Dear Botoku: Our history belongs to us, and so does our voice

Dear citizens and friends of Botoku, at home in Ghana and across the world,

My recent article in The Ghanaian Times was written for a national audience. This letter is different. It is written especially for the people and friends of Botoku.

In telling our story, I will revisit painful parts of our distant past, including ritual practices none of us would defend today. If these memories cause distress, I sincerely apologise. I mention them not to shame our ancestors or any clan, but because reconciliation requires the courage to face our history honestly.

For years, I became frustrated whenever another Botoku disagreement ended up in the mainstream courts. I wondered: What is the value of chieftaincy if every difficult matter ends before a judge?

Researching our history changed my mind. Long before independence, our chiefs and elders had learnt to take disputes they could not resolve to the colonial courts rather than settle them through violence. That is not weakness. It is one of Botoku’s unspoken strengths. I therefore thank both Kpale and Kledzasi for continuing that tradition. Whatever our differences, choosing the courtroom over confrontation matters. Those cases also left us an unexpected gift: records through which later generations can still hear the arguments and voices of our ancestors.

My late co-author, Lt. Col. F.M.K. Asamoah, and I spent many years listening to Botoku chiefs and elders, including respected Kledzasi elders, and examining historical records for our book on Botoku history. Botoku trusted us with its stories. I now have a responsibility to share what I know and encourage younger people to learn their family, clan and Botoku history.

Botoku history did not begin with Togbe Sei. Our traditions remember earlier leadership associated with Togbe Alagadawoe and our ancestors’ migration from Notsie. Powerful shrines and their custodians also once exercised authority. Chieftaincy developed gradually over generations, with Akan influence becoming an important part of the system we know today.

That raises a simple question. If Kledzasi can look back to Togbe Sei and say, “The stool was once ours, so we are taking it back,” what prevents descendants of Togbe Alagadawoe of Tove or other clans from looking further back and making their own claim? If every clan searches the past for a time when its ancestors exercised authority, where does it stop?

History cannot mean choosing the point in the past that gives us the answer we want today.

Before we become absorbed in plaintiffs, defendants and competing claims, let us remember something simple: Sei and Sei Ama were brother and sister. The royal descendants of Kledzasi and Kpale therefore begin not as strangers or enemies, but within one family.

Think about your own brother or sister. Imagine something accepted within your family becoming, more than a century later, the subject of a court case among your descendants. Our elders expressed that wisdom beautifully: Koklo be ne yewo le dzre waa tse yewo le ŋku kpɔm,even when chickens fight, they are still careful of each other’s eyes. We may disagree passionately, but there are things we should never destroy: kinship, dignity, friendship, love and the possibility of embracing one another when the dispute is over.

There is also an uncomfortable part of the Sei story that we did not fully publish. Elders told us that Togbe Sei’s sister, Sei Ama, married into Kpale and that one of her children was sacrificed during the consecration of the paramount stool. According to the oral tradition handed down to us, this gave her surviving children and their descendants the right to inherit the stool. Before Togbe Sei died, he directed that the stool should pass to his nephews at Kpale.

Why did we leave the human-sacrifice story out? The elders asked us to. Our book was intended partly for young people. Christianity was already making some people reluctant to become chiefs, and the elders feared this story would frighten another generation away from Botoku chieftaincy. We therefore published a gentler account: that Togbe Sei gave the stool to the nephews who cared for him in his old age.

Today our book is being used in this dispute. I therefore believe I must tell Botoku what the elders actually told us and why that part was omitted.

Sei Ama was not unique. Across Botoku clans, chiefly rights have sometimes been traced through women and their descendants for similar reasons. Earlier generations regarded the child of a royal woman as unquestionably carrying her royal blood, while the same certainty could not always be assumed about the children of a royal man. This helps explain why some chiefly claims reach through a great-grandmother or an even more distant female ancestor.

But here is the central point for me. Ownership and succession of the paramount stool were not questions left unresolved for our generation to settle. Whatever its earlier origins, generations of Botoku people had established an accepted customary practice long before our earliest documentary evidence from 1886. From at least 1886 until Togbe Tamtia V died in 2003, five successive Tamtias of Kpale occupied the paramount stool.

Since retiring and spending more time in Botoku, I have heard young people discussing this dispute along our roadsides, women raising it after funerals and men debating it beneath shade trees. In 2025, traditional officeholders associated with eight of Botoku’s nine clans publicly declared their support for Togbega Tamtia VI of Kpale and invited journalists to speak with the people. A veteran journalist later told me that eighteen of the first twenty people approached identified the Tamtia of Kpale as the legitimate Paramount Chief. Twenty people are not a scientific survey. But they remind us of something important: the people of Botoku have voices.

Do not leave your voice to chiefs, lawyers or professors, including me. Ask your grandmother what she remembers. Ask your grandfather and clan elders. Read the records. Ask Kpale difficult but respectful questions. Ask Kledzasi the same. Speak to someone who disagrees with you and really listen.

Ask: What happened before Togbe Sei? What happened afterwards? How did succession work in other Botoku clans? What did our grandparents and great-grandparents actually practise? What evidence supports each story? And what evidence would make us change our own minds? Then make up your own mind.

And please speak respectfully. Insults will not make bad evidence good. Anger will not change history. Calling another Botoku person an enemy will not help our children inherit a stronger community. Whatever the courts decide, Kpale and Kledzasi will remain neighbours. Our children will attend school together. Our families will marry one another. We will meet at funerals, festivals and community gatherings.

I hope we emerge determined to make succession rules clearer, traditional governance and land administration more transparent, and chieftaincy an example of humble public service rather than inherited privilege. Traditions can change, but if Botoku wants change, let us discuss it openly and seek broad agreement rather than allow one part of our community to decide for everyone.

That includes how we recognise women’s traditional authority. In contemporary Ghana, female traditional leaders are often called “queen mothers.” Botoku tradition gives us more precise terms: the Fianyɔnu, the female chief, alongside the Fiaŋutsu, the male chief. These are distinct chiefly offices. The woman’s authority belongs to her own office, not simply to her relationship with a male chief.

Respecting tradition does not mean resisting change. Strong traditions endure because each generation asks what should be preserved, what needs greater clarity and what should change to strengthen human dignity.

Botoku belongs to all of us. Whatever our differences, may we find the wisdom to listen to one another, the humility to put community before faction, and the courage to leave those who come after us a Botoku more united than the one we inherited.

With affection for our community, and hope for our shared future,

Komla

The writer 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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