Asanbosam

The silk cotton tree stands by itself in the middle of a cleared field, and everyone in the village knows why nobody took an axe to it. The ground around it has been burned and hoed and planted three seasons over, but the onyina keeps its grey buttressed trunk and its wide flat crown, because felling one without ritual permission is the sort of thing that gets a man talked about for years. Farmers leave them. Loggers leave them. In the older forest, where the onyina and the odum still grow close, the air under those crowns is cool enough at midday to raise the hair on a bare arm, and the Asante have a name for what may be sitting up there.

The oldest written account of it comes from a Basel missionary. Johann Gottlieb Christaller, compiling his dictionary of Asante and Fante in 1881, recorded the sasabonsam as a monstrous being of huge human shape, red in colour, covered with very long hair, living in the deepest recess of the forest where an immense silk cotton tree serves as its house. He noted its hostility to people, and its particular hostility to priests, and then the detail that gives the whole thing its shape: it is the friend and chief of the sorcerers and the witches. It is not a wild animal. It has staff.

Forty years later the anthropologist Robert Sutherland Rattray heard much the same in Kumasi, with the anatomy filled in. He wrote it down as a monster of the dense virgin forest, hairy, with large bloodshot eyes and long legs, and feet that point both ways. It sits on the high branches of an odum or an onyina and lets its legs hang down. That is all it does for most of its existence. The legs swing slowly in the green half light, forty feet above a path that men have used for generations, and the tree gives no sign at all.

Then somebody walks under it. The legs come down and hook, and the hunter goes up.

The two-way feet are the cleverest thing in the whole description, and they are the part most often dropped from retellings. A tracker follows prints. Prints that face in both directions tell him nothing about where the thing went, or whether it is behind him or ahead of him, or whether it has stopped. The forest is already a place where sound arrives without direction, where a branch cracking could be forty yards off or four. The sasabonsam belongs to that confusion rather than standing apart from it.

Nobody records where it came from. The Akan sources give it no birth, no parents, no first appearance, no moment when the forest did not have it. This is a genuine silence rather than a gap in the record, and it fits the being: the sasabonsam is less a character in a story than a property of certain places, in the way that a river has a current. What the sources do supply instead is a household. Rattray tied it to the obayifo, the witch who leaves her body at night as a ball of light to drink blood and drain the sap from crops, and reported that the obayifo was reckoned the sasabonsam’s servant, though he also noted that people sometimes used the two words for the same thing. The mmoatia, the small forest people of Akan belief, were said to be in the same alliance. The picture is of a working arrangement rather than a monster alone in the trees.

Here is where the entry has to be careful, because two very different things get sold under one name.

The being in Christaller and Rattray is red and hairy, with dangling legs and reversed feet. The being that circulates in English is a bat winged vampire with iron teeth, hooks for feet, and a wingspan of twenty feet. That second version travels through a specific and recent set of books, the vampire compendia of the 1990s, Matthew Bunson’s *Vampire Encyclopedia* of 1993 and Konstantinos and their many descendants, and the iron teeth appear in none of the nineteenth or early twentieth century records at all.

The wings have an even more precise origin, and it is not a book. In 1925 the Asante carver Osei Bonsu, then in his twenties and already working on royal regalia, cut a sasabonsam as the finial of a chief’s linguist staff. He claimed afterwards to have been the first person to give the creature a physical form. Colonial officers in Kumasi saw the staff and started commissioning free standing versions; Rattray himself was among Bonsu’s customers. One of those carvings sits in the British Museum today, forty one centimetres of sapelle wood acquired in 1935, and the catalogue describes exactly what English readers now picture: human face, bat wings, horns, a long beard, long looped legs. The museum’s own note concedes that the figure is partly built on the Christian devil.

So the shape everyone knows was made by a named man, in a known year, largely for people who were not Asante. The anthropologist Harry Silver, working among Asante carvers in the 1970s, found the sasabonsam was not a popular motif among Asante households at all, and turned up mainly on regalia. The thing itself is old. Its portrait is not.

What it can do is narrow and effective. It waits, it reaches, it takes what passes underneath, and it lends its authority to people who mean harm. Its limits are geography rather than weakness. The record supplies no charm that turns it, no priest who binds it, no hero who kills it and hangs the body in a courtyard. It cannot follow anyone out of the high forest, and it has no interest in the cleared and planted ground, which is the whole of its restraint and the whole of the advice. Stay out of the deep bush. Do not walk under the big crowns alone. The tree standing in the middle of the field is safe, and it is standing there precisely because nobody was willing to test whether it was empty.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Asanbosam?

The Asanbosam, more properly the Sasabonsam, is a monstrous being from the folklore of the Akan peoples of southern Ghana. It lives in the crown of tall forest trees and takes people who pass underneath. The earliest written accounts describe it as a huge, red, long-haired figure with bloodshot eyes and feet that point in both directions.

Does the Asanbosam really have iron teeth?

The iron teeth are a late addition. They do not appear in Christaller’s 1881 dictionary entry or in Rattray’s Asante fieldwork of the 1920s, which describe a hairy red giant with dangling legs and reversed feet. The iron-toothed, bat-winged vampire familiar to English readers comes largely from vampire encyclopedias published in the 1990s.

How does the Asanbosam catch its victims?

It sits on a high branch of an odum or silk cotton tree and lets its long legs hang down, then hooks whoever walks beneath it. Its feet point forwards and backwards at once, so its tracks give no indication of which way it has gone. Hunters and others whose work takes them into the deep forest are its usual victims.

What is the connection between the Asanbosam and the obayifo?

Rattray recorded that the obayifo, the Akan witch who leaves her body at night to drink blood and drain crops, was regarded as the servant of the Sasabonsam, and that the two names were sometimes used interchangeably. Christaller had earlier called the Sasabonsam the friend and chief of sorcerers and witches. The forest monster is understood as the head of a working alliance rather than a solitary predator.

Who first gave the Asanbosam its winged, horned appearance?

The Asante master carver Osei Bonsu, who said he first carved the creature in 1925 as the finial of a chief’s linguist staff. Colonial officers in Kumasi commissioned free-standing versions from him, and those carvings, with their bat wings, horns and looped legs, became the standard image. The British Museum’s own catalogue notes that the form is partly based on the Christian devil.

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