Voices of the Ancestors

These are stories the elders of Ghana’s Volta region were delighted to tell once again. So many of their young people no longer wanted to hear them, and the stories are almost forgotten. Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, sometimes with animal characters with all-too-human foibles.

Whispers come from the land, and history speaks through the voices of the ancestors. A voice that came to me of a woman snatched away. What right has she to tell my story? she asks. Yet she has given me her story none-the-less, through the stone walls of the old trading fort whose trade had become that of people.