Akan Religion

Akan religion, the tradition of the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire (Ashanti, Fante and others), is ordered around a supreme sky-god and a graded world of lesser powers. At the summit is Nyame (also Onyankopon), the creator and sky-god, all-knowing and everywhere, with the earth-goddess Asaase Yaa beside him.

Beneath them are the abosom, deities or spirits associated with rivers, lakes, the sea and particular places, who act as Nyame's intermediaries and are served by their own priests; and around the living are the nsamanfo, the ancestors, whose goodwill is essential and who are honoured at the family and chiefly level. Akan thought, as philosophers such as Kwame Gyekye have set it out, holds a rich account of the person, including the okra, the soul or life-principle given by Nyame, and of a moral order upheld by God, the ancestors and the community together. It is a living religion, described here in the present tense.

Akan religion remains woven into the public and civic life of Akan communities today, even as most Akan people are also Christian or Muslim. The stool is its central sacred object of chieftaincy: a chief's blackened ancestral stool is the seat of the ancestors and of the community's soul, and its rites bind the living ruler to the dead.

Great festivals mark the ritual year, the Akwasidae, celebrated in the Ashanti cycle of forty-two days when the chief honours the ancestors, and the annual Odwira, a festival of purification, first-fruits and the renewal of the community and its bonds with the ancestral dead. These observances continue under the Asante and other traditional authorities alongside the churches and the mosque, so that Akan tradition persists less as a separate congregation than as the ritual and moral framework of chieftaincy, family and festival. It is a present, practised tradition, and is described here as such.