shows the depth of the cultural network of Africa. Since the ancient soci-
eties were almost all illiterate, we cannot trace it with any precision, but ves-
tiges remain. One such vestige on the Gold Coast is suggestive. According
to the English ethnographer A. B. Ellis, the Tshi-speaking inhabitants of
the Gold Coast believed in something they called kra. Krahas been inter-
preted as “a second individuality, an indwelling spirit residing in the
body.... Krain some respects resembles a guardian spirit.” This notion,
allowing for the long distance and the great passage of time, echoes the
ancient Egyptian notion of ka,which the Egyptologist John Wilson called
“guiding and protective forces in life and death.”
The Egyptians believed that the gods permeated all things. So too the
West Africans believed that all things—bushes, trees, and rocks as well as
living things—had a kraor spirit capable of causing events. This enabled
them to explain the otherwise inexplicable. For the Tshi, if a man drowned,
water alone could not explain his death. After all, as Ellis reported, a Tshi
would say, “Water, alone, is harmless: he drinks it daily, washes in it, uses it
for a variety of purposes. He decides, therefore, that water did not cause the
death of the man.” Rather, the cause must be the river’s kra,its indwelling
spirit. And just as the Egyptians believed that upon death the kaof a per-
son goes to an afterworld, so the West Africans held that kragoes to what
Ellis translated as the “dead world.” Both cultures believed that after death
the desires of a person could be conjured by those gifted with oracular
powers.
Other concepts are shared among the ancient Egyptians and various
African peoples. And it is not just in religion that we can see the pervasive
currents of custom. One noteworthy custom is in diplomacy. Given the hos-
tility among the village-states, some means of safe passage had to be created
for messages, for trade, and (occasionally) for making truces. Throughout
Africa, there is evidence of a figure known along the Nile as the “chief of the
path.” His ritual status—what we would call his diplomatic immunity—was
symbolized by a spear or wand. Carrying it, he was inviolate. So too among
the people of the Gold Coast, ambassadors were known as mosior “bearers
of the stick of office.” The stick or wand, called in Yoruba an edan,had “an
almost sacred character, and it is an unheard of crime for an ambassador, fur-
nished with this emblem, to be molested.”
The African Roots of American Blacks 91