Tongnaab: the history of a West African god (review)

While vacationing in Bolgatanga in 1992, Jean Allman and John Parker visited the shrine of the locally renowned god Tongnaab. Buoyed by the visit, the two scholars embarked upon a journey of historical discovery, which resulted thirteen years later in this much-anticipated study. It was worth the wait. Tongnaab is an excellent book and a major contribution to the historiography of Ghana. The authors offer two important arguments: that religion provided a space for African agency within the colonial system, and that the spread of Tongnaab to the south represented a modern response to the challenges of economic and social change.

Chapters 1, 2 and 5 establish the authors’ argument about religion and African agency. Chapter 1 investigates the history of Tongnaab before 1911. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tongnaab’s ritual power increased as its subjects, the Talensi, sought protection in the Tong Hills from slave raiders and colonial military forces. It continued to provide protection as the British brought the Talensi under civilian rule after 1907. Talensi resistance appeared to centre around Tongnaab, and the British thus attempted to suppress its influence. During this time, the Talensi gained the reputation among the Akan as a ‘primitive’ people untouched by history, which fed into Tongnaab’s mystique and enhanced its spiritual reputation among southerners. Chapter 2 charts the history of Tongnaab between 1911 and 1928, when the British consolidated their control over the Talensi. But British power was not airtight. Through Tongnaab, local actors manipulated the institutions and policies of colonial rule. In 1915, the British destroyed one of the main shrines, Bonaab, but another shrine, Yanii, continued to function. The Yanii shrine received official blessing in 1925 when the British permitted Tongnaab worship after a ten-year ban. By this time the shrine was controlled by a local headman, Tengol, who advertised its power in the Ashanti kingdom and the colony through Talensi labour migrants. Exercising agency within the colonial framework, Tengol accumulated wealth and power by attracting pilgrims from the south and allowing them to establish remote shrines in their home areas. Chapter 4 focuses on Tengol’s rising power between 1928 and 1945. During this time, anthropologist Meyer Fortes tried to block Tengol’s rise on the grounds that he was a ‘cynical racketeer’ and an illegitimate custodian of the Tongnaab shrine (p. 215). In 1937, Fortes drafted a Talensi constitution which attempted to write Tengol out of the political structures of indirect rule. But the project failed, and Tengol continued to make his own history through his control over the pilgrim traffic from the south.

Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus to the south, establishing the ritual terrain of southern Ghana and following Tongnaab’s diffusion from the north. In the south, Tongnaab became ‘Nana Tongo’, a gendered transformation wherein the Talensi god developed into a source of protection against witchcraft. Chapter 3 establishes the importance of anti-witchcraft cults between the 1870s and 1920s, in Asante and the colony, against bayi (an Akan term for witchcraft). Chapter 5 charts the diffusion of Tongnaab, as southern elites searched for protection against bayi’s threats to health and financial welfare. As Nana Tongo, Tongnaab provided spiritual protection, a sort of ‘medicine’, for chiefs and elites as they struggled with the modernization of the southern economy through cocoa production. Nana Tongo thus was not a relic of the past, as colonial officials presumed, but rather a modern response to a modernizing world.

Allman and Parker conclude their book by challenging the notion that Talensi tradition and agency have been destroyed by colonialism and modernization. The Tongnaab shrines have been developed into a tourist attraction (with the help of the authors), but they are not relics of a bygone era. Instead, Tongnaab’s survival illustrates the ongoing efforts of the Talensi to ‘modernize tradition’ and to make their own history within a modernizing world...