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Nyonmo, the Djemawodzi and the Mountain

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Nyonmo, the Djemawodzi and the Mountain

Nyonmo, also recorded as Mau, sits at the top of Krobo cosmology as the creator of sky and rain, a power the wider Ga-Adangbe family shares under related names and sometimes addresses in the compound form Ataa Naa Nyonmo, father and mother together. Everyday Krobo religious life, however, runs mainly through the djemawodzi, tutelary spirits attached to individual lineages, and through the ancestors, whose goodwill is sought at shrines maintained by priests, the wonotsemei, who serve particular spirits rather than Nyonmo directly. Divination, sacrifice and the advice of these priests, not direct address to the high god, are how ordinary religious problems are actually handled.

Klo Mountain itself was more than geography. It was the seat of Krobo chieftaincy and priesthood, the physical ground the community's spirits were understood to be tied to, and losing it in the 1892 eviction was a religious loss as much as a military and political one. Shrines, priesthoods and the memory of the mountain were carried into the new lowland towns rather than abandoned, and Hugo Huber's mid-twentieth century fieldwork found the tutelary spirit system and its priesthoods still functioning fully in the resettled communities, decades after the move off the mountain.

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