Botoku’s history belongs to all of us
There comes a time when respect for one’s elders must coexist with an obligation to speak plainly about the history they entrusted to us.
I have watched the Botoku paramountcy dispute with increasing sadness. I initially spoke cautiously, partly because a leading figure on the Kledzasi side was my late elder cousin, whom I respected greatly, and partly because I continued to hope that the dispute could still be resolved through dialogue rather than the courts.
But I am the surviving co-author of Botoku/Dzali: History, Culture and Governance. I participated in the research, listened to Botoku’s male and female chiefs and elders, and helped decide what went into the book. I therefore have a responsibility to say plainly what that research established.
The Botoku Paramount Stool originated with Togbe Sei of Kledzasi. Nobody needs to deny that. But the succession did not remain there. It passed through Togbe Sei’s sister, Sei Ama, to her descendants at Kpale.
This is not an interpretation I have recently invented because of the present dispute. Our book says explicitly that there was a “transfer of the paramount stool of Dzali to Kpale” and describes Kpale as the “seat of paramount stool.”
By the time we reach the first documentary record available to us in 1886, that succession was already established. From then until the death of Togbe Tamtia V in 2003, we documented five successive Tamtias of Kpale as Paramount Chiefs.
Here is what now troubles me deeply. During our years of research, I cannot recall one Kledzasi male or female chief, elder or informant telling us that the Tamtias were illegitimate occupants of a stool that Kledzasi intended one day to reclaim. Kledzasi people contributed respectfully to reconstructing our common history. They narrated the transfer to Kpale as something that had happened, not as an unresolved grievance. This is important to understand.
Kledzasi helped us write this history
There is another reason I find today’s selective use of our book difficult to accept: Kledzasi was not an outsider to the research. Respected Kledzasi people helped construct the history itself.
As our book records, the Botoku Traditional Council established the History Committee and appointed Togbe Akodu, a highly respected authority on Botoku oral history, as its principal oral-history consultant. Togbe Akodu was himself a respected Kledzasi elder. He had been married to a female chief of Kledzasi, and their son subsequently became Kledzasi clan chief. Prominent Kledzasi elders, including Aaron and Jacob Gbadagba, also contributed their knowledge.
Neither my co-author, the late Lt Col (Rtd) F.M.K. Asamoah, nor I was from Kpale. We were asked to help with this work not because we represented Kpale, or any side in a chieftaincy dispute, but because we were trained historians. Our task was to listen, question, compare accounts and help Botoku record the history its chiefs and elders shared with us.
This was therefore not a Kpale history written about Kledzasi. Kledzasi men and women were themselves among the custodians who helped us tell Botoku’s story.
And throughout that research, not one of these respected Kledzasi chiefs or elders told us that the Tamtias of Kpale occupied the paramount stool illegitimately, that the transfer was temporary, or that Kledzasi retained a right to take the stool back.
Had such a fundamental claim formed part of the history known to Kledzasi elders, the History Committee was surely the place to state it. Instead, the transfer was narrated to us as part of Botoku’s accepted history.
That is why I find the present selective reading so troubling. We cannot rely on our elders’ history when it tells us that there was once a Togbe Sei in Kledzasi, but disregard the same history when it tells us that for more than 100 years since then, the Tamtias have ruled Botoku with the blessings of all other eight clans Kledzasi included, until the death of Togbe Tamtia V in 2003. We cannot select only the half that suits us today.
Why did succession pass through a woman?
Here we need to tell part of the history that we deliberately left out of the book. The elders told us categorically that human sacrifice formed part of the circumstances surrounding the consecration of the stool and its transfer through Sei Ama’s line. They also explained why a child from the female royal line was used.
In the traditional reasoning they described, a child born to a royal woman was certainly of royal descent because everyone knew who the child’s mother was. The same certainty could not be claimed about the biological father of a royal man’s children.
Whatever our views today about that belief, or about the terrible practice of human sacrifice, that was the reasoning within which the accepted custom operated.
Nor was this presented as something unique to Kpale. The elders described similar changes involving other Botoku stools. Usually, however, the royal woman had married within her own clan. Succession could move from a male line to the descendants of a female royal without the stool leaving that clan. Sei Ama’s case was different. She had married into Kpale. The stool therefore crossed a clan boundary.
And the story did not end with Sei Ama. Her line continued through her descendants. Our history identifies some of the present-day descendants not only among Botoku families like the Bekui, but also Atiemo and other families at Krobo Odumase and Akuapem Amanokrom. Togbe Tamtia VI, the present Tamtia, comes from the Krobo Odumase branch.
The line that began with Sei Ama is therefore not merely an old story explaining how the stool once passed to Kpale. It is a continuing and living line of descent connecting that transfer to the Tamtia succession today.
This is why I appeal directly to chiefs and elders of our other Botoku clans: please tell this part of our history too. Why is maternal succession so common in Botoku chieftaincy? Which stools moved from one family line to another through royal women? Our young people deserve to hear the history from all our clans.
The pattern certainly continued within the Tamtia line. Tamtia I, III, IV and V derived their succession through their maternal lines. We cannot accept four Paramount Chiefs who succeeded through their mothers and then say that succession through women is foreign to Botoku tradition.
I can also speak from personal knowledge about Alagadawoe’s Tove: all the Tove chiefs who have occupied the stool in living memory inherited their chieftaincy through a great-grandmother’s line. Maternal succession is therefore not an abstract argument invented for the Kpale case. It is part of Botoku customary practice that I have witnessed myself.
The history we changed for our children
Why, then, did we leave the human-sacrifice account out of Botoku/Dzali?
Look at the book cover. Beneath the title are the words “Learning Resource for Teachers, Parents and Students Interested in African Knowledge Traditions.” And there, taking centre stage, are the animated, smiling faces of Botoku schoolchildren. Those faces tell us something important about the book. The elders wanted children to open it with curiosity and pride, not fear. That purpose shaped not only what we put into the book, but also what they asked us to leave out.
The elders wanted our children to learn their history and feel proud of it. They were also concerned that Christianity was already making some young people reluctant to become chiefs. They feared that publishing the human-sacrifice tradition would make matters worse.
So they gave us a gentler account for the book. In that version, the ageing Togbe Sei asked for food. His own children repeatedly gave him meat with hard bones. His nephews at Kpale treated him better and gave him soft, tender meat. Disappointed by his children’s behaviour, Sei decided that the stool should pass to his nephews.
It was a good story for children: kindness and responsibility matter, and inheritance should not be taken for granted.
We respected the elders’ wishes. For more than f40 years, I also respected their wish not to publish the human sacrifice account.
But circumstances have changed. The gentler story intended for children is now being presented as though it were the complete historical evidence, while the reason the elders asked us to tell it that way remains hidden. I can no longer remain silent about that. A story deliberately simplified for children cannot fairly be turned into proof in a court of law.
Botoku custom changed
There is another part of our book that selective reading overlooks.
When our ancestors came from Notsie, shrines and their custodians carried enormous spiritual, political and economic authority. People approached shrines for help and promised gifts if their wishes were fulfilled. Paramount chieftaincy as we understand it today gained its importance over time.
Our book explicitly records Akan influence. Indeed, the same discussion describing Kpale as the seat of the paramount stool says that incorporating the Akan Kpalewo produced the first major Akan influence in Dzali.
Botoku people intermarried. We borrowed customs. Our institutions changed. Matrilineal inheritance became intertwined with patrilineal inheritance. Many Botoku people therefore proudly belong through both their mothers and their fathers.
That is more than a century of recorded practice.
I therefore make a direct appeal to the male and female chiefs, elders and families of every Botoku clan: if you know of evidence that Kledzasi chiefs or elders challenged the legitimacy of any of the five Tamtias of Kpale during those generations, please bring it forward. Tell us who challenged, which Tamtia was challenged, when it happened and what was said or done. I am not asking anyone to take my word as the final authority. I am asking Botoku to search its collective memory. In more than four decades of researching our history, I have not encountered such a challenge. If others know differently, now is the time to speak.
So when someone quotes our book to prove that Togbe Sei belonged to Kledzasi, my answer is simple:
Yes. Please keep reading. The same history records that the paramount stool was transferred to Kpale for reasons our ancestors accepted for over 100 years.
If we go backwards, where do we stop?
If a clan can reclaim a stool simply because it once held it more than 100 years ago, regardless of what Botoku subsequently accepted, why should that principle apply only to Kledzasi? What about Alagadawoe, whose leadership in bringing our ancestors from Notsie belongs to an even earlier part of Botoku history? What about clans whose shrines and custodians exercised authority before paramount chieftaincy became as important as it is today?
Do we keep travelling backwards until each clan finds the period of history that favours it? That cannot be the way forward.
Botoku can change, but Botoku must make the change
I am not saying Botoku chieftaincy can never change. It can. Our history proves that our institutions have changed before.
But reform is not the same as unilateral declaration by one clan. If Botoku wants a different system of paramount succession, let us discuss it openly. Let Kledzasi speak. Let Kpale speak. Let Alagadawoe’s Tove and every other clan speak. Let our male and female chiefs, elders, women, young people and diaspora participate. Then Botoku can decide what Botoku wants for the future.
I no longer wish to be ambiguous about my own conclusion. After more than four decades researching this history and listening to elders from across Botoku, I regard succession of the paramount stool through Kpale as historically settled long before our first documentary record in 1886.
If evidence exists that Kledzasi challenged the legitimacy of those Tamtias during those generations, let it be produced and examined. I did not encounter it in our research.
I say this not because I am against Kledzasi. Kledzasi is part of Botoku. Its respected male and female chiefs and elders helped preserve the very history I am defending.
That is precisely why the present dispute pains me. We should not turn a history our elders narrated together into fragments with which their descendants fight one another. And if Botoku now wants to change what generations before us accepted, that conversation must belong to all of Botoku, not one clan alone.
Professor Komla Tsey studied History at the University of Ghana and co-authored Botoku/Dzali: History, Culture and Governance (2011) with the late Lt Col (Rtd) F.M.K. Asamoah. His forthcoming book, Botoku Child (Langaa Publishing), will include accompanying Ewe audio versions so that people who cannot read the written text can also listen to Botoku’s stories.
BY PROFESSOR KOMLA TSEY
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