Nana Tongo

Nana Tongo is the southern manifestation of Tongnaab, the form the Tong Hills god took as its cult travelled beyond Taleland into the Akan forest and the Gold Coast during the early colonial period. Where the northern deity was an ancestral earth-oracle concerned with fertility and security, in the south it was received under an Akan honorific as an anti-witchcraft power whose principal work was to identify witches and heal their victims, and to furnish protective 'medicine' for chiefs and cocoa-economy elites. Such travelling offshoots are conceived as boarbii, 'children of the ba'ar', so that Nana Tongo stands to Tongnaab as a child to its parent. Its rise is the central case study of Allman and Parker's history of the god's mobility and transformation.

Parentage

• paternal: Tongnaab

Domains

• witchcraft
• healing
• protection

Powers

• identifies and heals witches
• provides protective medicine to chiefs and elites

Relations

• child: TongnaabA boarbii, or 'child of the ba'ar', of Tongnaab.Allman and Parker, 'Tongnaab' (2005), ch. 4, on Nana Tongo as the southern offshoot of the Tong Hills god. (secondary)

Sources

• In its spread south into the Akan forest and Gold Coast from the 1920s, Tongnaab became 'Nana Tongo', a gendered transformation devoted chiefly to the identification and healing of witches and to protecting southern chiefs and elites.: Jean Allman and John Parker, 'Tongnaab: The History of a West African God' (Indiana University Press, 2005), ch. 4; 'Earth and shadow', 'Africa' 81 (2011). (secondary)