Nyame

The altar to the highest god of the Akan was a stick. A forked branch, cut from the tree the Asante call Nyame dua, God’s tree, set upright in the courtyard of a compound with an earthenware pot or a brass basin wedged into the fork. Nothing was carved on it. Nothing was housed in it. The pot stood open to the weather and caught the rain, and the water that gathered in it was used for cleansing and protection. Rattray, walking through Asante villages in the 1920s, found one in nearly every household he entered.

That is the shape the Akan gave to the being who made everything: a branch, a pot, and a great deal of open sky above it.

He has more names than most gods manage. Onyame is the ordinary word for God in Twi. Onyankopon carries the sense of the only great Onyame, the one beside whom there is no other. Odomankoma is the creator, the one who alone gives abundance, and also the architect, Borebore, the hewer who shaped the thing. Twereduampon is the finest of them: the tree you lean on that does not give way. He is Amowia, the giver of the sun. He is born on a Saturday, which makes his day-name Kwame, while the earth is Asase Yaa, born on a Thursday, and the two of them are named together at the opening of prayers and libations across Akan country.

Nobody has ever described his face. There are no statues of him, no masks, no temple with his name on it, and the absence is not an oversight. What the tradition gives instead is a symbol and a sentence. The adinkra sign Gye Nyame, stamped in black dye on funeral cloth and carved into gold weights and stools, means “except God,” and it stands for the proverb a man says when he wants to state exactly how much of his life is negotiable: nobody can kill me except God.

The reason he is so far away is domestic and slightly absurd, which is what makes it stick. In the beginning the sky sat low, close enough to touch, and Nyame lived among people. An old woman was pounding fufu in a mortar in her yard, working the long wooden pestle up and down as women had always done, and on every upstroke the pestle knocked against the underside of heaven. Thump. Thump. Once she had done it enough times, the god drew himself up out of reach and stayed there. That is the whole of it. The world lost its intimacy with its maker because somebody was making dinner.

The consequences of that retreat organize the entire religion. Nyame is too remote to be bothered with the particulars of a bad harvest or a sick child, so his powers went to his lieutenants, the abosom, the lesser gods spoken of as his children or his messengers and settled into rivers, lakes, rocks and trees. Tano and Bia are among them, rivers with real banks and real fish that are also persons with tempers. Below them stand the ancestors, closer still. Every layer of the system exists because the top of it moved away, and an Akan libation reads like a chain of command being worked down from the top.

Which leaves the question of how anyone gets anything out of him at all, and the answer the Akan gave is the best story in the tradition. Once, all the stories in the world belonged to Nyame, locked away with him in the sky. Kwaku Anansi the spider went up and offered to buy them. The sky god, who had watched great and wealthy towns try and fail, named a price he considered safely impossible: Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, Mmoboro the hornets, and Mmoatia the fairy, delivered alive. Anansi said he would bring them, and went home to consult his wife Aso.

He got the python by arguing loudly with himself about whether a palm branch was longer than a snake, until Onini offered to be measured and then, helpfully, to be tied straight. He dug a pit for the leopard and pulled him out with silk. He fooled the hornets into a calabash by pouring water over a banana leaf and telling them it was raining. For the fairy he carved a doll, smeared it with sticky gum, set a bowl of mashed yam in front of it, and waited for someone small and well-mannered to be insulted by its silence. She hit it with one hand, then with the other, and stuck fast. Nyame took delivery of all four, gave his blessing three times, and announced that the stories would no longer be called his. They would be called spider stories. In Twi they still are: anansesem.

The other thing the Akan say about him is harder and stranger. Odomankoma created Death, and Death killed him. The maxim is quoted in exactly that flat form, and the tradition does not soften it: the creator made the last of his creations and was destroyed by it, then returned as spirit and made Death eat its own poison. A god who can be killed by something he built is not the serene abstraction that the word “supreme being” tends to suggest.

Two cautions are worth carrying into any reading of him. The tidy scheme in which Nyame, Onyankopon and Odomankoma form a three-person godhead is largely the work of J. B. Danquah, whose The Akan Doctrine of God appeared in 1944, and it is a philosopher’s systematization of Akan speech rather than a doctrine handed down intact. Earlier still, Eva Meyerowitz reconstructed an original Akan moon goddess called Ngame behind the name, along with a long Bono kinglist to support it, and later scholarship, Dennis Warren’s in particular, took her chronology and her sources apart.

His powers are those of a first cause and are described mostly by what depends on them. He gives the kra, the spark of himself that each person carries, and receives it back. He set the abosom in their rivers and the sun in its track. His limits are self-imposed and total. He does not intervene, he is not petitioned directly by most people on most days, he has no cult to speak of, and the whole apparatus of Akan worship exists to route around his absence. He gave away the stories, which is to say he gave away the culture’s memory of itself, to a spider who outsmarted him with a stick and a lump of gum. He asked an impossible price and then honoured the deal when someone met it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nyame?

Nyame is the supreme god and sky god of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, also called Onyame, Onyankopon and Odomankoma. He created the world and every human soul, then withdrew above the sky and left the daily running of things to lesser gods called the abosom.

Why did Nyame leave the earth?

According to Akan tradition, the sky once sat low enough to touch, and an old woman pounding fufu kept striking the underside of it with her long wooden pestle. Annoyed, Nyame raised himself out of reach and stayed there. His distance from the world is why the abosom and the ancestors carry so much of Akan religious life.

What does Gye Nyame mean?

Gye Nyame is an adinkra symbol of the Akan meaning “except God.” It comes from the proverb that nobody can kill a person except God, and it is used to express both the supremacy of Nyame and the speaker’s own confidence under his protection. It is the best known of all the adinkra symbols.

How did Anansi get the stories from Nyame?

Nyame owned all the world’s stories and set a price he expected nobody to pay: Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, Mmoboro the hornets and Mmoatia the fairy, all delivered alive. Anansi captured each of them by trickery, including a gum-covered doll that trapped the fairy, and Nyame handed over the stories and renamed them spider stories, anansesem in Twi.

What does Nyame look like?

No Akan source describes Nyame’s appearance, and he is not represented by statues or masks. He is approached instead through the Nyame dua, a forked branch holding a pot of rainwater set up in household courtyards, and through the adinkra symbol Gye Nyame.

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Anansi, Asase Yaa, Anansi and the pot of wisdom, How Death Came into the World, Asanbosam, Obayifo, Adze, Aziza, Mawu-Lisa, Amma, Obatala, Unkulunkulu, Modimo, Tengri, El