The Wall at Notsie: how the Ewe walked out backwards
The Ewe once lived at Notsie, in what is now Togo, behind a great mud wall.
Anloga, and the Hogbetsotso festival there in early November.
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The Wall at Notsie: how the Ewe walked out backwards
The Ewe once lived at Notsie, in what is now Togo, behind a great mud wall. Their king was Agokoli, and Agokoli was a tyrant with an imagination.
He had the elders killed, because old men give advice and advice is a constraint. He set the people to building the wall with clay he had ordered mixed with broken pottery, thorns and glass, so that every handful cut them. He demanded they weave him a rope out of clay, and punished them when they could not.
But one elder had been hidden — Tegli, in the best-known telling, kept alive in secret by his family — and the people came to him at night with the problem.
His answer was patience. The women of the town were to take their washing water, every day, and throw it against one particular section of the wall. Only that section. Day after day, ordinary domestic water, thrown by women no guard would look at twice.
The clay softened.
On the chosen night they cut through the softened place, and the people went out — the old and the children first, then the rest. And as they went, the last of them walked backwards, so that every footprint in the dust outside the wall pointed inward, toward Notsie, as if a crowd had arrived rather than left.
By the time the trick was understood they were gone, and they scattered south and west into what is now the Volta Region and founded Anloga and Ho and Kpando and Aflao and the towns along the coast.
Every year at Hogbetsotso — "the festival of the exodus" — they tell it again, and act it out, and before the celebration begins there is Nugbidodo: the rite of peace-making, in which quarrels within the community must be brought out and settled, because you do not carry a dispute across a threshold.
If you visit Ghana. Anloga, and the Hogbetsotso festival there in early November.
The Ewe once lived at Notsie, in what is now Togo, behind a great mud wall. Their king was Agokoli, and Agokoli was a tyrant with an imagination.
He had the elders killed, because old men give advice and advice is a constraint. He set the people to building the wall with clay he had ordered mixed with broken pottery, thorns and glass, so that every handful cut them. He demanded they weave him a rope out of clay, and punished them when they could not.
But one elder had been hidden — Tegli, in the best-known telling, kept alive in secret by his family — and the people came to him at night with the problem.
His answer was patience. The women of the town were to take their washing water, every day, and throw it against one particular section of the wall. Only that section. Day after day, ordinary domestic water, thrown by women no guard would look at twice.
The clay softened.
On the chosen night they cut through the softened place, and the people went out — the old and the children first, then the rest. And as they went, the last of them walked backwards, so that every footprint in the dust outside the wall pointed inward, toward Notsie, as if a crowd had arrived rather than left.
By the time the trick was understood they were gone, and they scattered south and west into what is now the Volta Region and founded Anloga and Ho and Kpando and Aflao and the towns along the coast.
Every year at Hogbetsotso — "the festival of the exodus" — they tell it again, and act it out, and before the celebration begins there is Nugbidodo: the rite of peace-making, in which quarrels within the community must be brought out and settled, because you do not carry a dispute across a threshold.