Sasabonsam

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Names & Creature Profile

Sasabonsam inhabits a forest in which people hunt, gather food and risk meeting something with a claim of its own. In Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930), the British colonial administrator and collector R. S. Rattray includes an encounter over a kola tree. Its antagonist can speak, negotiate and be defeated. The story belongs to the collection’s anansesem, or spider stories: a storytelling category that includes tales in which Ananse the spider never appears. Sasabonsam is one participant in a much larger world of talking animals and human households. [8]

Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology records Sasaboa, glossed as a ghost animal, for its carving by Osei Bonsu. [2]

Tales & Encounters

Rattray’s forty-third tale begins with a hunter and four dogs that normally accompany him into the bush. In his English translation their names are Sniff-sniff, Lick-lick, Tie-in-knots and Gulp-down. One day the hunter finds a kola tree laden with fruit. At home he tells his wife; she urges him to collect the nuts, since they have none to chew and none to sell. He sets out again, this time leaving the dogs behind. He climbs the tree and begins to pick. [8]

Sasabonsam appears before him and demands to know who has taken its nuts. The hunter admits that he has. Facing the being’s threat to kill him, he asks first to summon his dogs. Sasabonsam allows three attempts: if they have not come by then, he will die. The hunter calls each by name. At home the dogs hear him faintly and run to the edge of town. He calls again, and they hurry onward. Sasabonsam tells him that the next call will be the last. [8]

Before he has finished that third summons, the four dogs stand before him. He orders Sniff-sniff to sniff the creature and Lick-lick to lick it. Tie-in-knots knots its throat; Sasabonsam falls, and Gulp-down swallows it. The hunter and his rescuers collect the kola nuts and return home. He cooks a full dish of groundnut soup for the dogs and sets water beside it, then eats with his wife. Afterward he goes into the street and sits beneath a gyedua tree. [8]

The danger now comes from inside his household. Fly, described in the tale as the hunter’s enslaved servant, lifts the dogs’ meal to the ceiling. They return hungry, see no food and conclude that their master has failed to feed them despite their service. Lick-lick proposes killing him. The dog goes out and licks the hunter, who plays with it; Sniff-sniff follows. Then Tie-in-knots tightens the hunter’s throat and Gulp-down swallows him. The powers that saved him have been turned against him. [8]

Back at the house, drops of soup make the dogs suspect that food was left after all. Fly denies having seen it. Sniff-sniff looks up, discovers the dish and realizes that they have killed their master without cause. Fly escapes. The tale ends by explaining why a dog snaps at a fly that lands on it. The hunter is not restored. An everyday movement carries the consequence of the mistake, long after Sasabonsam’s defeat seemed to have brought the danger to an end.

Homeland & Tradition

Rattray describes collecting across Ashanti and south into Kwawu, in what is now Ghana. Villagers gathered after dark to tell and hear stories, sitting in a street or sheltering around a courtyard during rain. After an evening’s telling, he selected a tale and asked its narrator to repeat it later. He wrote it down and read it back for correction. He also standardized some differences of dialect and adjusted English tenses. The printed collection consequently preserves a performed tradition through the interventions of a particular collector and translator. [8]

The hunter tale begins with a formula distancing the performance from a claim to literal truth. Its songs and repeated actions belong to that public storytelling occasion. Rattray describes interruptions, impersonations and laughter during such gatherings; his general account does not identify the individual teller or audience for this particular story. Its English text lets us follow the hunter’s predicament, but cannot reproduce the timing with which an unnamed performer delivered a call, delayed the dogs or brought the fly into the house. [8]

Appearance & Signs

In his 1954 chapter on Ashanti society, the Ghanaian scholar K. A. Busia describes long hair, bloodshot eyes and feet turned both ways. The being sits high in odum or onyina trees, letting its extraordinarily long legs reach downward and hook a passing hunter. Busia identifies Rattray’s earlier Religion and Art in Ashanti as the source of this portrait. Height makes the body dangerous: the hunter need not climb before coming within its reach. [1]

Bonsu’s Cambridge figure has a human face, birdlike wings and a four-legged body in hard reddish wood. In her St Andrews course essay, Isabel Simpson describes a different McManus figure with batlike wings, short horns and looped legs ending in backward-facing feet. One carver gave the same being two distinct bodies. [2][3]

Nature & Powers

The Sasabonsam in the kola-tree tale is dangerous without being invulnerable. It confronts the hunter and grants him a limited reprieve; the four dogs then overcome it through the actions expressed in their names. No flight, transformation or blood-drinking is needed for this encounter. Speech and the power to kill are enough to turn fruit gathering into a contest whose result depends on whether help can arrive in time. [8]

Benedicta Efua Apprey’s 2018 MPhil thesis, A Visual Documentation of Selected Akan Myths, presents another concise portrait: hairy, lanky, haunting and troubling sleepers, and familiar in anansesem. Her drawings accompany a modern Ghanaian study. They offer an artist-researcher’s visualization, while the accompanying description places Sasabonsam among beings that can intrude on rest as well as journeys through the forest. [5]

Landscape & Associations

The kola tree is valuable before it is frightening. The wife thinks of nuts to eat and sell; Sasabonsam claims them as its property. The hunter has entered a dispute over something his household needs. A second tree, the gyedua under which he rests at home, marks the change of scene after his escape. Neither an empty forest nor a secure home can explain the whole story: the meal prepared in gratitude is hidden, and a familiar resting place becomes the site of a fatal misunderstanding. [8]

In a different discussion, J. B. Amissah-Arthur relates Sasabonsam to dabɔne, special or prohibited days on which forest activity is restricted. He interprets such restrictions as allowing resources to recover. This is his explanation of a particular relationship between danger and restraint, not the stated reason for the hunter’s predicament in Rattray’s tale. That story names no forbidden weekday. [4]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Busia places mmoatia, small forest beings, beside Sasabonsam in his account of spiritual powers. They can teach medicines and are associated with witchcraft; their knowledge gives them a role beyond frightening a traveller. Apprey likewise treats mmoatia separately, describing small, stout bodies and backward-facing feet. In her account they can do good or harm. The repeated foot motif does not make the beings identical: the small teachers and the long-legged threat occupy different places in their authors’ descriptions. [1][5]

Ananse’s absence from the hunter story is equally instructive. The label anansesem does not promise that every narrative will feature the spider. In this one the four dogs and Fly determine the human outcome after the forest adversary has disappeared. Treating the tale solely as a Sasabonsam attack would lose the episode that gives it its title: the dog’s continuing quarrel with the fly. [8]

Historical Record

The Cambridge carving was made in Kumasi in 1935 and donated by Captain Robert Powley Wild in 1936. Its catalogue associates such works with umbrella tops. Accession 1936.205 travelled to the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Enslavement & Resistance exhibition in 2023. These dates follow the object; they do not date the beginning of Sasabonsam stories. [2]

The McManus acquired its carving from A. R. Walker in 1965. Simpson dates it probably to the 1930s and records a correction on its label: Nigeria was crossed out and Ghana substituted. The donor’s identity and circumstances of acquisition remain unresolved; a proposed colonial connection is her hypothesis. [3]

Meaning & Belief

Amissah-Arthur questions the translation of Akan beings through Christian categories such as the Devil. His argument draws attention to a change in meaning rather than providing a universally accepted etymology for Sasabonsam. A being that bargains over kola nuts in anansesem need not perform the same role as an adversary in Christian theology. The particular source determines what a use of the name means. [4]

Felicity Apaah’s 2018 doctoral thesis supplies a specific Christian context. Discussing a poem by the Ghanaian writer Yedu Bannerman, she considers Christ’s power over feared spirits and, in her commentary, connects Sasabonsam with Devil language. Her discussion quotes the theologian Kwame Bediako. Sasabonsam is not named in the displayed lyric itself; the connection belongs to the theological explanation surrounding it. This is a documented reinterpretation, distinct from treating every older forest story as a Christian allegory. [6]

Later Retellings & Reception

Sasabonsam also became the title of a folk opera by Saka Acquaye. In the abstract for a 2021 lecture at Leeds, Ghanaian music scholar Moses Nii Dortey places Acquaye’s work within the cultural renaissance and nation-building programme associated with Kwame Nkrumah. He names Sasabonsam among operas that toured internationally. The abstract establishes that performance history, but supplies no plot or account of how the creature appeared onstage. [7]

Simpson reports that an earlier curator considered the sculpture too modern for display. She questions categories that diminish it as tourist art and argues for an exhibition attentive to Bonsu’s authorship and his response to a changing colonial world. [3]

Evidence & Open Questions

Rattray does not name this teller, and the English version cannot settle every nuance of the accompanying Twi. His account of collecting explains how performances became texts, including his own adjustments to dialect and tense. The published tale preserves one recorded version within a changing performance tradition. [8]

Its last turn is sharper than a catalogue of supernatural powers. The dogs arrive in time, defeat the monster and receive the promised care. Their error comes afterward, when they judge an absent meal without finding where it has gone. By the time Sniff-sniff looks toward the ceiling, the truth can explain the tragedy but cannot undo it. [8]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Rattray’s tale supplies the continuous hunter-and-dogs narrative and its performance context. Busia records the tree-dwelling portrait; the Cambridge catalogue and Simpson’s essay concern two different Bonsu carvings. Apprey, Amissah-Arthur and Apaah provide Ghanaian discussions of representation and meaning. Dortey’s lecture abstract documents the opera title and its historical setting. [8][1][2][3][5][4][6][7]

Ashanti, in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples ↗
K. A. Busia · Oxford University Press for the International African Institute; University of Washington hosted scan · 1954
Printed pp.195–196; volume edited by Daryll Forde
Busia’s physical description quotes Rattray’s Religion and Art in Ashanti; that earlier passage was consulted through Busia.
Checked 2026-10-09
Sasaboa / Sasabonsam — Osei Bonsu, accession 1936.205 ↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

Dark-framed folio of a copper-toned, human-headed forest creature with an animal body and feathered bird wings perched between branches. — An original response to the particular human-headed, animal-bodied, bird-winged sasaboa form recorded in Osei Bonsu’s 1935 carving (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 1936.205). It does not reproduce the carving or claim one universal Akan form.

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