Spieth, Greene, Nukunya — three ways of writing the Anlo-Ewe memory

If you want to understand Hogbetsotso, you eventually have to confront three books written across a century, by three writers in three very different positions, and you have to read them against each other. None of the three is the right one. Each is a way of seeing that the others miss.

This is the third piece in our Hogbetsotso Field Notes set, and it is the bibliographic spine of the trip. The previous pieces — the primer and the Operator Notes — tell you what the festival is and how to be in it. This one tells you what to read before you arrive, and why each of the three matters even though only one of them is by an Ewe writer.

Jakob Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme (1906)

Jakob Spieth (1856–1914) was a German pastor of the Bremen Mission who lived in Ho, in what was then German Togoland (and is today the Ho Volta Region of Ghana), from 1880 to about 1908. His Die Ewe-Stämme: Material zur Kunde des Ewe-Volkes in Deutsch-Togo (Berlin, 1906) is a 1,000-page descriptive monograph on the Ewe peoples of his mission territory. It contains, among many other things, the first written rendering of the Notsé departure narrative in a European language.

Spieth's book is invaluable. It is also a missionary's book. He records what his informants told him, but he frames the recording inside a Lutheran evangelical project that took the dismantling of African religious practice as a goal. The shrines he describes were, in many cases, being argued out of existence by his colleagues at the same time. The departure narrative he records is, in his telling, an interesting historical curiosity en route to the more important story of Ewe conversion to Protestantism.

What Spieth got right: the names of places, the names of clans, the architecture of the chieftaincy, the calendar of festivals. What Spieth got wrong, or rather did not see: the political weight of the Notsé narrative in Anlo self-understanding. He recorded the story; he did not understand that it was, and is, a manual.

G.K. Nukunya, Kinship and Marriage among the Anlo Ewe (1969)

Godwin Kwaku Nukunya (1936–2018) was a Ghanaian sociologist, longtime professor at the University of Ghana at Legon, and member of the Anlo community he wrote about. His doctoral thesis, published in 1969 by Athlone Press, is the most rigorous internal account of Anlo social structure ever written. It is also, for a Western anthropological readership, the most often skipped, because Nukunya wrote it as a structural-functionalist analysis without the autobiographical confessions that Western readers expect from indigenous ethnographers.

Nukunya's implicit thesis — never stated as such but visible across the book — is that the Notsé departure is the foundational charter of Anlo political philosophy. The 36 divisions of the Anlo state, the role of the Awoamefia, the patrilineal clan structure, the inheritance rules, all are organized around the historical fact of having walked out. He does not romanticize this. He describes it the way a constitutional historian describes a founding document.

If Spieth gives you the surface ethnographic taxonomy, Nukunya gives you the deep structural grammar. Reading the two against each other is what produces a proper understanding.

Spieth saw an exotic story. Nukunya saw a political constitution. The Anlo festival is, every November, the public reading of that constitution.

Sandra Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (1996) and after

Sandra E. Greene is an American historian of West Africa who has been writing about the Anlo for forty years. Her body of work — Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Heinemann, 1996); Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Indiana, 2002); West African Narratives of Slavery (Indiana, 2011) — opened a third way of reading Anlo memory: as memory in process, contested, gendered, revised across generations, with women's narratives often markedly different from the official chieftaincy narrative.

Greene's contribution is to insist that the Notsé departure narrative is not a static fact preserved in oral history but an active, contested object that the Anlo community has continually rewritten. Some of the rewriting was deliberate (the early-twentieth-century Anlo intelligentsia codifying a particular version against rival versions). Some of it was structural (women's versions of the departure, often emphasizing the role of female ancestors in the escape, were systematically excluded from the official histories). Some of it was responsive to colonial pressures (the Anlo had reasons, during the German and British periods, to emphasize particular elements over others).

If Spieth gives you 1906 and Nukunya gives you the structural grammar, Greene gives you the historiography itself — the awareness that what you will hear at Hogbetsotso is one valid version among several, and that the festival is itself a venue for the production of memory, not just its display.

Reading the three together

You do not have to read all three before arriving. We give our travelers a 30-page reader that we have edited from the three, with brief introductions to each, and we hand it over a month before the trip. If you arrive having read it, the durbar in Anloga will look like a constitutional convention rather than a colorful regional festival, which is closer to what it is.

If you can only read one in full, the answer depends on what you want. For first-time visitors, Greene's 2002 book is the most accessible and the most generative. For travelers with a strong anthropological background, Nukunya 1969 is dense but irreplaceable. For travelers interested in the missionary archive and the colonial production of knowledge, Spieth 1906 is the document, but it is a 1,000-page German-language ethnography and you will probably want to read it in excerpt.

One last note — the Ewe writers who are not (yet) in English

The richest body of contemporary writing on Anlo-Ewe memory is in Ewe and in Ghanaian English-language journals that are not widely circulated outside West Africa. Komla Amoaku, Datey-Kumodzie, Nicholas Atsu Setrofim, and the work coming out of the University of Cape Coast Ewe studies programme — this is the active scholarship of the present generation. Our partner in Anloga, who has been an interlocutor of ours for many years, has been generous about lending us materials and pointing us to current voices. If you are coming to Hogbetsotso with academic intent, we can put you in contact.

A library you read before arriving is a library you read inside the durbar. The drumming sounds different when you know what it is keeping in time.

For 2026 booking, bookings@heritageandroutes.com. Cornerstone: Hogbetsotso 2026.