Gold Coast Crops and Palm Wine
Tales relating the invention of palm wine by the people of the Gold Coast.
Location: Ghana
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
As the soil all over the Gold Coast, even to the very sea-shore, is so wonderfully fertile, the productions obtained by means of these rude implements, twice in the year and with little exertion, richly compensated the farmer. The virgin soil moreover produced an abundance of trees with edible fruit, such as the fan-palm and date-palm, and several kinds of berries called by the natives: noko, kofu, amugui, anyenyeli, awongme (ofe), amuma, aflangme, angmada, gowa etc., upon which they subsisted during the greater part of the year. The fruit of the fan-palm furnished the principal food in those days, and was thus prepared. When gathered home, they are first roasted on fire, and the peels are stripped off, the edible part is mixed with a bit of native flour prepared of roasted corn and forms a favourite article of food. Some of the berries, especially angmada, undergo a process of brewing, and a beverage which served as liquor was obtained. The process of brewing corn and water into a kind of beer is called "nmada" i.e. corn-beverage.
The wine extracted from the fan-palm they called "adoka", that from the date-palm "akudono", of the oil-palm "teda (teida)", in Tshi "nsafufu". The origin of palm-wine is traditionally thus reported by the Western Echo (a local weekly paper edited at Cape Coast by Prince Brew of Dunkwa).
''When the Fantes were on their way from Takiman to the coast, their king had a celebrated hunter called Ansa, who used to. go a hunting for him. As the Fantes had to encounter the former inhabitants of the land who opposed their settling amongst them, the king had Ansa to head the scouts whom he had to send from time to time. Ansa had a dog which accompanied him in hunting and scouting excursions.
"It happened that in one of his hunting excursions, he found a palm-tree which had been thrown down by an elephant, and a hole made in the trunk of the tree by his foot. It seems that the sagacious animal had long known the secret of tapping the palm-tree, and had long enjoyed the delicious though intoxicating sap that it yielded. The hunter, perceiving some sap oozing freely from the orifice made by the elephant, was half inclined to taste but fearing it might be poisonous gave some to his dog, who seemed to relish it greatly. Finding that his dog took a liking to this new liquor, he in the morning drank so freely of the sap of the palmtree, that he got fairly intoxicated. He lay in a state of stupor for the whole day, in so much that the king and people wondered what had become of him, and gave him up for lost.
"When he was sufficiently recovered, he soon learned how to tap the tree and succeeded in getting one pot of palm-wine from the tree, which he took to the king. Ansa, before presenting the wine to the king, tasted of the wine first, as customary, to show that it was not poisonous.
''The king, having tasted of the wine, enjoyed it so much that he would not allow anyone to partake of it besides himself; the consequence was, he got so drunk, that he did not recover from its effects till the next morning. The people, finding their king in such a helpless condition, thought he was poisoned. They immediately searched for the hunter, whom they (without asking him any questions) despatched, supposing that, as he was so celebrated and held such a high position among the people, that he wanted to poison the king and reign in his stead. As soon as the king was sufficiently recovered from the effects of the wine, the first thing he did was to call out "Ansa!" Having heard that Ansa was killed by some of his men in their mistaken zeal, he ordered those men to be decapitated. Ever since, the sap of the palm-tree received the name of Ansa which is corrupted to Nsa.'"
Another account of the origin of palm-wine says that one chief Akoro Firampong of Abadwirera, a town in Adanse, had a hunter, Werempim Ampong, whose dog accompanied him to his farm, where he found a number of palm-trees thrown down by elephants, some of them split in two, and the sap oozing freely from the surface of the trees thus divided. His dog, on seeing the sap, licked some of it, became intoxicated and wild, and lay in a state of stupor for the whole day. The next day, Werempim Ampong went to the spot, made a hole in one of the trees, and having placed some broad leaf in the hole to receive the wine, he drank the same. The consequence was that he too got drunk, and then reported it to the chief Akoro Firampong. On the third day the chief accompanied the hunter, drank, freely of the new liquor, and became drunk. On his recovery, he invited his friend Anti Kyei of Akorokyere to the spot, and both enjoyed the wine so freely, that Anti Kyei died of it. A great alarm was made that the friends of the deceased resorted to arms to take revenge, upon which Akoro Pirarapong, to put a stop to much bloodshed, offered to kill himself. But before he committed the suicide, he ordered the drummer of his kettledrum to beat the following. which has become the general beating- of kettledrums:
Werempim Ampong, wudi nsa mu akotene,
Akoro Firampong, dammirifua, due, due!
Anti Kyei, Firampong, dammirifua gyegyegye.
Many years afterwards, when rum was introduced in the country by the captain of some trading vessel, Mmoro, a brother of Kwagya, the principal fisherman of Mowure, was employed as a servant to the captain. It was through his means the captain effected the sale of the new liquor, and in contradistinction to palm-wine it was called Mmoro-nsa or "mmorosil", that is, Mmoro's liquor.
The principal vegetables and plants cultivated by the former inhabitants, and upon which they subsisted, were: yams, batatas, cassada, maize, ngma (a kind of wheat very small and somewhat black), rice, and different kinds of beans. There seem to have been other kinds of roots used by them besides these, which are no more known to us, being out of use on account of not being brought to perfection by cultivation. Even the use of cassada was almost given up on account of its being narcotic. As traditionally reported, their fetish Sakumo promised to pass its urine on the root, so as to remove that power from it, which he did, and so it became good. We could hardly have convinced them at that time that it was not their fetish, but the constant and careful cultivation that brought the root to its present state. The narcotic substance in the cassada in its primitive stage is still with that root in the Bights, Gaboon, and such places. Amanfi and Asabu were the chief cultivators of the soil. They were giants who paid more attention to it.
The establishment of Europeans on the coast gave impetus to cultivation, and foreign plants, grains and fruit-trees were introduced into the country. The Portuguese did not confine themselves to their garrisons or trading factories, but formed considerable colonies on the coast. They attempted to instruct the natives in the better cultivation of their soil etc. They introduced different kinds of millet and corn, plantain and banana, orange and apple, etc. Although there is a tradition that plantain and banana were indigenous to the country, and that Dompim in Akem was the place where plantain and banana were found out. Defining the word ''abrode", which is the Tshi name for plantain, we say "Abro ode'' i.e. Abro's yam, as we find with the introduction of rum. It appears there were indigenous plantain and banana in the country before the arrival of Europeans, who may have also brought some other kinds of the same plant, and one Abro was the one who obtained some suckers from the European who first brought it.)
The following seems, however, the true tradition of how the plantain is said to have been discovered.
A hunter at Dompim in Akem, feeling the cravings of hunger in one of his hunting excursions, happened to discover ripe fruits on the plantain trees, then called “ahabaiitetredwa”, i.e. broad-leaved tree. Hungry as he was, he tasted one of the ripe fruits, and then ate one or two of them. He brought home a bunch of the ripe ones and another bunch of the green ones, showed them to his fellow-hunters and his wife, and told them how delicious its taste was. The green ones were roasted on fire and very good to eat. He went out for more another time, which was no more roasted, but boiled in water and prepared into mpesi (mashed food), as they do with yam, hence the name ''oboode”, which means, yam substitute, or more plain, ''obeboa-ode'', i.e. coming to assist yam, now corrupted into 'oborode"'.
After the Portuguese the Danish colonists, such as Meyer, Schonning, Truelsen, Gronberg, Balck, etc. trod in their footsteps. Their chief object was not only to instruct the natives in the better cultivation of the soil, but to improve cultivation so far as to supply European markets with produce from Africa like that obtained from the West Indies. After the abolition of the slave-trade, the Danish Government encouraged the cultivation of the vegetable productions gained in the West Indies. Plantations of coffee, cotton, etc. were made on the Kuku and Legong hills. Further on they bought several lands from the Akuapenis and founded their own villages: Sesemi, Bebiase, Kponkpo, Abokobi, Akropong, Togbloku, etc. Besides coffee they introduced several vegetables unknown to the natives.
After the Danes, the Basel Mission stepped in to improve the natives in the cultivation of the soil, first by European lay missionaries sent out for that purpose. For the same object, partly to show the natives that there are christian negroes who cultivate lands, 24 members of the Moravian Congregation in Jamaica were brought to Akropong in 1843 at the expense of the Committee in Basel. Those emigrants also brought the coco (mankani) and the mango, mountain-pear, bread-nut, etc. into the country. The coco has proved since a valuable boon to the country against famine. The Rev. T. B. Freemann of the Wesleyan mission also did his best to improve the country by cultivation, having made beautiful gardens.
Carl Christian Reindorf, History of the Gold Coast and Asante (Cape Coast: The Gold Coast District Book Depot, 1895).
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