Owuo

In the Krachi tale of the origin of death, recorded by A. W. Cardinall in the 1920s, a great famine drove a young man out along the road toward Salaga, where he came upon what seemed a hill of silky hair stretching for miles across the plain: the body of an enormous giant. The giant named himself Owuo, that is, Death, and fed the starving youth meat in exchange for service. The meat proved to be human flesh, and when the young man's sister and her maid were sent to serve the giant they were devoured in turn. The people of Krachi then set fire to Owuo's great hair and the giant perished in the flames; a magic medicine found at the roots of his hair restored his victims to life, but a remnant of it, sprinkled on the dead giant's eye, set the eye blinking forever, and each time Owuo's eye blinks a person somewhere dies. Owuo is the ordinary Twi word for death, and the same personification is known among the neighbouring Akan; the Krachi narrative, however, is its fullest mythological elaboration and became one of the most widely anthologized of African origin-of-death myths, analysed in Hans Abrahamsson's comparative monograph on the theme.

Domains

• death

Powers

• to cause a person to die each time his eye blinks
• to restore the dead to life with the medicine hidden in his hair

Sources

• A. W. Cardinall, Tales Told in Togoland (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), ch. 2, 'Of the Origin of Things'.
• Harold Scheub, A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. 'Owuo'.
• Hans Abrahamsson, The Origin of Death: Studies in African Mythology, Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia III (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951).
• Patricia Ann Lynch, African Mythology A to Z, 2nd ed., rev. Jeremy Roberts (New York: Chelsea House, 2010), s.v. 'Owuo'.