Migration stories

Here is a map showing the supposed migration route of the people of Akpafu, Ghana.¹ I found it in a University of Ghana dissertation on Mawu traditional music (Agudze 1991). The map, included in an introductory chapter on the history of the Mawu, tells a rather peculiar story.

'Map of Africa showing migration route of the people of Akpafu' (Agudze 1991)

It tells the type of story that comes into being when some people in a community² learn about the glorious and well-documented past of the ancient Nile Valley civilizations. To somehow share in this famed past, people start to trace their ancestry back to Ancient Egypt, Kush, or Nubia. Similar traditions circulate among the Yoruba and the Igbo of Nigeria since the 1950's; and there are no doubt many more West-African peoples that have relatively recently begun claiming Cushitic ancestry.³

Something got lost along the way

But this is not just a strange map. It is a symptom of something bigger: a shift in epistemic valuation. Where formerly knowledge was passed on orally, youngsters now instinctively grab for books in which, it is said, all can be found that matters. Where in the past all layers of Mawu society were part of a gigantic distributed system of transmission, now the knowledge of books functions as a watershed between young and old, educated and uneducated, literate and illiterate.⁴ This is, of course, a change that was set in motion already one century ago by the German missionaries, and for better or worse (most will say better), it has become an irreversible one. But didn't we loose something in the process?

We did. This map shows that we lost the checks and balances that kept obvious crackpottery out of the system. The open and communal nature of oral transmission allowed common sense to seep through; today's unquestioning reverence for anything written is quite impervious to that same common sense. Last week in Kawu, I had senior high school students telling me in all seriousness about the glorious Cushite past of the Mawu people. Where did they get that story? As it turns out, when the late Rev. Ogbete's migration stories were published in book form (Ogbete 1998), the local library of the Secondary High School was furnished with ample copies. The students, whose appetite for knowledge is whetted at school and remains unsatisfied at home (for grandmother has stopped telling stories) eagerly read these books.

It is written

And so it is written that the Mawu brought their ironworking skills⁵ all the way from Kush to their homeland in present-day Ghana. It is written (or at least indicated on this map) that they also passed through the famed Ghana Empire, which as you may know has nothing in common with present-day Ghana but its name. Only after that, we are told, they made the turn to their present location close to the Togo Plateau in the mountains north of Hohoe.⁶

These stories have not entered the fabric of oral traditions of the Mawu. In fact, it is highly doubtful they ever will, for that intricately woven fabric is being replaced at an amazingly efficient rate by the ready-made clothing of education. Meanwhile, in the process of exchanging traditional clothes for school uniforms, and wisdom for books, it proves frighteningly easy to exchange your own history for someone else's.

References

1. Agudze, Francis Symon Komla. 1991. The music of Tokpaikor shrine in Akpafu: a case study of the role of Tokpaikor music in Akpafu traditional worship. Dissertation, University of Ghana.
2. Hinderling, Paul. 1952. Notizen von den Togo-Restvö￶lkern. Tribus 2/3:361-378.
3. Hupfeld, Fr. 1899. Die Eisenindustrie in Togo. Mittheilungen von Forschungsreisenden und Gelehrten aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten 12:175-193.
4. Ogbete, H. B. K. 1998. A history of the Akpafus. Onyase Press Limited.
5. Rattray, R. S. 1916. The Iron Workers of Akpafu. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 46:431-435.

Footnotes

1. The people of Akpafu, who call themselves the Mawu, their language Siwu, and their land Kawu, number about 15,000 today. They live in some 8 villages scattered about in the mountains north of Hohoe, Volta Region, eastern Ghana. ↩
2. Let me make clear here that Agudze, the writer of an otherwise very informative thesis in ethnomusicology, did not make this up. He is merely including the theories of the late Rev. Ogbete, a man locally known for his knowledge of the past, in his chapter on the history of the Mawu people. Ogbete's theories were later published in Ogbete 1998, also a very useful and unique booklet. ↩
3. What renders such stories as these very suspicious is (a) their preciseness about locations; and (b) the fact that they have come into being only after the first exposure of people to the well-documented past of the Nile Valley civilizations. ↩
4. A common expression in Ghanaian Pidgin English for someone who is well-educated is 'he know books' (he is the default neuter pronoun, the verb is uninflected for person). ↩
5. on which see Hupfeld 1899, Rattray 1916 ↩
6. The borders of present-day Ghana are indicated on the map; if you look closely you can see one bent arrow in that area. That is the one part of the story that is more or less corroborated by other versions of oral traditions of the Mawu, which speak from a migration from Atebubu in central southern Ghana to the present-day location (e.g. Hinderling 1952). ↩