A note before we begin: this is oral history. It came to me through family, through telling, through the sort of knowing that does not live in Libraries. Scholars may find gaps. That is not what this is for.

Where the Ewe People Begin

Before there was an Anloga [Ang-lor-gah], before there was a migration, before there was a wicked king or a wise old man or a wall weakened by wash water, there was a people moving through history the way water moves, finding the lowest point, following the available path, settling where the land allowed.

The Ewe people carry two origin stories and hold both without needing to resolve them. One traces the line backward through West Africa, through the Niger basin, through Egypt, all the way to Israel area. The other points to the great empires of the Sahel, Mali and Songhai, and traces a long arc eastward through the desert fringe, down toward the Niger, then westward along the coast. Family oral history places the starting point further east still, in the region of present-day Ethiopia, with the journey continuing through Nigeria and into Yoruba land before turning west. What both versions agree on is a long arc through West Africa that passes through the area around Ile-Ife and Oyo in what is today southwestern Nigeria, among the earliest traceable points of Ewe settlement in recorded history.

It was somewhere in that Yoruba land, and through significant stops at Ketu [Keh-two!] and Dogbo [Dough-gbo] along the way, that the people encountered something they would carry with them for the rest of the journey, not as luggage but as practice. A palm, bearing inedible fruit, of no use to hunger, but understood to hold real spiritual power; a means of reaching the Supreme Being through prayer and offering. They called it Hudɛ [Hoon- deh]. They did not leave it behind when they moved on. It traveled with them into Notsie [Nor-chiey], and from Notsie [Nor-chiey] it traveled with them again, all the way to the Anlo [Ang-lor] coast, where it is still called upon today. What it became in my own family’s hands deserves room of its own, and I will return to it properly in the next essay. For now it is enough to know that some inheritances are not land or title. Some are practices, carried on foot, generation after generation, until they simply become how a family prays.

The result of that long migration is a language and a people that today span four nations. Ewe, in one dialect or another, is spoken across Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. It is a transnational language that predates every border it crosses. As the people settled and resettled across these territories, dialects shifted, some slightly, some deeply, the natural consequence of distance and time and the particular shape of each new home but the thread remained and there is mutual intelligibility. The names remained. In all these places, people named their children after incidents and aspirations so that a name, when translated, reads not as a word but as a sentence. That tradition of meaning-carrying names connects Ewe communities across four countries and echoes in certain Nigerian naming traditions as well. It is one of the quiet signatures of a shared origin.

The Kingdom They Had to Leave

The particular migration that defines the Anlo Ewe people began in a fortified town called Notsie, in what is today the nation of Togo.

Notsie was the seat of a king named Agorkorli [Ah-gor-kor-lih!]. Agorkorli [Ah-gor-kor-lih!] was powerful in the way that unchecked power always becomes powerful through fear, cruelty and the systematic destruction of any possibility of resistance. The kingdom walls were thick earthen structures, solid enough to contain an entire people. Purposefully, Agorkorli [Ah-gor-kor-lih!] used them that way. His subjects were subjected to punishments designed as much to humiliate as to harm. They were ordered to weave ropes from clay. They were made to knead mud filled with thorns using their bare hands. Every attempt to escape was met with consequences brutal enough to discourage the next attempt.

The walls kept them in. The punishments kept them afraid and the king’s watchfulness kept them from organizing. So, he believed.

The Old Man and the Plan

Among the people of Notsie was a group led by an elderly wise man named Torgbui Wenya [Tor-gbi, wherh-nya] “wh” is very soft, and the rest of the name slightly nasal. He was not young and fast but he understood something that the king’s cruelty had overlooked. He was the king’s foil. He demonstrated that patience, applied with precision, could do what force could not. His instruction to the women of his group was so simple it was almost invisible; “When you wash, when you clean, and when you pour away any water at all, pour it here. On this section of the wall. Only here. Every time.” No one watching would see anything alarming. Women’s pouring of waste water near a wall was an ordinary daily act. However, water, given enough time and enough repetition, does not negotiate with stone or earth. It simply persists until the wall has no choice but to yield.

They followed his instruction without deviation. Day after day, season after season, the water went to the same place on the same wall and the wall, slowly, without announcement, began to soften.

The Night of the Full Moon

When the night came, it came with a full moon. Enough light to move by. Enough darkness to disappear into.

The wall gave way at the chosen section with relative ease, exactly as the old man had calculated. The breach was narrow, it was a deliberate choice. Wide enough to pass through. Not wide enough to look like an escape route.

Then came the final instruction, the one that still arrests me every time I think about it. They walked out backwards. Every person who passed through that breach turned themselves around and walked away from Notsie, facing it so that any tracker who followed their footprints in the earth would read the story in reverse. The prints led toward the wall, not away from it. The kingdom’s people appeared to be arriving, not fleeing.

They carried only what they could bear without slowing down. They left behind everything else and walked backwards into the dark, into the unknown, into freedom, until they had gone far enough that tracking was no longer the danger and they could turn around and face the direction they were actually going.

The Journey Along the Coast

They moved in groups and subgroups, Torgbui Wenya [Tor-gbi, wherh-nya], at the center with his lieutenants carrying responsibility for each cluster of people. They crossed from what is today Togo [Toe-goh] into what is today Ghana, following the coastline, that ancient reliable road of sand and water that has guided migrations since people first learned to follow the horizon.

As they moved, people settled. The coast offered what they had always known, fishing, trading the particular rhythm of life between land and water. Towns formed where people stopped and decided this was enough, this would do, this was home.

The names they gave these places were true in the way only a people paying close attention can make names true.

Kedzi [Keh-Jee]. On top of the sand. A settlement perched on a great white sandspit, bleached and bright under the coastal sun, exactly as its name described. It was here that Dufia Joachim Acolatse I would reign, from 1865 to 1927, a chief of sufficient stature that my own grandfather would be summoned to help plan his grand funeral. As you may have read in my last essay, “Gakpleazi”.

Keta [Keh-tah], Head of the sand, where the land met the water at its most definitive point. Keta would grow into one of the most significant towns on the Gold Coast. A commercial hub, a seat of trade, and eventually a place whose name carried weight far beyond its shoreline.

Tegbi [Teh-gbee]. Carries a different kind of name, a person’s name rather than a description of land. Among the matriarchs traveling with the group was a woman called Mama Tegbɛ [Mama, Teh-gbeh]. At some point along this stretch of coast, she could go no further. She was tired. She was respected enough that when she said, “This is where I stop,” the people traveling with her stopped too. They settled there, around her, and the place took her name. Of all the towns founded along this migration, Tegbi [Teh-gbee] is the only one I know of named for a woman who simply could not walk any further, and was loved enough that nobody asked her to.

Woe [Woay!]. Whuti [Whoo-tih] “wh” is very soft. Each one a settlement, each one a decision made by a group of people who looked at a particular piece of coast and recognized something in it.

Another interesting name of a town is, Tsiamɛ [Chia-meh], translates as inside the water, because it was almost literally that. Surrounded by the waters and marshes the great Keta Lagoon on nearly every side, close enough to an island that the name was simply the truth stated plainly.

The land they were settling was extraordinary. To the south, the waters of the Gulf of Guinea stretched toward the Atlantic horizon, a coastline of remarkable power and beauty. To the north, the Keta Lagoon, one of the largest lagoons in West Africa, a body of water that was not merely a landscape feature but a living economy; fishing and fish trading. The daily work of people who had always known how to read water.

It was into this rich, ecologically diverse world that the Anlo Ewe people arrived and recognized themselves.

The Old Man Folds

But the journey had taken everything from Torgbui Wenya.

He had carried his people out of captivity with nothing but patience and wit. He had watched them walk backwards to freedom. He had guided them through Togo and into Ghana, past the settlements forming along the coast, past the places finding their names, past the people finding their homes and then, he stopped.

He looked at where he was and said, simply, Mɛ nlɔ [Meh-nglor]. translates as, I have folded.

In another man that might have been to surrender. In Torgbui Wenya it was a declaration. He had brought them as far as a human being could be asked to bring anyone. The fold was not defeat, it was completion.

Absolute completion because of who he was. Gleaning from what he had done and what he represented to every person who had walked backwards out of Notsie behind him, no one could go further. His stopping made the stopping permanent. The place where the old man folded became Anloga. “Anlo”, to fold. “Ga” big or grand. The grand fold. The final settlement. Home!

The Stool, the Sacrifice and the Man Who Could Not Be King

But a king without his stool is a symbol without its power. And the Anlo people had left theirs behind in Notsie.

The stool in Ewe tradition is not furniture. It is the seat of authority, the physical and spiritual vessel through which a traditional ruler derives legitimacy. Without it, leadership is a title with nothing underneath it. They needed it back. But Agorkorli’s terms were not simple. Word came that the stool would only be returned if the people brought him the arm of the old wise man, the very elder who had led them out.

And so, an emissary had to be sent to Agorkorli. But then this was no ordinary errand. The journey back to Notsie was treacherous, a road through uncertain territory that required not just a messenger but someone to travel alongside him, clearing the path, fighting off animals, standing between the mission and whatever might try to stop it. It was a journey for the brave. Everyone understood that.

Torgbui Wenya, the wise old man at the heart of this clever migration, turned first to his sons. None of his wives would allow it. The risk was too great. The road, too dangerous and a mother’s refusal in that moment, was absolute.

It was the old man’s sisters who would not accept the alternative.

They could not bear the thought of disgrace settling on their brother’s name, on the family’s name, on the name of the people who had come so far. Hence, they looked to their own sons. One of the sisters had twin boys and a third son born immediately after them. In Ewe tradition, the child born directly after a set of twins carries the name Doe [Dough]. This Doe [Dough] was a hunter of extraordinary reputation. He was noted to have said that when he heard wild animals roaring in the wild he was restless until he had silenced them. “Unfinished business,” he called it. He could not leave a thing incomplete.

Doe volunteered without hesitation.

A cousin, Adelaja, [Ah-derh lah-jah] “jah” sounding slightly nasally, the son of another of the old man’s sisters, joined him. The two of them were nephews to Torgbui Wenya, maternal cousins to each other, and they set out together toward Notsie to face a king who had every reason to want them dead.

Nonetheless before they left, something else happened. Among the people who had joined the group along the migration, a man whose name history has not preserved, who had not been part of the original escape from Notsie but had found his way to them on the road, a man who appeared frail, perhaps carrying some disability, gave something no one had asked of him.

He gave his arm.

It was severed and prepared for presentation to Agorkorli as proof that the old man’s wrist had been delivered as demanded. This unnamed man did not travel to Notsie. He stayed behind. And he likely did not survive what he had given. The wound or the complications that followed, would have been beyond what any treatment available to them could address. He gave it for a people he had joined along the way, not a people he had been born into.

History did not record his name but the stool came home because of him.

When Doe and Adelaja [Ah-derh lah-jah] arrived before Agorkorli and presented the arm, the king was surprised. He had not expected them to follow through. He released the stool.

But Agorkorli was not finished.

Through a spiritual invocation placed over the stool at the moment of its release, he declared that no one who had ever taken a life, whether of man or wild animal, could sit upon it as king. He knew exactly what he was doing. He could not stop the stool from leaving. So he ensured that the person most deserving of the throne it conferred would be disqualified from sitting on it.

Doe, the hunter who had silenced every animal that roared in the wild, who had fought skirmishes and come through them, who had volunteered without hesitation for a journey no one else would take, could not be king. The invocation made it impossible.

Torgbui Wenya’s disappointment was real and recorded in the oral history. He had wanted Doe on that stool. The bravery of the mission had earned it. But the spiritual condition placed on the stool by a wicked king in his final act of malice held, and Doe, understanding what it meant, removed himself from consideration without protest.

The kingship, or Awoamefia [Ah-war-meh-fia] passed to Torgbui Wenya’s own sons, the first being Torgbui Sri. Adelaja, who had made the journey alongside his cousin Doe, entered the rotational succession as well, his line eventually producing a second king, Torgbui Adelaja II, who centuries later would become the classmate, relative and closest friend of the late Col. Andreas K. Amuzu (Rtd), [Ah-moo-zoo] my maternal uncle. The two of them joining forces in the early to mid-1960s to formalize Hogbetsotso into the festival it is today. The circle that began with the stool’s retrieval was closed, generations later, by the direct descendants of the men who retrieved it.

Doe settled in Tegbi. The town named for a woman who could walk no further. He was of the Liké [Lee-kay] clan, and he carried with him into that settlement the full weight of what he had done and what he had been denied. His descendants remained. They are still there. Tegbi, Vui [Voo-wih] and the surrounding areas.

I am one of them.

And recently, a court judgment in Ghana ruled that the descendants of Doe may enter the rotational succession to the kingship of the Anlo people. The invocation placed by a wicked king on a stool retrieved at great cost is not, it turns out, the final word.

It never was.

The Nation They Built

Having escaped one king’s absolute power, the Anlo people made a deliberate and permanent decision about the kind of governance they would build for themselves.

No single overlord. Never again.

Instead they organized themselves into a nation of 37 towns, governed through 17 clans, each with its own traditional ruler and its own stool, its own internal norms and its own identity. Above them all, a Paramount King, the Awoamefia, who held the highest authority but not the kind of unchecked, wall-building, thorn-mud-kneading authority that Agorkorli had wielded. The structure was designed to distribute power, to ensure that no single person could ever again do to the Anlo people what they had escaped.

They had not just fled a wicked king. They had studied him and built their freedom in the precise shape of everything he was not.

The Anlo Dukor [Ang-lor, Doo-core], the Anlo Nation, was born not from conquest but from the long memory of people who knew exactly what they were determined never to become again.

A People Who Chose Wit Over War

Let me be precise about something. The Anlo people were not without warriors. Each of the seventeen clans maintained its own designated warrior, trained and ready. However, the warrior was the last resort, not the first instinct. They were, in the most accurate sense of the phrase, reluctant warriors. They did not go looking for confrontation. They saved that capacity for the ultimate moment when every other option had been exhausted.

In other words, my people are warm and slow to anger. Just don’t test that capacity.

Again, because they almost always found another option first, that moment rarely came.

But friendship was not passivity, it was as mutual as it was strategic. When their fishing waters, the source of their livelihood and territorial boundary, they had chosen and named were encroached upon, the Anlo fought. There are accounts of conflicts and at least one significant confrontation over control of the coastal waters. They were not defending pride or conquest. They were defending what they had built. That distinction mattered to them. A people who chose wit over war, still know how to wage one. They simply reserve the knowledge for what is worth it.

Nowhere is this more evident than in their relationship with the Ashanti Kingdom. The Ashanti were among the most formidable military powers in West African history, a Kingdom that fought and won several battles and wars. Yet, between the Ashanti and the Anlo Ewe, there was never a battle. Not one.

What there was instead was friendship, deliberate, structured and mutually beneficial.

Emissaries traveled back and forth between the two people. Sister towns were established in each other’s territory. In Kumasi, the great Ashanti capital, a settlement was designated Anloga, a place where Ewe people were actively welcomed and encouraged to put down roots. In Anloga, land was set aside for the Ashanti in return, though they did not ultimately come to settle as imagined. The gesture was made and received and that was enough.

They traded what each had in abundance. The Anlo people brought salt and dried fish/seafood from the coast. The Ashanti brought gold and minerals from the interior. Each had what the other needed and neither needed to fight to get it.

The Awoamefia [Ah-war-meh-fia] would send his spiritual practitioners, men of ceremony and power, to perform on grand occasions in Kumasi, deepening the relationship through culture as well as commerce. It was diplomacy conducted the Anlo way, through presence and gift and the slow accumulation of trust rather than through the threat of force.

One of my uncles, Uncle Jerome Akafia, was nicknamed Prempeh by his community because his bearing and majestic aura so closely resembled those of the great Ashanti king Prempeh I. In our family that nickname was worn as something between a compliment and a term of endearment, the kind only a people with warm relations across cultural lines can make and receive without offense.

Amedzro to Ayevu

But the colonial era brought a different kind of visitor to the Anlo coast. This visitor, was not craved.

They came bearing gifts at first. Mirrors, Gunpowder. The small, bright, useful things that make a stranger seem generous before you understand what generosity is costing you. Gradually, they gained a foothold and their weapons made them appear more powerful than any guest had a right to be. Steadily it became clear that they had no intention of leaving. They were overstaying their Woezor.

The Anlo people, true to everything they had always been, did not reach immediately for their reluctant warriors. They reached first for something sharper and quieter.

They gave the colonizer a name. Among themselves, in their own language, unbeknownst to the colonizer who walked among them, they began calling him Ayevu. “Aye,”[ah-yay] meaning slick. “Avu,” [Ah-voo] meaning dog. Slick dog. A name that captured the nature of what had arrived on their coast with the precision their language had always applied to naming things truly.

Consider what had just happened. In essay one of this series, I told you that the Ewe word for visitor is Amedzro,[Ah-meh-jro] the person I crave. The beloved guest, anticipated and welcomed and fed. Now the same people, applying the same instinct for naming what is true, looked at this particular visitor and named him Ayevu [Ah-yay-voo]. The slick dog. The guest who came bearing gifts and stayed bearing arms.

Same people. Same language. Same instinct for truth. Two completely different names for two completely different kinds of arrival. The naming was not hostility. It was diagnosis.

Having named him, they moved to the next item on what I can only describe as their quiet, methodical progression of resistance.

They fed him cassava. Not ordinary cassava. A particular variety, difficult to distinguish from the common kind but deeply intolerable to the body of anyone who did not grow up eating it. The more the colonizer ate, the sicker he became. Over time, weakened and unable to identify the source of his discomfort, he retreated to his fort and reduced his interactions with the people of the coast.

No weapons drawn, no battle declared and no blood spilled. The same people who had weakened a wall with waste water now weakened an occupier with a root vegetable. The method was different. However, the philosophy was identical.

When the colonizer attempted what colonial powers always attempted, the erasure of identity through naming, by encouraging the local population to take on European surnames, the Anlo people along the Keta coast simply refused. While other populations further west along the coast gradually absorbed colonial surnames into their identities, the people of the Keta and Anloga area held their names. They kept what was theirs quietly, without proclamation and without confrontation. They just did not do it.

That refusal is still visible today in the naming conventions of the area. It is one of the less celebrated but most telling acts of cultural resistance in the history of the Ghanaian coast.

Where My Family Landed

My father’s people settled with the wise old man in Anloga itself, though his mother came from Tegbi, quietly threading both sides of my family’s geography together before I was born.

My mother’s side, the line of Dumɛga Amuzu-Gakpleazi, settled in Tegbi, the town named for a woman who simply could not walk any further and was loved enough that no one asked her to. A town sandwiched between two bodies of water. The ocean to the south and Keta Lagoon to the north. Land held between water on both sides, the way the Anlo people have always understood themselves, between the forces of the world, finding a way to live in the narrow, fertile space between them.

I come from two clans. My father from the Amlada clan. My mother from the Liké clan. I carry both migrations, both settlements, both relationships to that coastline in whatever I am. Mmm… Perhaps it explains something. The way I’m drawn to the ocean without needing a reason. The way entrepreneurship pulls at me with a familiarity that feels older than my own ambitions. The way seafood hits differently, as though my body remembers a diet my conscious mind never chose.

Some inheritances skip the paperwork entirely. They arrive as appetite, instinct and the particular comfort of sitting somewhere near water and feeling, without any explanation that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

What Remains

The wall in Notsie is reduced to ruins. That brutal kingdom of Agorkorli exists now only in the telling. But the people who walked backwards out of it are still here along this coastline, fishing these waters, and still nominating or selecting and installing their chiefs to stools that were once worth a man’s arm.

Every year, the Anlo people set aside days to remember all of this properly, not as a history lesson but as something closer to a homecoming. That gathering has its own shape, its own rituals, its own name, and it deserves an essay of its own. I will tell you about it next.

For now, this is enough. A people escaped a tyrant by understanding water better than he understood power. They named the place where they stopped after the man who could walk no further. They built their lives and a homeland shaped like everything their oppressor was not. They are still here, still walking, just no longer backwards.

The Anlo did not conquer land to live on. They chose it carefully, named it and stayed.

What have you chosen carefully enough to stay? How did your people come to settle where they are now? Tell me in the comments section, let’s talk.

Ɛmɛgbɛ,

Yao

My great grandfather had a philosophy, and it went like this.

“Gakpleazi mɛno kɛvi mɛ o, nɛ ga mli ko kɛ aziaa gbã,” [Ga - kpleh - azhi - meh - nor - kehvi – meh – o, Neh - ga - mlee - ko - keh - Azhiaa – gba] which literally translates, “A metal and egg cannot be in the same small sack, if the metal rolls, the egg will break.” To wit, you cannot put an egg and a piece of metal in the same small sack. If I may ask, is there a way to achieve that?

What he was saying was not about sacks, metals or eggs. He was saying that life is a balance between strength and tenderness, and that balance is not optional. It is the condition of survival. You need the firmness of metal. You need the fragility of the egg. Held together carefully they are two necessary things. Held together carelessly, one destroys the other. The art is in how you carry them both.

That philosophy was so central to who he was that it became his name. Or rather, it became the adjective that qualified his actual name, Amuzu Amoo – zu]. Over time, the philosophy compressed itself into a single word, “Gakpleazi,” [Ga – kpleh – azhi] and attached itself to the man who lived it most visibly. My maternal grandfather, his son, carried that name forward with such conviction that he became inseparable from it. The man in the photograph above is my grandfather.

His brothers and cousins, watching what a name could do for a man’s identity, adapted their own adjectives. One became Amuzu-Gbogboga [Amoo – zu, Ggboh-Gboh-ga!]. Each man, sharing the same name, found his own qualifying word. A small act of self-definition that I find quietly magnificent.

My grandfather was a herbalist. Not in the casual sense of the word. He cultivated a garden of wild plants sourced deliberately from the bush, each one selected and tended for its purpose. When a child was brought to him suffering from convulsions, he would walk into that garden, choose the right plants from memory and knowledge, grind them by hand, and administer them in a precise sequence. His methods worked. The child’s body would expel what was threatening it and the child would recover. In a time before hospitals were within reach of most families in coastal Ghana, he was what stood between a sick child and the worst outcome.

He was also a man of considerable standing. A cattle rancher and crop farmer, who also owned fishing nets and rented them out to fishermen along the coast. And above all of that he held the role as owner of the stool of his clan. In Ewe tradition, the stool is the seat of a traditional ruler, the physical and spiritual symbol of leadership. The owner of the stool is its ultimate custodian, the one responsible for keeping the ruler accountable for maintaining the integrity of traditional governance. It was the most demanding application of his philosophy. You needed the strength of metal to hold power in check. You needed the care of an egg to do it without breaking what you were protecting.

Back then to be called Dumɛga [Doo-meh-gah] was not a title given freely. It was not a courtesy extended to any man who had grown old or carried a respected surname. It had to be earned, through genuine and visible contribution to the life of the town, through the kind of service that people remembered and named out loud. My grandfather earned it the way his own name said he should, by holding strength and tenderness together long enough and consistently enough that the community had no choice but to acknowledge it. Communities brought their disputes to him and he mediated. He also arbitrated. He held the tension between opposing sides the way his father’s philosophy said to hold metal and egg, firmly enough to keep them together, gently enough that neither destroyed the other.

His standing was such that when Dufia Joachim Acolatse I, [Doo-fia - Joachim - Akor-lah-chey - the first], the traditional ruler of Kedzi [Keh-Jee] who reigned from 1865 to 1927, passed away, my grandfather was among the elders summoned to Kedzi [Keh-Jee] to help plan the grand funeral. It was a role reserved for men of genuine consequence. He spent several days there, away from home, fulfilling that duty. During those days, back in Tegbi [Teh-gbee], my grandmother gave birth to a daughter. The exact date of birth of that daughter was not captured at birth which wasn’t unusual back then. When the date of her birth was needed, it had to be traced to the particular timing of events surrounding the funeral which then settled the contention once and for all. It became the fixed point by which everything else was measured.

They named her Adzo [Ah-Jo!]. In Ewe, Adzo [Ah-Jo!] means female born on Monday. She carried the day in her name. She did not need a record, she was the record. My grandmother remembered clearly it was either the day of, or the immediate Monday after the passing of the great chief. He was Dumɛga Amuzu-Gakpleazi of Tegbi [Doo-meh-gah, Amoo – zu, Ga – kpleh – azhi]. And even his absence from home during one of the most significant moments of his family’s life was in service of something larger than himself. Metal and egg again. Every time.

He was not a Christian, yet he led the elders of his larger family to donate the land on which the Catholic church and school were built in his hometown of Tegbi [Teh-gbee]. That land still holds those buildings today. He gave it freely with no conditions, without belonging to the faith. Metal and egg again. The strength to lead and the tenderness to give to something beyond himself.

As fate would arrange it, a great grandnephew of his whose great grandmother was my grandfather’s older sister, today, serves as a Catholic Bishop in the Volta Region of Ghana.

He was not a Christian, yet his family produced a Bishop.

My older sister carries a similar truth alongside me. She is believed to be our great aunt reincarnated, and that great aunt was older than my grandfather, just as my sister has always been older than me. The relationship between them mirrors the relationship between us, in age, in dynamic, in the particular way we have always effortlessly and unexplainably understood each other.

My mother says we reincarnated from the same womb, the two of us, just as our grandparents did before us. She has never said it with any drama. Just the quiet certainty of someone reporting what she has always known to be true.

I have told you in a previous essay that I was the first male grandchild born after my grandfather passed, and that my family has always believed I carry him forward. Some of his mannerisms arrived with me before I knew enough to have developed them on my own. Some of his demeanor has always felt less like personality and more like memory.

Those are some heavy shoes to fill for the reincarnated, me. No pressure.

The first twelve weeks in a new job are when a person decides, usually without knowing they are deciding whether they belong there or not. I was the one responsible for that window, at a company I used to work at.

I have been in those rooms. Week after week, watching someone find their footing or lose it, and having to decide in the moment whether what they needed was the firm word or the open hand. Too much edge and something closes in them. Too little and the habit takes root and becomes harder to shift later. My superiors and colleagues sometimes thought I was too easy. My direct reports sometimes thought I was too hard. I was trying to be both at once, which is not a compromise. It is the thing my grandfather’s name describes.

Gakpleazi is not the balance you find. It is the weight you carry while you are still looking for it.

Share with me, does your family carry a philosophy the way mine carried metal and egg? Is there a belief, a saying, an image so precise and so true that it eventually became someone’s name? And if you were to distill your own life into a single image that honest and that clear, what would it be?

You can share that in the comments section of this essay and let’s continue that conversation.

I want you to sit with that for a moment before I explain it, because it is not a small thing. It is not a quirk of translation or a gap in the language that was never filled. It is a deliberate reflection of how my people, the Ewe of Ghana, understand human connection. We do not say goodbye because we do not believe in it. We never have.

When a guest leaves, when you walk someone to the road and watch them go, what you say in Ewe is ɛmɛgbɛ, meaning afterwards, or later on. If you know you will see them soon, you say miagadogo, we will meet again. The distinction matters. One holds open the near future. The other holds open all of time. Both refuse to close the door.

There is even a phrase for the ordinary hours of a single day. If you see someone in the afternoon and evening has not yet come, you might say Ɛzamɛdowo, night has not fallen yet. What that phrase is really saying is this: the day is not over. I cannot rule out seeing you again before it is. Therefore, I will not pretend this is the end of the day.

I used to hear people at retirement parties in the west say “goodbye is not forever,” and I would think to myself; for us, it is not even a word. Goodbye suggests finality. It suggests a door closing and a key turning. We simply do not build doors like that.

This same philosophy carries into conversations. When we leave something unfinished, we say Miagayidzi, we will pick it up where we left off. We do not end conversations; we pause them. Because ending a conversation is like ending a visit or a relationship, requires a kind of goodbye we do not know how to say.

Now you might think that death, of all things, would finally force the word out of us. It does not.

When someone we love passes, we believe they have gone ahead. Not away, ahead. We pour libation, speak their names and call on them during the hard decisions; the ones that keep you up at night, asking for steadiness and clarity. It was not unusual in Ewe households for prominent family members to be buried at the front of the house, or within the compound itself. Close enough to be consulted, close enough to still belong.

And when we say farewell at death, we say, “Hedenyue,” which translates as, “Go on and arrive safely, wherever you are going.” Not goodbye. Arrive safely. As though the journey continues and we expect a report.

Because we do.

We believe in reincarnation. We believe that some of us are our ancestors, returned. I am one of those people. I was the first male grandchild born after my grandfather passed, and my family has always held that I am him, come back. My mannerisms carry his. My demeanor echoes something older than my own years. I have never found reason to argue with it.

In my next essay, I will tell you about my grandfather’s name, and what it means. That essay has been living in me for a long time.

For now, ɛmɛgbɛ. Later on. We will meet again.

Tell me, does your culture believe that those who leave are ever truly gone? Is there a word, a ritual, a grave in the front yard, that keeps the conversation open?

Ɛmɛgbɛ,

Yao.

There is a word in Ewe that I want you to handle carefully.

Dzimakpla. Pronounced [Jee-Mah-Kplah].

It literally translates; birthed but untrained. And if someone ever says it to you within an Ewe community, understand that they have not merely criticized you. They have issued an indictment against everyone who ever loved you.

That is the weight of its effect.

Ewe people hold the raising of a child as one of the most serious responsibilities a human being can carry. Not a suggestion, not an aspiration but a duty. The belief that a good name is better than gold is not a proverb people recite politely here, it is a lived standard. Ewe people are sticklers for order, conduct and doing things the right way. They do not take shortcuts easily, likewise the formation of character lightly.

So when you are called Dzimakpla, it does not stop at your doorstep. It travels. It reaches your parents first, then your family name, then your neighbors, then every adult who ever watched you grow up and said nothing, did nothing, corrected nothing. Because in Ewe culture, the village is not a metaphor. The village is literally responsible for the child. Every elder who saw you misbehave and looked away carries a small portion of your Dzimakpla. The insult is communal because the obligation was communal.

This is why in the Ewe world, the first question asked when someone does wrong is never simply “What did they do?” It is; “Whose child is this? Which family does this person belong to?” Your conduct is not your private matter. Your name is borrowed from your kinsmen and you are expected to return it intact.

Ewe parents understood this deeply. They thrive in professions that lean heavily on rules and structure including law, civil service, teaching, law enforcement and trade. The same orderliness they practiced in their work, they brought home. Discipline was not cruelty. It was love with the long view.

And what does that upbringing produce in practice? A person who knows how to enter a room. When you show up to another person’s house as a visitor, an Amedzro, there are norms you are expected to follow. You greet. You show respect to the elders. When you are in the company of elders, you defer and allow them to speak first, unless you are specifically invited to lead. You follow the pecking order. There is an adage among us: with old age comes wisdom. Elders hold a revered place in our lives, and a well-trained person does not need to be reminded of that. You observe the house rules, and when in doubt, you ask or you remain mindful that you are not in your own space. If you find yourself in a town where your relatives reside, you go and announce your presence. Woe unto you if you are later discovered to have been in town for days without going to greet them.

This is what Dzimakpla fails to produce. Not just a rude person but a person who never learned how to be in the world with others.

But here is where the Ewe tradition reveals something surprisingly honest about itself.

Even within this culture of rigorous upbringing, there is a proverb that quietly acknowledges the limit of what any parent or village can do. It goes like this: “Ɛvi yikɛ do ɛtada ɛye wonya dzi na,” pronounced [Eh-Vee yee keh dough eh-tah da air yay wonya jeena] directly translating to the baby that shows its head is the one that is able to be birthed.

Think about that slowly.

You can only deliver the baby that is willing to come. A child who will not be shaped cannot be shaped, no matter how much love or discipline surrounds them. The village can build the container. Only the child can choose to be held by it. In the end, the willingness to be trained is itself a form of character, perhaps the most essential one of all.

And if a child is trained and still refuses to respond? The family has a word for that too, “Kplamasɛ” Trained but refused to receive the training. Evidently, the Ewe language leaves very little unnamed. Even that specific failure, the child who was given everything and absorbed nothing, has been named and accounted for.

Dzimakpla is a word about failure. However, the proverb, “Ɛvi yikɛ do ɛtada ɛye wonya dzi na,” tucked at the end of it, quietly inspires hope.

So here is my question for you. In your culture, how does the community hold the responsibility of raising a child? Is it the family alone or does it extend further? And is there a word, a proverb, a gesture, that captures what happens when that responsibility is not honored?

I would genuinely like to know.

Two weeks from now, a word for when you leave but never really go. Subscribe so it finds you.

Yao

Before you sit down, before we talk, before anything, I want to say something to you.

Woezor.

Pronounced [Way-Zohn], Zohn sounding like John but the n is very soft and nasally.

In Anlo Ewe, my mother tongue, this is how we greet someone who has just arrived. It means: you have traversed, you have walked, you made it here. The word itself, the very first thing out of our mouths, is an acknowledgment that getting here cost you something. Time, energy and thought. We do not take any of that for granted.

If you came with others, the greeting opens wider. Miawoezor, pronounced [Mia-Way-Zohn], meaning all of you, every one of you who traversed. Seen individually, welcomed collectively.

In my last essay I told you about Amedzro, the person we crave, the visitor we were already hoping would come. Woezor is what happens the moment that person actually walks through the door. The craving has been answered. Now the welcome begins in full.

And it is more elaborate than you might expect.

First there is water, not to drink yet, but to wash your feet. If you walked any distance at all, especially along the sandy paths of coastal Ghana, your feet carried the evidence of that journey. We acknowledged the journey with Woezor. Then we cleaned it from your feet. You arrived. Now you rest.

Then comes the drinking water and this is where it gets interesting.

Even if you are not thirsty, even if you drank a full bottle of water five minutes before walking in, you take a sip. It is expected. Not as a performance, but as a statement. By accepting the water you are telling your host: I trust you. You are saying without words that you believe the cup contains nothing harmful, that you have come in good faith, that you are glad to be here. And the host, watching you accept, feels something too. A quiet reassurance that you mean no harm, that this visit is safe, and the welcome was right to be given.

Two people. One cup of water. An entire negotiation of trust, conducted in silence.

Now the greeting.

What follows is unlike anything you will find described in most books about African culture, because it is not a greeting in the way Westerners typically think of one. It is closer to a structured ceremony, a gentle and deliberate period of conversational turns, if you can imagine such a thing. The guest and host take turns leading, each asking after the other’s family, children, work, health, and after each question the other responds. When one side finishes, they add one word, ɛyooo, and a brief deliberate pause. That single word is the signal of a handoff. You have to be attentive to notice it. Now the other leads. When both sides are complete, they shake hands. The greeting is closed.

If all is well in the house, the host will then say something that has always moved me. We are at peace here. You are the one who traversed. The floor is yours.

The guest who traveled gets to speak first. The effort of the journey earns that right.

If the matter is serious, if what the guest has come to say carries weight, someone else may be called into the room. A witness. Someone to hold what is about to be said. Nothing important happens without being witnessed.

None of this is mandatory but it is usually expected. A guest can always politely ask to skip the full ceremony and just talk. A simple good evening is enough and it is accepted graciously. But even in the abbreviated version, notice what remains. Each person in the room is greeted individually, not a general wave at the group. If it were morning it would sound like this. Ndii nami kɛɛn, pronounced [Indee Nahmi Kehn], the Kehn rhyming with a stretched out bend. This greeting translates directly as good morning to you all, severally. Each face acknowledged. Each person seen.

That is the thread running through all of it. Woezor, the foot water, the drinking water, the greeting ceremony. Every single element is saying the same thing in a different language.

You matter. Your presence here is not ordinary. We noticed you came.

And when you say Woezor to someone, they answer you. The response is yooo or ɛyooo, the same word of affirmation you heard earlier in the greeting ceremony, now turned outward. There it closed one side of the exchange between host and guest. Here it receives the welcome itself. I acknowledge what you said. If the traveler wants to add a flourish, they say mɛ zor dɛ mianu, which translates literally to I have traversed up to you all. The visitor’s declaration back to the host. I came here intentionally. I made this effort because you matter to me. The connection runs both ways.

The exchange is complete only when both voices have been heard. That is the beauty of it. Woezor is never just one person speaking. It is always a conversation.

So I want to ask you. How does arrival look where you come from? Is there a word, a ritual, a gesture, however small, that says to the person who just walked through your door: I see what it took you to get here?

Two weeks from today, I will bring you a word that stings. The kind that travels further than the person it was meant for. Subscribe so it finds you when it arrives.

Woezor, my friend. I am glad you traversed.

Yao.

I want to share with you a word that stopped me mid-conversation.

It was one gorgeous spring afternoon while running grocery errands after Mass. I got into a conversation with a stranger who commented on my traditional outfit. He disclosed his observation of how warm and welcoming Ghanaians are, how people from West Africa, Ghanaians and Nigerians especially, have a particular kind of warmth you feel the moment you meet them. I nodded because I knew it was true. But even as I agreed, something was forming in the back of my mind. A connection I had not quite made before.

In Ewe, my mother tongue, pronounced like ɛwɛ, with a breath where the “w” should be, the word for visitor is Amedzro, pronounced [Ah-Meh-Jro]. Amedzro does not just mean a person who has come. It means the person I crave. The person I have been wanting.

Think about what that means for a moment. I will come back to it.

My mother cooked for people who had not arrived yet. That was just how it was. The pot was always a little fuller than necessary, an unnamed portion saved for whoever might knock after dark, whoever might show up tired and hungry without prior notice. There were no phone calls then to announce yourself. You simply came, and the welcome was already prepared. “Cook enough for our Amedzro,” she would say. For our visitor. For the person we were craving, even before we knew who they were.

If no one showed up, the following morning we warmed the food and ate it. If the food were our staple Akplɛ, we call it ɛtso kplɛ, meaning the Akplɛ from yesterday. For whatever reason ɛtso kplɛ with leftover soup from the previous day hits your taste buds differently. Nothing goes to waste.

That memory. That word. They tell me everything I need to know about why Ghanaians are who they are to the world.

This hospitality that visitors always remark on, it did not come from nowhere. It was not luck or personality. It was architecture. Our ancestors built it into the language, which built it into the kitchen, which built it into us and it thrived in our subconscious. By the time we grew up and met the world, we were already living out a philosophy we might not have been able to name.

The name is Amedzro. And now you know it.

What is your mother tongue? How does your language greet the stranger at the door, and what does that greeting ask of you?

You arrived here for a reason.

If this word opened something in you, there is more where it came from. Two weeks from now I will bring you another word from my mother tongue, and another piece of the world it carries. Subscribe if you have not already, so it finds you when it arrives.

Ɛmɛgbɛ.

Yao

Amedzro is coming.

In Ewe, the language of the Anlo people of Ghana, Amedzro means the person I crave. It is what my people call a visitor.

Beginning Saturday, August 15, 2026, this publication will open one Ewe word at a time and follow it into the philosophy, the memory, and the living history it carries.

Not just translations. Living culture.

Subscribe now so the first word finds you when it arrives.

I’ve been expecting you.

Yao

Subscribe now