The Volta is the great artery, and rivers of that size accumulate stories.
Ada Foah at the estuary; the Volta ferries; Dodi Island and the Akosombo lake boats.
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Places & LandscapesEweGaplace memory
Listen to The River Takes Its Own: Volta water lore
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The River Takes Its Own: Volta water lore
The Volta is the great artery, and rivers of that size accumulate stories.
Fishermen speak of a canoe seen far out in poor light, moving without a paddler, that turns toward you if you look at it too long. They speak of hearing drumming from an empty stretch of bank. They speak of a section of water that must be greeted before it is entered, and of the practice of pouring a little drink into the river before a crossing, which is still done.
Mami Wata belongs here too — the water spirit found all along the West African coast, beautiful, wealthy, often shown with a snake, who takes people into the water and sometimes gives them back changed and rich, and sometimes does not give them back. She is not a mermaid, though the postcard iconography borrowed one. She is a bargain.
And under the lake there is a real drowned country: the Akosombo Dam, closed in 1965, created the largest man-made lake in the world by surface area and displaced around eighty thousand people from more than seven hundred villages. Towns, shrines, farmland and graves are under that water. Their descendants know precisely where.
If you visit Ghana. Ada Foah at the estuary; the Volta ferries; Dodi Island and the Akosombo lake boats.
Narrated by AI. Some Ghanaian names and places will not sound the way you say them.
The Volta is the great artery, and rivers of that size accumulate stories.
Fishermen speak of a canoe seen far out in poor light, moving without a paddler, that turns toward you if you look at it too long. They speak of hearing drumming from an empty stretch of bank. They speak of a section of water that must be greeted before it is entered, and of the practice of pouring a little drink into the river before a crossing, which is still done.
Mami Wata belongs here too — the water spirit found all along the West African coast, beautiful, wealthy, often shown with a snake, who takes people into the water and sometimes gives them back changed and rich, and sometimes does not give them back. She is not a mermaid, though the postcard iconography borrowed one. She is a bargain.
And under the lake there is a real drowned country: the Akosombo Dam, closed in 1965, created the largest man-made lake in the world by surface area and displaced around eighty thousand people from more than seven hundred villages. Towns, shrines, farmland and graves are under that water. Their descendants know precisely where.