Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Ghana, Africa

Rose
By Laban Carrick Hill

View Larger Map

KOSANMBA

By Laban Carrick Hill

The other day in my Fanti class my teacher Rose was discussing politeness in Ghanaian culture. At times this seems to be the only topic we ever cover because everything about Ghana seems to center around a complex and nuanced sense of politeness. It was when she struggled to find an example about one’s responsibility to family that she meandered into this story.

According to Rose, her maternal grandmother raised her in the royal family compound in Womasi where several generations of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins lived. Her grandmother was a queen in a matriarchal community in which queens and kings, instead of chiefs, are the leaders of the community. Her grandmother was the eleventh child born to her great grandparents, but the only child to survive infancy. All of the previous ten children died in infancy, which was not uncommon with the many deadly diseases that a vulnerable infant could contract, from malaria to dengue to yellow fever to small pox to cholera, to name just a few.

The Mfantsi believe that evil spirits take newborns because an infant’s innocence is prized more than anything by these spirits. In a kind of reasoning that appears to defy logic, it is also believed that when an infant dies, his or her soul will return immediately in the next child born to the parents. The tragedy here is that once an infant’s soul has learned to leave its body it is extremely difficult to get it to stay. The evil spirits recognize the soul and snatch it away even more easily. To counter this, the parents must perform kosanmba, or ritual scarring. When Rose’s grandmother was born, her parents cut three slits at the corners of her eyes and her mouth. These cuts are meant to mirror the crow’s feet around the eyes and the wrinkles around the mouth that people get as they grow old so that the evil spirits would be tricked into believing the infant is actually old. It is believed that the evil spirits find these scars ugly and so don’t want infants who have them. As added protection, the parents newborns funny names. Rose’s grandmother was named Owu, which means death in Fanti.

Whether one, the other or both reasons are correct, Rose’s grandmother survived infancy. Rose speaks of her grandmother with a sense of gratitude that she lived and credits a strong faith in the power of the kosanmba rituals.

Without any transition, Rose then launched into a story about her oldest sister Theresa, who is now the matriarch of the family. This account had the trappings of a folk tale, but the way Rose shared it with me, it was clear that she was telling me fact. Rose’s sister is more than thirty years older than her. Her father, a chief himself, had Rose in his sixties and died shortly thereafter. Her father had eight children, all with different mothers. Since Theresa was the oldest child living in Ghana, she became the head of the clan. Rose, like everyone, called her Nana or chief, as a show of respect for her sister’s position in the community. This year, however, after her brother’s funeral she withdrew that honorific, and in a show of utter contempt she began calling her Sister Theresa, suggesting that she and her sister were of equal standing to her. According the Ghanaian culture of politeness, Rose could not have been more discourteous. This came about because her older sister, who is wealthy having lived and worked in America for decades before retiring to Ghana, left Rose, a thirty-two-year-old single mother of two, with the bills for her brother’s funeral. Ten months later Rose is still paying them off.

As Rose shared this with me, she explained that her sister’s behavior was not surprising. She remembered when she was a girl of ten or eleven. Her sister had returned to the palace she had inherited from their father, the chief, for vacation from Far Rockaway, Queens, where she lived most of the year. This summer, Rose was called by her sister to help open the palace for her sister and her family. As I mentioned before, Rose lived with her maternal grandmother about four miles away. After Rose came over to her Nana’s, she worked cleaning and scrubbing all day and well into the night. She worked so hard that she lost track of time and didn’t realize how late it was until well after midnight. Since she was so young, she was afraid to walk the four miles home in the dark without a flashlight so she went to her cousin’s room. Her cousin was already in bed asleep. She woke her and asked if she could spend the night with her. Her cousin told her she had to ask Nana. They both knew that if Nana found out, she would explode in anger if Rose had not gotten permission first.

Rose was terrified of Nana so when she approached her, she didn’t ask outright to spend the night. Instead, she told her Nana that she was very tired and didn’t realize how late it was and how dark it had become. She was hoping that her Nana would invite her to spend the night like any polite and hospitable Ghanaian would do. She couldn’t imagine that her sister would make her walk the four miles in the dark. Rose, of course, was wrong. Nana told her that if she was tired then she should go home and sleep. She added that she wanted her back at the house at dawn because there was still a lot to do. Rose swallowed hard and left. Outside the palace she noticed a man standing by the gate. She tried not to look at him because if you look into the eyes of an evil spirit he will take your soul away. She hurried along the dark path trying not to stumble or trip. Behind her she heard the footsteps of the man. She increased her pace, but as you would expect, the man behind her kept pace. When she was nearly halfway home, she realized that the man was now walking beside her.

As he began to ask her questions about her life, she noticed that he was dressed in the ceremonial robes of a chief. He carried a gold staff of a chief as well. She found his voice comforting, but when he asked her where she was going, she told him the village just beyond her own. He said that he was going to that village as well. Rose felt good that she had tricked him so that she might reach home before he decided to steal her soul. When they arrived in her village, she stopped and pointed to her home. She told the man that this was where she lived. The man responded by saying that he wanted to make sure that she got home safely and that someone was home to take care of her since she was so young. He insisted on walking her to her door. As they got to the house, he asked her which room her mother lived in. Rose was so afraid that she didn’t correct him and tell him she lived with her grandmother, not her mother. Instead, she went to the window beside the front door. The man shook his head and said her mother doesn’t sleep in that room. He was right, of course. In her panic, Rose had forgotten that her grandmother had recently moved to the back of the house. She took the man around to the back of the house where the man rapped on her grandmother’s window. He called to her grandmother to let Rose into the house. They then walked around to the front door again. When her grandmother opened the door, Rose turned to the man to explain that this was her grandmother and not her mother, but the man was no longer there. He had vanished.

Rose described the man and what had happened to her grandmother. Her grandmother smiled and said not to worry. That was no stranger. That was her father and he was watching over her. Ever since, she has felt his loving presence guiding her and protecting her through life.

As Rose recounted this story, I was struck by how her Fanti beliefs seemed not to conflict with her Pentecostal Christian beliefs. For Rose, this story is no different than the Holy Spirit coming down to protect the innocent. I was reminded of standing in her church’s sanctuary a few weeks back and how the spirit in the room uplifted even me, a person with only a few dried crumbs of faith upon which to feed. Whenever I think of my lack of faith, I am often reminded of Winnie the Pooh, a bear of very little brain. Like Pooh, I am a person of very little faith, but what little I still have I hope is kind and generous so that when I hear a story such as Rose narrated I can share in her conviction and outright certainty without any hint of condescension or irony. I am humbled by stories like these because they speak so honestly and openly to the contradictions that we all live with in negotiating our lives each day.

Alone now in my room after four days of visiting Ashanti shrines in the central region of Ghana, I can’t help but think of Rose’s story of her father’s spirit protecting her and of her certainty of its truth. I find myself reflecting on my own incongruities, which are certainly more than I can ever be conscious of. I turn to thoughts about my stay here in Ghana. I wonder about the insanity of such a journey, or perhaps the extreme hubris of leaving my family and traveling to another continent, of coming to a place that provides little comfort and deep loneliness. I miss my daughters, Ella and Natalie, beyond comprehension. I miss Elise in a way that language cannot contain. I know that my absence causes them pain as well. Despite this fact, I am here. Did I exile myself? Or is it something else that I have done? Perhaps I chose displacement to learn something about myself. Most likely it is both as well as a dozen other reasons that I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand. Certainly, some sort of delusion combined with hubris has played a role. No matter how much I try to examine this, I find myself returning again and again to Rose and her story. I find myself lost in her narrative and am humbled to have been present when she shared it. Somehow, through some sort of alchemy of the human spirit, something happened that I am reluctant—not because of some romantic sense of self importance but rather a cold and rational understanding of my own inconsequence—to attempt to name.

Contact: LabanHill@yahoo.com