‹ Under the Baobab

Ewe

West Africa

The Ewe speak a Gbe language and live mainly in Ghana’s Volta Region, Togo, and Benin, tracing their history through a series of migrations that passed through the town of Notsie in what is now Togo. Their 17th-century escape from Notsie, fleeing the rule of King Agokoli, is still commemorated every year at the Hogbetsotso festival.

Did you know?

Ewe drumming ensembles are built around a lead drum and an iron double bell called the gankogui, which keeps the master time-line that every other instrument plays cross-rhythms against.

Proverbs (3)

You can hang an item from where you are seated, but when you want to get it down, you have to stand up.
Setting something up can be done comfortably, from a distance, without much effort at all. Actually retrieving the reward, this proverb points out, always demands a final, unavoidable act of effort: sitting still won't finish the job.
Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.
A baobab is too wide for any one pair of arms to reach around. This proverb argues that wisdom is built the same way: too vast for a single person to claim they've mastered, no matter how learned they are.
A fish is the last to acknowledge the existence of water.
A fish is surrounded by water constantly enough that it stops noticing it's there at all. This proverb warns that the things we're most immersed in are often the hardest for us to actually see clearly.

Names (4)

First names
Edem
An Ewe sentence name meaning "he/she has redeemed me".
Sedinam
An Ewe sentence name meaning "Providence has favored me".
Sefakor
An Ewe sentence name meaning "God has comforted me".
Selorm
An Ewe sentence name meaning "God loves me" or "divine love".
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