The Akan Doctrine of God

A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion

J.B. Danquah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136971693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1968. Danquah's desire with this title is to expound Akan thought in such a way as to make it comprehensible to western thinkers and to demonstrate that it is comparable to their system. In pursuance of this objective, he calls forth his philosophical training and indulges in metaphysical and ethical speculation. The effects of this are evident in the whole book, whether in his discussion of the nature of the supreme Being or in his exposition of Akan ethical thought.

SECTION TWO

THE AKAN MEANING OF GOD

CHAPTER I

ONYAME, THE AKAN DEITY

1. IN WHAT SENSE A “SKY”-GOD

THE most used name of God in Akanland is Onyame, often pronounced Nyame, and modern anthropologists say He is a “sky” God. I feel convinced from internal evidence that the appellation is misleading and does little credit to Nyame Himself.

As already noticed, the Akan designate the Supreme Being by three distinctive names, Onyame, Onyankopon and Odoman-koma. Onyame, we shall show presently, corresponds to the basic idea of Deity as commonly understood in Christian theology. Next is Onyankopon, who is more appropriately described as Supreme Being or Supreme Deity in the sense of a personal religious God. The third, Odomankoma, corresponds to a conception of the Godhead as the Interminable or Infinite Being.

Common to each of these is the appellation of Boadee (Booadee), Creator, and specifically to Odomankoma is that of Bore-bore, Excavator, Hewer, Carver, Creator, Originator, Inventor, Architect. Each of the three names of God is recognized as possessing certain qualities characteristic of its function. One of the best known of such qualities is that of Onyankopon who is called Kwaame, or Kwaamen, that is, “He whose day (of birth, or of worship) is Saturday.” It is for this reason, namely, that the day of birth of Onyankopon is known, that under this name He is made the object of religious adoration to a far greater extent than either Onyame or Odomankoma.

Now, until anthropologists left Europe to study “native” races the idea of a “sky”-God was not commonly associated with the Supreme Deity. He was, to them, either the God of Heaven or the Celestial Godhead, or in Milton, plain Celestial. But, for one reason or other, it has become the fashion to designate the high-gods of “native” races as “sky” Gods, and one’s admiration cannot but be stirred by the studied insistence to dissociate the Akan Onyame from “heaven,” keeping him pinned, as far as bearable, to the rather funny idea of “sky.”

There was, of course, some justification for this linguistic acrobatic to jump one godhead over the other in precedence within the firmament. According to Rattray, he was told that Onyame was “some power usually considered non-anthropomorphic which has its abode in the sky”; that Onyame was derived from onya, to get, and mee, to be full, satiated; that “long, long ago Onyame lived on earth, or at least was very near to us, and not then high up in the sky, and that it was much later that ‘he took himself away up in the sky.’”¹

In other words, Onyame was not, or of, the sky. Originally he was some one staying on the earth, or near the earth, who later acquired new quarters in the sky, like some of the Greek gods did. Before the Akan God acquired this new domicile his name or nature was, according to Rattray’s guides, that of giving satiation or satisfaction. (It should be noted that I do not subscribe to the interpretation of the word Onyame to be derived from onya, to get, and mee, to be full, satiated. Onya does not mean “to get”; it means “he gets.” Nya is the infinitive form, “to get.” For the purpose of argument, however, it seems convenient to work with Rattray’s own premises.)

I believe it ought to have struck Rattray that if indeed the Akan had wished to look upon Onyame as “sky”-God, they would have changed his name as soon as he changed his domicile from the earth to the sky. But apparently they did not think the change of domicile made any difference to the nature of Nyame, for whether he lived on earth or in the sky, he was known to the Akan as Onyame, and remained to them as such.

It follows that, to the Akan mind, the fact that Onyame, for some reason unstated, was elevated to the sky, did not thereby cause his native quality to be altered. The Akan people appear to have looked at the matter this way: If a hunter, living in a mud hut with his family, subsequently changed the form of his dwelling and went to live in a grass house, or a glass house, he would not thereby have exchanged his trade to acquire a new name or characteristic. He would still remain to his fellow-men the hunter, or the ex-hunter, who now lives in a grass house or glass house. But no one would think of calling him grass or glass hunter, for it would be meaningless in the context.

So, too, I think, the designation of the Akan Nyame by the term “Sky” God is meaningless, solely upon the evidence that He had left the earth and gone to live in the sky.

Indeed, if Rattray and the other anthropologists were looking about for a proprietary character to distinguish the Akan Onyame from the other types of Akan gods, they could not have done better, with the information at their disposal, than to have called him the “Satiation or Satisfaction God,” following the supposed etymology of the name given Rattray by the “natives.”

But this was not to be. From now on, and to the very last, the Akan Onyame (as also Onyankopon), became to the anthropologists not “God of Satisfaction,” or “Repletion,” but “Sky” God. And thus was the mental horizon of European students of the Akan religion definitely “set” for them by the limitations they had chosen to impose on the workings of their own minds. The fixed firmament, possibly only the near-side of it, became for these students the limit of the horizon the Akan could be supposed to have reached in their search for Godhead. Is it any wonder, then, if students of Akan thought were progressively hindered in their effort to understand what the Akan were thinking about most of the time when they talked about God—Onyame? What these anthropologists and scientists did was, of course, to create confusion for themselves and others, for first they caused a misunderstanding and then called it learning, which is not a bad parody of the aggressor’s conception of a new order: to make a solitude and call it peace.

It would not matter much to the Akan were such learned misunderstanding to be confined to field anthropologists, but, as in this case, the “Sky” God idea became so widespread that even the great Marett, of Oxford, after critically reading Rattray’s “Religion and Art in Ashanti,” and writing a treatise upon it, and after acknowledging that the Akan conception of Supreme Being was that of a living God, maintained, nevertheless, in addition, that to the Ashanti or Akan, God was a “Sky” God: Whereas, in truth and in fact, a God cannot be a “living” God if He lives in the sky.

2. SOME FALSE MEANINGS OF “NYAME”

A similar fusion of incompatible ideas would seem to have led Dr. M. J. Field in her “Religion and Medicine of the Ga People” (p. 61), published in 1937, to follow Rattray’s style and describe Nyonmo, the Supreme Being of the Ga people, as “certainly … a sky-god” because in the Ga language “the word Nyonmo means rain. The only way of saying that it is raining is to say that Nyonmo is falling.” In the major part of her book the Ga Nyonmo therefore remained sky-god and rarely a rain-God. Which, one must think, is a peculiar way of interpreting a people one is supposed to know to others who are not supposed to know them.

Probably Dr. Field is better justified in her interpretation than the anthropologists of the Twi or Akan people. For she, at least, gives the Ga word for rain, which looks like being the same as the word for the Supreme Being, or what she elsewhere calls “Nature.” The Akan anthropologists do not quite do the same thing.

All the same, Dr. Field is not less wrong than any others in calling a Gold Coast God a “sky” God, even on the evidence of the similarity of the names for rain and for God. Mr. E. A. Ammah, of Accra, a poet of the Ga race and an authority on the language, has explained to me personally that the term Nyon in Nyonmo does not mean rain. Nyon is found in other compounds where it appears to mean bright, light, shine, day, or the firmament. Mo is the Ga suffix for person acting or doing. Thus Nyonmo (God) possibly means “The Master of Light” or “The Actor of Light,” etc. Other words in the Ga language using Nyon in the sense of light or brightness are nyon-tsele, “moon,” nyon-ten, midnight. Mr. Ammah adds that the Ga word for rain is best written without the middle “n” or “ng,” nyomo and not nyonmor the first “o,” of course, being the broad “o,” as “oa” in broad, and not the “o” in “told.” For the benefit of the research student it may be useful to add that the “tsele” in nyontsele means “brightening up”; tse often means neat. (Ehe ntse, he is neat, holy, or attractive); also the “ten” or “teng” in nyonten means “the middle of.” So that nyontsele primitively meant, probably, “Nyon is brightening up,” and nyonten also meant “The middle period of Nyon,” whatever Nyon may mean. In any case, there is here evidence which points to the conclusion that the “Nyon” in Nyonmo belongs to a c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction to The Second Edition
• Foreword
• Contents
• Figures
• Note On Adinkra Illustrations
• Section One The Quest of the Doctrine
• Section Two The Akan Meaning of God
• Section Three Ethical Canons of the Doctrine
• Section Four The Eight Akan Postulates
• Section Five Universal Utiltity of the Postulates
• Appendix I Twi Maxims Quoted (With the original Akan Versions)
• Appendix II Notes and Glossary of Akan Words