In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Tongnaab: The History of a West African God
  • Cati Coe
Jean Allman and John Parker. Tongnaab: The History of a West African God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. xi + 299 pages. Maps. Photographs. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper.

As the subtitle makes clear, Tongnaab is the study of a god over historical time, focusing on the period between the 1890s and 1945. From a shrine in the Tong Hills in the far Upper East Region of contemporary Ghana, this Talensi god became the center of a regional cult that stretched toward the coast and across the northern savanna. Although colonial officials attempted to suppress the god by destroying the shrine with explosives, fire, and resettlement of villages, they found that not only did the shrine continue, but the pilgrim trade to the Tong Hills actually increased. Eventually the colonial officials came to accept the shrine, but under the terms, the authors point out, of Talensi people's choosing, in which one clan came to dominate the pilgrim trade.

Many of the pilgrims were people from the coastal and forest regions of contemporary Ghana who had heard of Tongnaab through northern migrants who traveled to the south to work in the mines and on cocoa farms. Southerners thus became religious migrants who traveled to the north to found satellite shrines of Tongnaab in their hometowns. Like Karen Armstrong's A History of God (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994), this is a study of people's changing relationship to and perception of this god: as it moved from the north to the south, it changed meaning. While in the north Tongnaab was central to the fertility of the land and women, in the south it was important as a witch-finding deity—like other savanna gods—during a time of increased anxiety about witchcraft in the early decades of the twentieth century as cocoa capitalism generated increased tensions about money, property, and social relations.

In mapping a chronology of belief spatially and temporally, the authors, respected historians who have heretofore worked primarily in southern Ghana, show how northern and southern Ghana have constituted one another, not just in terms of the conventional narrative that the north served as a labor reserve for the southern economy, but also that the north has been a key site of ritual power for southerners. Through this lens, the north becomes center and the south periphery, overturning the conventional picture of Ghanaian society and history. While one might hope that such a portrait might help prevent tensions between north and south, their study also makes clear that even as these forms of ritual power are adopted, however, their efficacy and power depend on the exoticization of the north and the marking of cultural difference, with the use of a few Talen words and the wearing of northern smocks by priests and priestesses of Tongnaab.

Through this study, the authors argue for the importance of history—or "active and ongoing change" in the study of African religion and belief [End Page 204] (217). While I agree with the importance of understanding chronologies of belief, I would argue that continuities are as much a part of history as is change.

The authors draw on a wide range of resources in the inscribing of this narrative, from colonial-era archival documents, to interviews with more than sixty people (at both the center and fringes of this regional cult), to ethnographic accounts by Meyer Fortes and R. S. Rattray (read as indicators of how these anthropologists were also historical actors who shaped colonial perceptions of Talensi people rather than as a source for data about the Talensi themselves). The book is richly illustrated with photographs, both historical and contemporary, including one of a stunning mural of one of the important priestesses who brought Tongnaab to the south.

Cati Coe
Rutgers University
Camden, New Jersey
...

pdf

Share