Krobo Traditional Religion

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.

For generations before colonial contact, Krobo religious and political life was centred on Klo Mountain, a defensible highland stronghold in what is now Ghana's Eastern Region, held under Krobo chieftaincy and priesthood. In 1892 a dispute between Krobo authorities and the British colonial administration of the Gold Coast ended in a military expedition that drove the population off the mountain entirely and dispersed it into new towns on the surrounding plains, Odumase and Somanya prominent among them, which remain the community's main centres today. The eviction is remembered in Krobo historical memory as the community's central rupture, the loss of the physical ground its religious life had been tied to.

Christian mission work reached Krobo communities even before the eviction: the Basel Mission, a German Protestant society, was active in the area from the mid-nineteenth century, and its work continued under Presbyterian successors after Basel missionaries were expelled during the First World War. Conversion accelerated through the twentieth century until Presbyterian and other Christian affiliation became the norm for most Krobo people, a trajectory that ran alongside displacement rather than following from it directly. What survived through both changes is Dipo: Hugo Huber's fieldwork and Grace Adinku's more recent study both document the rite continuing as customary practice, observed by Christian and non-Christian Krobo families alike, in the resettled communities of today.