the lineage of atano deities he fathered.

The praise-names each disclose a facet. Asuo Tano, “Tano the waters,” ties him to the river itself; Obomuhene, “king within the rock,” to the cleft at Tanoboase from which the water comes; Nana Ko Nim, “the one who wins wars,” to the office he holds for those who fight under his protection. The etymologies that circulate for the deep name — ta read as an honorific or a “father” element, kora glossed as “the immense” — are the glosses the tradition offers rather than settled linguistics, and are best marked as folk etymology and left there. No alphabet recorded the Akan world before the Europeans reached the coast, and the name reaches the documentary record late, through the ear of the ethnographer and the mouths of the priests he questioned.

In the lineage of myth Tano is a son of Nyame, the sky-god and creator; in the Asante telling his mother is the earth, Asase Yaa, so that the greatest of the river-gods is born of sky and ground together. His kin form a mythic geography of water. His elder brother and rival is Bia, the god of the Bia River, which flows west out of Ghana into Côte d’Ivoire; the crater lake Bosomtwe and the rivers Apo and Pra are counted among the family. Historically Tano is a Bono deity of the northern Akan heartland around Techiman, and his cult was drawn southward over time into the pantheon of the Asante, who made him among the highest of their state’s powers. Tradition names the first to serve him: Afia Ankomah, a woman said to have drawn the god from the river in her fishing-basket as a stone or an object that darkened the day when she lifted it out, and who, possessed by the presence that named itself Asuo Tano, became his first priestess. Her family’s obligation to the god is folded into the founding of the Bono state — Techiman, in the tradition, is the “nation of Takyi,” settled when the hunter Takyi could no longer outrun the spiritual duty the river laid on his house.

The theft of the inheritance

The signature story is a theft, and it explains the map. When Nyame’s sons came of age, the sky-god meant to divide the lands between them: to the favored elder Bia the rich and fertile country, to the younger Tano the poor bush. The division was to be settled by a blessing given to whoever came first. But the messenger, a goat named Akua Abirekyi, preferred Tano, and coached him: he was to rise before dawn and go to Nyame disguised as his elder brother, and take the blessing meant for Bia. Tano did, and won the fertile lands — the forest country that would become the Asante heartland — while Bia was left the barren west and driven out into the wilderness, where he became the obosom of the bush and the wild animals, his river running away toward the setting sun. The feud between the brothers, the tradition holds, still runs in their two rivers.

The story travels, and inverts as it crosses a border. In the Asante version above, Nyame favors Bia and the goat’s trick robs him for Tano’s benefit; in the Anyi (Agni) telling from the western side of the river, it is Tano who is the favored son and Bia who is helped to the disguise, after which Tano takes back by force what he holds to be his and drives Bia west. The two versions are not a contradiction to be resolved but a boundary drawn in narrative — each people telling the tale so that the greater god ends on their own bank.

From the goat comes a law. Because Akua Abirekyi worked the deception, the goat is taboo to Tano’s worshipers, and to Bia’s; the animal that made the god rich is the one animal his people will not bring near him. This is the constant. Some tellings add a fowl or a hen to the prohibition, but the goat is the fixed point and the fowl a local variant, not to be overstated. To the taboo on the goat the river adds its own: the bearded fish — the mudfish read as the god’s own children — may not be eaten, and in the bailing of the river the exposed fish may not touch the earth. A worshiper of Tano therefore carries the god’s story in a short list of things not done.

The river that became a border

The river runs the length of the myth’s geography. The Tano — the Tanoé, on the francophone side — rises near Techiman in the Bono East heartland and runs some 400 kilometers (250 miles) south, gathering the drainage of the western forest, until its lower course forms the last stretch of the international boundary between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and it passes through the Ehy and Tendo lagoons into the Aby lagoon and out to the Gulf of Guinea. It is navigable from the sea for about 60 miles (95 km) inland to Tanoso, where the Sutre Falls block further passage. The god of the goat-trick, in other words, is now literally a line on a map between two nations — a deity one country’s border runs along, whose fish and lagoons and floods are shared, in fact, by the very peoples the inheritance-myth divided.

Tano’s power is not an emblem laid over the water; the water is the power. His office to the living is double. He is an oracle: through him the future is read and the sick are healed, and his voice comes through his priests. And to the Asante he is above all a god of war — Nana Ko Nim, the one who wins wars — and, in Asante reckoning though not in Fante, a god of thunder and lightning. His service runs through the akɔmfoɔ, the priests and priestesses of akom, whose vocation characteristically opens not with a decision but with an affliction. In the ethnographic record, Asante priests and priestesses commonly report that they discovered their calling when they heard “the voice of Tano” — or of some other obosom — and fell into a fit or went into a trance; mounted thereafter by the god in the drumming and dancing of akom, they deliver his oracle and his cure. What the office is, and that it exists, belongs to the public record set down a century ago; how a person is made a priest of Tano, and what passes in the shrine, stays at the worshipers’ distance and is not an instruction to be written out.

The bailing itself is the plainest window onto how this god is served. At intervals the priests empty a marked stretch of the river, working the water from one pool into another so that the bearded fish are gathered and shown; the exposed fish are the god made briefly visible, and the two prohibitions — not to eat them, not to let them touch the ground — hold at their strictest in exactly the moment when they are most vulnerable, out of the water and in human hands. It is a rite that puts the whole theology into a single act: the god’s body opened, his children lifted into the light, and a law observed that keeps the sacred from being consumed or defiled. What passes belongs to the public record that Rattray and the museum accounts already set down; the shrine’s inner work does not.

From the one god descends a whole family of shrine-deities, the atano, each with its own priest, its own vessel, and a day-name in the Akan style: Tano Kofi, Tano Kwasi, Tano Kwabena, Tano Kwadwo, and others, scattered in shrines across the forest country — the Tano Kwadwo shrine at Saaman, north of Kumasi, among the better documented. The material core of such a shrine is spare and portable: a brass pan, the god’s water, consecrated stones or objects drawn, as Afia Ankomah’s was, from the river, kept in the care of the priest whose body the god may mount. Two things travel together in this cult, then: a single named river-god at Techiman, and a dispersed lineage of his children resident wherever a shrine holds his pan and his water. The atano are how one great river becomes a hundred local presences without ceasing to be one god, and how a deity rooted in a particular cleft of rock in the Bono country could be carried south to Kumasi and made a power of the Asante state.

The Tano Rock Shrine within the Tanoboase Sacred Grove, the standing rock the Bono hold to be the traditional home of their people and the house of the god. Adjoajo, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The war office fastened the god to a remembered history, though loosely. The Asante and the state of Gyaman, on the western reach of the river country, fought a real war in 1818–19, in which the Asantehene Osei Bonsu subdued Gyaman and its king Adinkra near Bondoukou. A widely told tradition attaches Tano to that campaign — that Osei Bonsu sought the river-god’s help against Gyaman, and that the god delivered the victory. This is folklore grown around a documented event, not documented fact, and it is worth naming as the tradition it is rather than promoting to history. The state, the wars, and the office of the Asantehene belong to the record of the Asante empire; what belongs to Tano is the memory that a nation at war turned to a river.

Rattray’s record, and the god’s afterlife

Almost everything an outside reader knows of the Tano cult in fine detail passes first through one man. R. S. Rattray, the British government anthropologist stationed at Kumasi, set down the atano deities, the possession-priesthood, and the shrine practice in Ashanti (1923) and Religion and Art in Ashanti (1927), and his descriptions of the atano possession-shrines remain the most cited a century on — and they have to be weighed accordingly. Rattray was unusually attentive and, over his career, moved away from the traders’ and missionaries’ vocabulary — the word fetish, coined by Europeans on this very coast to name what they did not understand, and its companions juju and superstition — toward the tradition’s own categories of obosom and suman. But his work was also an instrument of colonial indirect rule, produced to make a conquered people legible to their governors, and a claim that rests on Rattray rests on a mediated, colonial-era source, not on neutral ground. The privileged testimony is the Akan’s own: the oral tradition of the shrines, the drum-texts and possession-dance that the Ghanaian scholar J. H. Kwabena Nketia analyzed as poetry and music, and the cosmology that Peter Kwasi Sarpong — later the Catholic Archbishop of Kumasi — read from within, in Twi, on the sacred stools and the shape of the Asante sacred world.

The rock itself has become heritage. The Tanoboase Sacred Grove near Techiman — held to be the cradle of the Bono, its rock caves a refuge during the era of slave-raiding and inter-state war, when the Atlantic trade reached deep into the forest and a defensible grove was worth its stone — was formalized in 1996 as a community-based ecotourism project and developed as a visitor site from about 2001. The god’s house is now also a place one buys a ticket to enter, a reception frame worth noting and not worth adopting: the grove is a working sacred site first and a tourist attraction second.

Tano belongs, too, to a wider West African family of water and creator powers, though he keeps his own shape within it. Where the Yoruba honor the river-goddesses of the orisha traditions and the Fon-Ewe the water spirits of vodun, the Akan give their first rank among the working deities to a river reckoned male, a war-and-oracle god born of the sky and the earth, whose myth is not of origins but of an inheritance stolen with a goat’s help. The resemblance is a matter of region and not of borrowing: each of these forest and coastal peoples built, out of its own rivers and its own dead, a distinct account of how a withdrawn creator’s power comes down into water that a person can walk up to and must not misuse.

Two afterlives pull in opposite directions. Much of the freely circulating material on Tano — the river-tourism blogs, the scraped and machine-written encyclopedia pages — inflates him with grand regalia lists, a named “doomsday gun,” an army of baboons, precise tallies of thirty child-deities, and elaborate battle tactics, none of which the ethnographic record supports and all of which are better treated as modern popular embellishment than as fact. The other afterlife is the living one. The abosom, the akom priesthood, the sacred groves, and the festivals — the Apoo rite at Techiman among them — are practiced today by the Bono, the Asante, the Anyi, and their neighbors, sovereign peoples in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, in a religion that most of them hold alongside Christianity or Islam without contradiction. The god is not a relic recovered from the record. He is a river that still floods, a border two states still share, and a rock at Techiman where the water still comes out of the stone and the fish are still, by law, not to be eaten.

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