Adze

The light comes in low along the floor of a sleeping room and it does not hurry. Somewhere in the Volta Region of Ghana, or over the border in southern Togo, a child shifts on his mat and a small cold point of brightness crosses the wall above his head. In the version of the story that travelled into English, that is the adze arriving: a firefly thin enough to flatten itself through a keyhole, settling on a sleeping body and drinking. In the version the Ewe give to the people who come to study them, the light is almost beside the point. Adze is the Ewe word for witchcraft. It is not an insect. It is what your father’s sister has.

The person carrying it is an adzetɔ, or dzetɔ, the owner of adze, and in the plural the dzetowo. The grammar is worth pausing on, because it puts the horror somewhere a European vampire story never puts it. There is no coffin, no stranger at the crossroads, no ancient thing that predates the village. There is a woman two compounds over who came to the naming ceremony, who has held the baby, and who is eating him from the inside because his father inherited what she did not.

Envy is the engine and it runs on kinship. Among the Ewe, adze is understood as a destructive force powered by the resentment of family members and close friends, and the witches wreck the very ties they travel along, feeding on relatives’ blood and flesh. The old gods can only take hold of a person whose family already keeps them. Adze can turn up in any household at all, which is why the fear of it runs wider and colder than the fear of the gods. To get at a victim, though, a witch needs a thread of relation to walk down. Blood is the road and the meal both.

One relative sits under permanent suspicion. The paternal aunt has a grievance the whole society can do the arithmetic on: her brothers’ children inherit the family property and keep the run of the paternal home, while her own children belong to her husband’s people. When something goes wrong in that house, everyone already knows where to look. A suspicion of adze is a map of who resents whom, drawn from the inside by people who would know.

A preacher in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church watched his daughter lose pregnancy after pregnancy. She was educated, married to a prosperous businessman in Accra, and by every visible measure fine. Sitting beside her hospital bed he worked out the answer: the husband’s grown son by an earlier marriage, who stood to lose a share of his father’s wealth if another child arrived, and the preacher’s own sister, whose motive he could put down to nothing but envy. His daughter carried one baby to term. Then she miscarried again.

There is no adze myth. No origin tale, no cycle of adventures, no first witch. What the record holds instead is case after case like that one, and a set of practical understandings: that the feeding can be sociable, since a witch may invite other witches to share the meal, and that the sleeper across the compound feels nothing at all until the sickness starts.

Along the Anlo coast, an anthropologist who spent a decade in the district found adze accusations steady and relentless, a spiritual problem so ordinary that it was simply part of the weather. Women bore the weight of it. A wife who looked envious of her husband’s other wives, a woman who could not conceive, a woman whose temper ran unevenly: any of them might be told, by neighbours or by a church, that something was living in her.

The Christian churches did not clear the air. They thickened it. Pentecostal and charismatic congregations took adze up rather than throwing it out, filed it under the Devil and answered it with deliverance, long sweating prayer sessions meant to drive the thing out of a member and cut the family ties it came in on. The older Ewe response to evil was to repair a relationship. The new one severs it, and calls that healing.

As for what an adze looks like, the ethnographers decline to say, because a force does not have a face. The body it wears in English belongs to a 1993 vampire encyclopedia by Matthew Bunson, whose single short entry supplied the firefly, the keyhole, the sleeping child and the flat assurance that there is no defence, and which has been copied outward ever since, one uncited paragraph at a time. Later retellings added the hunched shape with talons and skin like wet coal, the form the adze is supposed to take once it has been forced out of its host and can finally be killed. Reporters who have gone asking more recently come back with something less picturesque and more unsettling: an Ewe professor who said he had met adze only as a witch, and that witches here are real rather than mythical, and a man who agreed to talk, dreamed badly the night after he agreed, and withdrew.

The mosquito reading is the tidy one. A thing that comes at night, gets in through the smallest gap, prefers the blood of children and leaves fever behind is a fair portrait of malaria, and historians have said so. It explains the insect. It does not explain the aunt.

What adze can do follows from what it is. It moves after dark in a shape small enough for a keyhole: a firefly, a beetle, a mosquito, or nothing but a drift of light. It possesses, and a possessed person may not know it. It causes miscarriage, wasting sickness, infertility, accidents, poverty and death, and, more usefully than any of that, it gives an unbearable run of bad luck a name and an address.

Its limits are the limits of kinship. It cannot come at a stranger, and it cannot come at anyone it has no thread to, which makes distance a real protection and makes family the opposite. Forced out of its host into a shape that can be laid hands on, it can be killed, though every telling agrees this is hard and that what comes out is fast. Prayer works, if the church you attend says it does. In the older telling nothing worked at all: no potion, no charm, no fence around the sleeping mat. The most reliable protection, then and now, is to be a person nobody has any reason to envy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the adze in Ewe belief?

Adze is the Ewe word for witchcraft itself, not the name of a single creature. It is understood as a destructive power that leaves its owner at night to feed on the blood and flesh of relatives, and a person who carries it is called an adzetɔ or dzetɔ. The firefly form familiar from English-language retellings comes from later popular writing rather than from Ewe testimony.

Who do the Ewe suspect of carrying an adze?

Suspicion falls hardest on close kin, and above all on the paternal aunt. Her brothers’ children inherit the family property and have the run of the paternal home while her own children belong to her husband’s clan, which gives her a grievance everyone in the family can recognise. Wives thought to envy a husband’s other wives, women who cannot conceive, and people with uneven tempers are also commonly accused.

How does the adze get into a house?

In the popular tellings it enters at night in a small form, a firefly or beetle or mosquito or simply a point of light, slipping through a keyhole or a gap under the door and settling on a sleeper. In Ewe understanding the more important entrance is social rather than physical: a witch needs a tie of family or close friendship to reach a victim at all, so a stranger is beyond its range.

Can an adze be stopped?

The oldest English account states flatly that there is no defence, and Ewe accounts stress that adze attacks were steady and hard to prevent. Two remedies circulate anyway. One is to force the adze out of its host into a shape that can be caught and killed, said to be dangerous and rarely managed, and the other is Christian deliverance, the long prayer and exorcism sessions used in Pentecostal and charismatic churches to expel it.

Is the adze the same thing as a vampire?

Not in the way the word is usually meant. The adze drinks blood and prefers children, which is why English writers filed it with vampires, but it is a witchcraft power rather than a returning corpse, and it attacks within the family instead of preying on strangers. Its closest relatives are other West African and Caribbean blood-witches such as the Obayifo and the Soucouyant.

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Obayifo, Asanbosam (Sasabonsam), Aziza, Mawu-Lisa, Anansi, Abiku, Mami Wata, Impundulu, Soucouyant, Loogaroo, Asema, Boo Hag