The Mawu and the mountains: some historical and cartographical notes

The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). Here I synthesize information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.

First some context. The Togo Plateau area was mapped in 1913 by German colonial official Grüner and was declared a forest reserve in 1931. In the notes accompanying his map Grüner provides interesting historical and geographical details that allow us to match to some still-transmitted oral traditions. On Grüner’s map, Akpafu is one of the six communities linked to the area. The map is titled “Karte des Sechsherrenstockes” or “map of the Sechsherrenstock”, the latter a term of Grüner’s own invention that uses the common German suffix -stock for mountain block or massif; so Sechsherrenstock literally means the “Six Peoples Massif”. ¹ Its subtitle mentions that the area was “formerly known as Kunja mountains” ². The most appropriate modern name for the area as a whole may be the Togo Plateau, as this is the official name of the forest reserve that was instituted in the area in 1931.

For around 150 years at least, the Mawu have been settled on a ridge overlooking the area (Akpafu) and in two towns at the feet of that ridge (Mempeasem and Odomi). They have in recent times also settled eastward in Sokpoo and Adokor. But prior to this, both oral traditions and written sources allow us to firmly place them in the mountains of the Togo Plateau. The people of Lolobi, a few kilometers to the southeast, also speak Siwu and likely share the same roots (Hinderling 1952). The name Akpafu is an exonym; the people call themselves the Mawu, their land Kawu, and their language Siwu.

When I wrote about the Grüner map a few years back, I mentioned the copious notes appended to it, which contain historical, ethographical, geological and botanical information. I am not aware of any discussion of these notes in the academic literature or online, so I’ll be quoting and translating some parts of it here for the benefit of audiences more comfortable with English than with German.

Site 1: Patoeto

Here’s the first thing Grüner writes about Akpafu in his notes accompanying the map. I will give my English translation and provide the original German in a footnote. Note that Grüner mixes up the name of the people (Mawu) and their language (Siwu), an error I have not corrected but marked with “[sic]”.

The Akpafu, who count about 1250 souls, call their land Kawu (Kefu in Buem) and their language Mawu [sic], and according to their neighbours came from the area of Akrofu south of Ho before they settled in the centre of the Sechsherrenstock mountains at Makoikpakpui. They themselves deny the journey from Akrofu and say that they have always lived in the mountains. ³

Grüner’s information seems comparable to what we later find in Hinderling (1952), who spoke to people in three Akpafu villages. It is quite possible that the Mawu have migrated in several stages, and the further we get back the murkier the traces get; but the most recent migration has been the one that brought them from being right in the centre of the Togo Plateau —where they likely had multiple settlements— to their current location overlooking it.

Grüner provides some interesting details on localities he was able to inspect. The first of these is the peak known in Alavanyo as Patoeto, which the map records Grüner as visiting in October 1911 (we can confirm this by cross-checking with other sources: the Akpafu mission chronicle by Ernst Bürgi records a visit by Grüner to Akpafu in the same month). Again my translation with the original German in a footnote.

Indeed, the 650m-high peak of Makoikpakpui, called Patoeto by the Lawanjo people, drops steeply on all sides like a fortress, and is covered for over a kilometer with dry-stone terraces. These terraces are completely similar to those still found in mountain villages today, for example Kebu-Djigbe on the Agu river, with its huts clinging to the mountainside. Today the terraces of Patoeto are covered with dense forest interspersed with individual oil palms. Neither the Egbi nor the Alavanyo know who built them. Since there are springs on the western slope of the mountain range, the village would have had no shortage of water either. ⁴

Grüner clearly observed copious remains of settlements. He compares them to those of “Kebu-Djigbe on the Agu river”, a sight from near Kpalimé (present-day Togo) he would have been familiar with (here’s a contemporary postcard). The more obvious comparison is of course with the town of Akpafu itself (present-day Akpafu-Todzi), which has exactly this kind of terraced layout. Here is what it looked like around 1900:

Site 2: Sotui

About six months later, in April 1912, Grüner traversed the area in a different way. About 3 km north of Patoeto he found another, even bigger site of evident historical and archaeological interest, centered around a peak known in Alavanyo as Sotui and in Santrokofi as Kotolifugi. The site is described by Grüner as follows:

Climbing the southern slope of the Sotui, one encounters, occasionally ascending slightly, the remains of an even bigger site on the grassy, rocky ridge at an altitude of 707m. 150m from the southern edge of Sotui, iron slag, millstones, and stone slabs with rows of holes of the same type today used for the adido game begin to appear, and further away remnants of walls. 80m from the starting point, at a slightly elevated place, we find a circle of stone seats with stone slabs for backrests. The remnants of walls become increasingly frequent to the north, and shortly before the end of the 300m long trackway, man-high terrace walls appear on the slope. ⁵

A number of things stand out about this site, which Grüner records as being part of a larger area called Makoikpakpui. There are human-made terrace walls; there is evidence of iron smelting in the form of iron slag; and remains of cultural institutions like a variant of a mancala game. But reading about the stone seats really made me sit up. I suddenly remembered something I was told in Kawu in 2010: that there is a site in “Kùbe” (the generic name for the Togo Plateau area used by people in Kawu) called ikpakpi where remains of old buildings can be found, and even a circle of stone seats signifying the formal seating of the elders in the public forum.

People telling me about ikpakpi in Mempeasem told me you’d have to go beyond the first mountain ridge and typically pointed to the southwest, a bit left of Ɔ̀kàlàsɛrɛrɛ (Klasereré on Grüner’s map, a steep cliff face easily visible from the main road).

At the time I recorded an interesting anecdote: you might try to bring a nice mill stone or slab home from a site like this, carrying it on your head — but if you tried to unload you’d find it would be stuck, and you’d have to walk all the way back. Why? Because the remains found there were still in use by the ancestors.

So here we have people aware of the site, and an oral tradition that directly links the remains to an ancestral population.

Remains of ironworking

Grüner’s description of the Sotui site shows that he found several remains of the famous iron industry of Akpafu:

Despite the haste with which I had to cross the area, I found an iron finger ring and a fragment of old pottery. The slag alone indicated that iron had once been smelted here. Digging had taken place nearby. 660 paces north of the edge of the former settlement lies an clearly artificially dug pit, 2.5 meters deep and 8 meters in diameter. In the center stands a mighty, ancient aussi tree. A few paces away lies a deep ditch of the same kind. Let me mention at this point that three similar pits, but filled with iron slag, are located on Mount Kalomepe on the southern edge of the range. Further searching will likely reveal more such pits. The entire settlement on Sotui extends for 700 meters. ⁶

The Kalomepe site Grüner mentions is labelled on the 1913 map “Kalemepé (Law.) / Plíabotá (Ku.)” and it is just a few kilometres north of Wudidi, at the very southern edge of the Togo Plateau.

Not far from Patoeto and Sotui, on a ridge a little more eastward, Grüner records a disused furnace near a place he labels “Kowalibiopo (Santr.)”. The furnace site is on a line labelled “Gruner, Okt. 11.”, the same line that continues to the Pátoeto site. Since this is in an area that at the time was mostly frequented by people from Santrokofi, and since both Santrokofi and Akpafu were known as smithing sites around the turn of the 19th century, it is possible that the furnace was connected to Santrokofi smelting operations.

The sites identified by Grüner have apparently gone overlooked by anyone interested in a more expansive history of the famed iron industry of the area. In 1916, British colonial official Rattray passed through the area but only reported on the iron industry and some mines along the main road through Santrokofi and Akpafu (the extreme right part of the map above). Similarly, half a century later, Darkoh 1964 has a map of “disused pits and ovens” in Akpafu-Santrokofi that focuses only on sites east of the same road.

I am not aware of any archaeological work in the area, published or unpublished. ⁷ There is a geological report from Robertson (1921) but he did not enter Togo Plateau area at all. Indeed the most striking feature of that report it is that for every single river and stream he reports it “gave no gold on panning”, showing the priorities of the British colonial regime.

On the scale of the iron industry

In a 1905 dictionary of Ewe, a language spoken South and South-West of the Togo Plateau, ethnographer and linguist Diedrich Westermann records the word Akpafumlá ‘a (curved) bush knife from Akpafu’. The word is one of the pieces of evidence that Akpafu ironware was a household name across a wide area.

Earlier evidence points in the same direction. In an 1882 journey to the North and North-East of what was then the German colony of Togoland, indigenous ethnographer and missionary David Asante notes that “Iron implements in use were from Apafo,” regretting that he could not go there himself. A few years later he managed to visit the area and wrote “We looked very much forward to come to Akpafu, which is famous for its ironwork and blacksmiths”. His account provides a firsthand view of a society that appears to revolve around the iron industry, with charcoal production along the roads, banks of furnaces for smelting just outside of town (close to the mines), and blacksmiths all across town. Some excerpts:

“Everywhere along the way we saw the charcoal that they use to melt the iron. … Soon after climbing the mountain and reaching the plain we saw the place where they melt the iron, which is a little away from the town. … They took us into a forge and showed us everything they make there. Their anvil is not made of iron, but it is a big quartzite stone that is attached to the ground, the upper side of which is polished. When they are forging, they don't remain in one place but they walk around the anvil. They make their own tools, like hammer, tongs, chisel and so on. … Because of the ironwork done here there are many forges in the town; when one sees their zeal in forging and ironsmelting, one has to wonder.”

Asante’s 1887 visit records a lot of activity and active iron mines. When German geologist Hupfeld visited a decade later, he recorded an industry in decline: blacksmiths increasingly used European imported iron, there were no active smelters in Santrokofi, and it was “hard to compete with cheap bush knives imported from Europe”. While later visitors still recorded a few active blacksmiths in Akpafu (e.g. Fisch, 1911; Rattray, 1916), the full-scale iron industry that had for perhaps more than two centuries made the name of the Akpafu was on its last legs.

Akpafu is, after Bassar, one of the best known sites of an indigenous iron industry in this part of West-Africa. In terms of productivity and efficiency, it outcompeted several other local industries (Pole 1982). It is quite striking then, that there has been so little historica, ethnographical and archaeological work in the area. I am publishing these notes to synthesize some of the available information and to make it easier to find.

The University of Ghana’s departement of Archaeology and Heritage Studies is the first Department of Archaeology in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Togo Plateau and the adjacent remnants of the formidable iron industry of Santrokofi and Akpafu would be a worthy goal for an expedition. Careful excavations are likely to surface much of interest, and research into oral traditions would likely round out the picture of which I have only sketched a few scattered strokes here. One can hope!

References

Asante, David. 1889. 'Eine Reise in Den Hinterländern von Togo, Beschrieben von Einem Christlichen Neger Und Aus Der Asante-Sprache Übersetzt von J. G. Christaller'. Geographische Gesellschaft Für Thüringen Zu Jena 7/8: 106–33.

Gruner, Hans. 1913. 'Begleitworte zur Karte des Sechsherrenstocks (Amandeto)'. Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten 26 (2): 127–58.

Hupfeld, Fr. 1899. 'Die Eisenindustrie in Togo'. Mittheilungen von Forschungsreisenden Und Gelehrten Aus Den Deutschen Schutzgebieten 12: 175–93.

Lilley, C. C. 1925. 'A Short History of the Nkonya Division in the Ho District'. Gold Coast Review 1 (2): 108–26.

Pole, Leonard M. 1982. 'Decline or Survival? Iron Production in West Africa from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries'. Journal of African History 23 (4): 503–13.

Rattray, R. S. 1916. 'The Iron Workers of Akpafu'. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 46 (December): 431–35.

1. A folk etymology found online that it has something to do with the sticks of community leaders meeting with Grüner is likely based on an all too literal translation[↩]
2. bisher Kunjagebirge genannt[↩]
3. Die Akpafu, die etwa 1250 Seelen zählen, nennen ihr Land Kawu (in Buem Kefu) und ihre Sprache Mawu, sollen nach Angabe ihrer Nachbarn aus der Gegend von Akrofu südlich von Ho gekommen sein und sich zuerst mitten im Sechsherrenstock auf dem Makoikpakpui niedergelassen haben. Sie selbst leugnen den Zug von Akrofu und behaupten, von alters her im Gebirge gewohnt zu haben.[↩]
4. In der Tat ist der von den Lawanjo Patoeto genannte 605 m hohe Gipfel des Mokoikpakpui, der nach allen Seiten wie eine Festung steil abfälflt, über 1 km weit mit Terrassen aus Trockenmauerwerk förmlich übersät. Sie gleichen völlig den noch heute in Bergdörfern, z. B. in Kebu-Djigbe am Agu, üblichen, auf denen die am Berghange klebenden Hütten errichtet sind. Heute sind die Terrassen des Patoeto mit dichtem Wald bestanden, zwischen dem einzelne Ölpalmen stehen. Weder die Egbi noch . die Lawanjo kannten ihren Erbauer. Da sich am Westabhange der Bergkette Quellen befinden, so hat es dem Dorf seinerzeit auch nicht an Wasser gefehlt.[↩]
5. Ersteigt man nun den Südabhang des Sotui, so trifft man, ab und zu noch etwas ansteigend, auf dem hier mit Gras bestandenen, völlig felsigen Rücken in einer Höhe von 707 m die Spüren einer noch größeren Ansiedelung. 150 m vom Südrande des Sotui entfernt beginnen Eisenschlacken, Mahlsteine, Steinplatten mit Löcherreihen derselben Art, wie sie heute für das Adidospiel gebraucht werden weiterhin auch Mauerreste. 80 m vom Beginn entfernt befindet sich an einer etwas erhabenen Stelle ein Kreis von Steinsitzen mit Steinen als Rückenlehnen. Die Mauerreste werden nach Norden zu immer häufiger, und kurz vor dem Ende des 300 m langen Spurenfeldes treten mannshohe Terrassenmauern an dem Abhange auf.[↩]
6. Trotz der Eile, mit der ich die Strecke durchqueren mußte, fand ich einen eisernen Fingerring und eine Topfscherbe alten Musters. Schon die Schlacken zeigten, daß einstmals hier Eisen geschmolzen wurde. Es wurde in der Nähe gegraben. 660 Schritt nördlich vom Rande der ehemaligen Ansiedelung liegt ein unverkennbar künstlich gegrabener Kessel von 2½ m Tiefe und 8 m Durchmesser. In der Mitte steht ein mächtiger, uralter Aussibaum. Wenige Schritte davon liegt ein tiefer Graben gleichen Ursprungs. Bei der Gelegenheit will ich bemerken, daß sich drei ähnliche, aber voll Eisenschlacken liegende Gruben auf dem Berge Kalomepe am Südrande des Gebirges befinden. Beim Suchen werden sich wahrscheinlich noch mehr solcher Gruben finden lassen. Die ganze Ansiedelung auf dem Sotui hat eine Länge von 700 m.[↩]
7. If there were any archaeological interest currently, it doesn’t help that the Makoikpakpui region coincides partly with the area where Alavanyo and Nkonya have a contested boundary (in recent years a curfew has been imposed in some of the communities around here.[↩]