The Ewe

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A smooth stone turns up in the earth of a compound where the lightning has struck. It is an axe-head, ground and polished to a dull shine, older than any memory the town keeps — the work of hands that farmed this coast before iron was known here. To the Ewe who lift it from the scorched ground it is none of that. It is soki-kpe, the thunderstone: the bolt itself, hurled from the sky and buried where it fell, and it is carried not to a cabinet but to the shrine of Yewe and laid before the vodu of the storm, whose signature it is. The god who threw it is So, the ram-horned lord of thunder and lightning, and the stone is proof that he has passed and rendered judgment. From that single object — a Neolithic tool read as a weapon of heaven — the whole shape of an Ewe world can be recovered: a high creator above, the powers of the storm and the earth and the crossroads beneath, a society of initiates who tend the thunder, and behind all of it the drums whose interlocking beat is the voice of the rite.

The Ewe (Eʋe) are a people of the West African coast, and they are the near western kin of the Fon, with whom they share a language, a founding migration, and a sacred world built on the same grammar. They call themselves Eʋeawo and their tongue Eʋegbe, and they number today, by the estimate carried in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, on the order of ten million — roughly six million in Ghana and some three million more in Togo, with a further scatter across the Beninese border. They are a living people, present-tense in every sentence that follows.

Ewe kente stripes, each about ten centimeters wide and sewn edge to edge into a finished cloth — the narrow-strip weaving of the Volta Region. ZSM, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Out of Notsie

The Ewe speak Eʋegbe, a language of the Gbe branch of the Kwa division of the great Niger-Congo family, and Gbe is a compact cluster: Ewe stands beside Fon, Aja, and Gun as dialects of one ancient coastal speech, mutually near enough that a Gbe-speaker moving from the Volta to the lower Niger crosses a continuous world of cognate tongues rather than a wall of foreign ones. Their country is the strip between two rivers — the Volta to the west and the Mono to the east — which today falls across three states: the Volta Region of southeastern Ghana, the whole southern band of Togo, and the western edge of Benin. It is a land of lagoon and savanna and coastal plain, and the sea is never far.

Their own account of how they came to it is one of the most fully preserved migration traditions in West Africa. It begins far to the east, at towns the elders name as Ketu and Tado, and it remembers the ancestors under an older name than Ewe: the Dogboawo, the People of Dogbo, called after the first settlement they raised when they broke westward from the confederacy of the Aja, the parent stock of Tado from which Ewe and Fon alike descend. The historians read this migration as one strand of the same Aja-Fon-Ewe dispersal that the Fon record from within — the movement out of Tado and Allada that seeded the whole Slave Coast with Gbe-speaking peoples — and where the traditions of the several peoples touch, they broadly agree.

The drama on which the Ewe story turns is the escape from Notsie. Notsie (Notsé), a walled city-state in what is now central Togo, was the last place the Dogboawo lived as one body, each clan in its own ward under its own head, all beneath a single king. The founding trouble came, the tradition holds, in the seventeenth century. The welcoming king Adela Atogble died, and his successor, Togbe Agɔkɔli, ruled with a cruelty the tellers dwell on: he demanded that the elders be killed, set impossible tasks — a rope spun from clay — and ringed the town with a great earthen wall to hold his people in. The escape is engineered by patience and cunning rather than force. The women, going out to wash, poured their water day after day against one stretch of the wall until the packed earth there went soft. Then, by night, the elder Tegli drew what the tellers call the Sword of Liberation, called on the gods, and struck the weakened place through; and the fugitives, streaming out, walked backwards so that their footprints seemed to lead into the town, not away from it, and Agɔkɔli’s pursuers found only tracks pointing home.

Beyond the broken wall the single people became many. They split into the groups that would found the towns of Eweland — the Anlo, the Bɛ, the Peki, the Tɔŋu, and others — fanning south and west to the coast and the Volta. The Anlo, the group whose story is told most fully, settled around the Keta lagoon and made their ritual capital at Anloga, which remains the customary and ceremonial center of the Anlo state. Because the Ewe never built a single centralized kingdom on the scale of Dahomey to their east, their history is a history of many towns and clan-states bound by language, descent, and a shared religion rather than by one crown — a looser and more durable federation of peoples who remember a common wall and a common night.

Mawu, Se, and the thunder society

Over the Ewe world stands Mawu, the supreme creator, associated with the sky and the far height, the maker of everything and the source from which all lesser power descends. Mawu is the same high god that the neighboring Fon set behind their dual creator Mawu-Lisa and the primordial Nana Buluku; but among the Ewe, spoken of strictly, Mawu is one — remote, sovereign, and largely withdrawn from the daily running of the world, which is delegated downward. Beneath Mawu stand the trɔwo and the voduwo, the deities and spirits set over the domains of the world — the earth, the sea, the storm, the smallpox, the iron, the hunt — and it is they, not the distant creator, whom the ordinary worship of Ewe life addresses. Each is served by its own priests, the trɔnua and the hunɔ, who keep its shrine and speak for it, in sacred groves and shrine-houses scattered through the towns.

Everything rests on Se (Sɛ). The word carries at once three senses the tradition holds together: Se is cosmic law, the order and harmony by which the world is kept; Se is destiny, the course “written” for each life by Mawu before it is born; and Se is the soul-portion, the particular allotment a person carries. Every person, in this teaching, has a unique Se that existed before their birth and that shapes what they are and what will befall them — a life-script issued from the creator and lodged in the self. To live well is, in a phrase a contemporary Ewe practitioner uses, a matter of working one’s Se, of coming to know the destiny one was given and aligning with rather than against it.

The instrument for reading that destiny is Afa. Afa — the Ewe form of the sixteen-fold divination the Fon call Fa and the Yoruba Ifa, cousins drawn from one coastal inheritance — is the science by which a diviner discloses a person’s Se: which vodu owns their head, what fate is written, what must be done to set a crossed life straight. The specialist who reads it is the bokɔnɔ, the Afa priest, master of the signs and of the memorized body of verse and counsel attached to each. And no consultation, no offering, no approach to any vodu begins anywhere but with Legba. Legba is the trickster-guardian of the crossroads and the threshold, the messenger between the human world and the world of the trɔwo, and the one who must be greeted and fed first at the gate; only through him can the other powers be reached at all. He guards the spiritual essence of a person and stands watch over their destiny, and to leave him unhonored is to find every door beyond him shut.

The most powerful of the Ewe orders is Yewe (Yeʋe, Yeve), the exclusive society of thunder and lightning, and its vodu is So — also called Xebieso, the sky-king whose name is cognate with the Fon Xɛvioso and Heviosso and, across the eastern frontier, with the Yoruba Ṣango, though the three are kin and not one and the same. So is the ram-horned lord of the storm. His zoomorphic sign is the ram; his weapon is the double-headed axe, whose two blades are read as destruction and rain together, judgment and life; and his hurled bolt is the thunderstone, the soki-kpe, the polished prehistoric axe-head found in the burned ground where lightning has fallen. He is the enforcer of Se in its sternest aspect: he smites liars, thieves, and the false, and a death by lightning is understood not as accident but as verdict, so that the Yewe society is called to investigate and purify a compound the bolt has touched. Those he strikes and spares are counted as chosen, marked for him.

The initiates of Yewe enter the convent for a season of seclusion, moral training, and ritual rebirth — a passage described here only at the distance of the public record, its interior kept where the society keeps it. They emerge remade, bearing new Yewe names, while the names they carried before become taboo, unspoken; and they are led by the order’s priests and priestesses, the Midawo and Hunɔ among the men, the Minawo among the women. The whole apparatus — the high creator, the delegated trɔwo, Se and the Afa that reads it, Legba at the gate, the thunder society enforcing the moral law — is a coherent religion with a theology, a clergy, a divinatory science, and a discipline, and it is best understood at that level rather than any other.

Over all of it lie the drums. The Ewe are among the most celebrated drummers and dancers of West Africa, and their music is not ornament to the rite but its speech. The martial Agbekor — old, stately, once a war-dance — and the vigorous Agbadza, danced today in celebration and in mourning both, are played on a graded family of drums conceived as a family in fact: the small, high kagan, the child; the kidi, the mother; the sogo, the father; and the tall master drum, the atsimevu, the grandfather, who leads and speaks and against whose calls the others answer. Their interlocking cross-rhythms, laid over the iron bell that holds the timeline, are the sound the vodu is called down into. And on their portable looms the Ewe weave the narrow-strip cloth the world calls Ewe kente — long bands about ten centimeters wide, historically in blue and white, sewn edge to edge into finished cloths dense with motif and proverb, the regalia worn by chiefs at the great gatherings.

The word and the world

The Ewe country lay on the Slave Coast, and the Atlantic trade that funneled captives through the ports of the Bight of Benin — through Ouidah above all — scattered the Gbe-speaking world across the Middle Passage. Carried into bondage in the Americas, the Ewe-Fon vodu and the Yoruba orisha did not perish; they took new root and new names, surviving as Haitian Vodou, as Brazilian Candomblé, as Cuban Santería and Lucumí. Legba still keeps the crossroads in the New World rites; the thunder-lord and the ordered spirits of Mawu still answer under other skies. The reception of the Ewe religion in the wider world is inseparable from that forced dispersal, which is told at length where the ports and the creator-gods are told; here it is enough to mark that the vodu went where the people were carried, and endured.

There is one thing the wider world got badly wrong, and it must be named as an error rather than repeated as a fact. The word by which this whole religion is popularly known — “voodoo” — is not a description of it but a caricature of it: a thing assembled out of colonial contempt and, later, out of Hollywood, none of which belongs to the faith of Mawu and the trɔwo and Yewe. That image is a problem in the historical record — a distortion produced by the slave societies of the Americas and the cinema of the twentieth century — and not a portrait of the priest-served, divination-ordered religion described above. Read at its own level, the tradition is neither sinister nor secret in the lurid sense the caricature supposes; it is a way of keeping the law of the world.

That the tradition is a living one, and increasingly an acknowledged one, is also part of the record. Across the border in Benin, vodun holds official standing as a recognized religion, granted in 1996, and is marked by a national festival each January; and among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo the shrines stand open, the Yewe convents still receive initiates, the bokɔnɔ still read Afa, and the drum-orders still play — even as the great majority of Ewe today are also Christian, the two allegiances held together rather than traded one for the other. The scholarship read here runs from the ethnography of Melville J. Herskovits, whose fieldwork on the neighboring Fon (Dahomey, 1938) first framed the Ewe-Fon religious complex for outside readers, through Suzanne Preston Blier’s African Vodun (1995) and the coastal history of Robin Law, to the Beninese, Togolese, and Ghanaian scholars who have written Eweland from within — each read critically, with the outsider’s lens marked where it is an outsider’s.

Children dressed in cowries at the Hogbetsotso festival at Anloga, the annual re-enactment of the Anlo flight from Notsie. JY midey, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The broken wall is remembered every year. On the first Saturday of November the Anlo gather at Anloga for Hogbetsotso — the name means the festival of the exodus, the coming-out from Hogbe, which is Notsie — and the whole migration is staged again. The weeks before it are given to peacemaking, all disputes to be settled amicably; the villages are swept clean and the rubbish burned; the ancestral stools are purified with libation in the rite called dodede; and the festival crests in a durbar where the chiefs sit in their kente and receive the homage of the people, and the drummers play Agbadza until the ground moves. The thunderstone still waits in the shrine, and the diviner still reads the destiny written before a person was born; the wall the women softened with wash-water is three centuries down, but the people who walked out backwards through it keep the night in their calendar, and dance it.

→ Related: The Aja · The Gun · Mawu Lisa · Legba · Dan · Gu · Sakpata · Allada · Ouidah · Abomey · Dankoli