Dmitry Pruss wrote me in regard to the perplexing etymologies of Ghanaian royal titles:
“Zosimli Naa” is a title bestowed on outsiders who play such an honorary role in Ghanaian societies that the local tribal hierarchy steps in to elevate them to chiefs aka royals.
Traditionally “Zosimli Naa” were American educators in African studies programs. Dr. George Lee Johnson Jr., the acting chair of South Carolina State University’s Department of Education, is Zosimli Naa of Madina, and earlier on, Dr. Susan J. Herlin (University of Louisville) was Zosimli Naa of Tamale. After her death, Tamale enskinned (the North Ghanaian equivalent of anointing done with precious skins rather than myrrh) a travel agent from Detroit who runs a popular immersion-in-ancestral-West-Africa travel program (since her story involved DNA testing in search of ancestral African cultures, it came up in my feed). This lady, Kennedy Johnson, actually lives in her royal mansion in Tamale now!
But what is Zosimli Naa?
One source says that it means “Born on Saturday” but metaphorically, “one who brings people together” (presumably American and Ghanaian peoples). Another says that it means “Friendship Queen” but by extension, head of department of development. And Wikipedia says that Naa translates as King or Chief while Zosimli means: Cooperation, Alliance, Accord, Collaboration and Friendships, with the whole title meaning liaison for foreign cooperation (they apparently have separate chiefs for America and Europe).
Dmitry and I await Hattic enlightenment!
Easy: Dagbani zɔsimdi “friendship” and naa “chief.”
It’s an age-old title to honour visiting Americans. (It’s not any sort of royal title, of course.) “Enskinning” is the northern Ghanaian equivalent of Akan “enstooling”: enthroning, basically. No anointing is involved.
It’s a pleasant change to see a generic “Ghanaian” used to mean something other than “Akan”, at least. Baby steps …
I don’t know enough Dagbani to know if zɔsimdi has quite the same nuance as the Kusaal equivalent zuosim, which is “befriending”, from the derived verb zuos “make a friend of”; “friend” itself is Dagbani zo, Kusaal zua. “Friendship” in Kusaal is zuod, from the same root as “friend” but with a different class suffix.
I had a feeling you’d know; thanks for that satisfying response!
Compare Kwame and its variants, of course.
Ah, so the South Carolina story might have conflated two of Dr. Johnson’s distinctions – being born on a special day AND being a foreign dignitary in Northern Ghana?
Now it starts to make sense… and it’s great to know a community of people for whom it takes mere seconds to unravel it!
The “born on Saturday” stuff was presumably just made up by the journalist, who perhaps had some confused memory that Akan personal names are based on the day of the week you were born on and reckoned that this would explain any random Ghanaian name or title, because Africa is all one single culture, apparently.
The journo also evidently doesn’t know that it’s called “enskinning” because northern cbiefs er, do in fact sit on animal skins as a sign of their office. Hence the waffle about “presentation of specific animal skins.” Who knows, maybe they did do that, given that this is nothing to do with actual chieftainship.
Ghanaians are very good at managing well-meaning foreign workers in positions of authority: I can vouch for this personally (it took me a while before I quite understood that this was happening.) And good luck to them, too!
>It’s not any sort of royal title, of course.
I believe you, but the Zosimli Naa of Tamale (and Louisville, KY) seems to think differently:
“I am Her Royal Majesty Zosimli Naa II Ife Bell Tipagya of the Dagbon Kingdom in Northern Ghana, with my palace in the cities of Tamale and Louisville, KY.”
It also looks a good functional translation into American English would be Sister Cities Coordinator.
> just made up by the journalist, who perhaps had some confused memory that Akan personal names are based on the day of the week you were born on and reckoned that this would explain any random Ghanaian name or title
I very much doubt this particular bit of anti-journalist prejudice is accurate. It would an utterly random insertion, since there’s no one named Kwame and not even anyone with an African name to be explained. There’s nothing about the article that looks like the writer is bringing outside information into it. I’d bet the subject of the story offered this tidbit. Whether he mentioned knowing someone named Kwame, and the journalist crossed that up, or whether he himself somehow got that confused is impossible to know.
I’m curious how a Zosimli Naa living in Orangeburg, South Carolina would sit on a skin if he wasn’t given it. Did the bestower of the title come to Orangeburg and install the skin seat?
The Dakpema of Tamale, who is stated to have carried out this enskinning, is actually not a chief but a tindana, a title usually rendered “earth-priest”, Kusaal tendaan. Tendaannam are the traditional “owners” of the land, dating from the period before the Mamprussi conquered the region and created chieftaincies. AFAIK they have no authority to create chiefs of any sort, though I must admit I am hardly up to speed on Dagomba politics. Perhaps the Tamale tindana has been coopted.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41406735
(In the traditional chiefly scheme of things, Tamale is actually a pretty no-account place. It owed its bigging up by the Brits to the fact that at the critical time, Yendi, the seat of the actual Dagomba king, was in German Togoland.)
Whoever conducted the ceremony, she states that her authority derives from the Yaa-Naa, “the reigning King of the Dagbon people”
>Created by the Yaa-Naa over 30 years ago and first appointed to my predecessor, Dr. Susan Herlin of Louisville, KY, the title was created to strengthen the bond between Tamale and Louisville as Sister Cities.
She asserts that the Dagbon system of chieftainship consists of 5 levels, the first four of which would seem to be princes of the blood, and the fifth, in which hers falls, “made up of court elders, each responsible for specific tasks.”
She also says shes “an authentic storyteller with a kaleidoscope of lived experiences”, so who knows. Maybe it’s all just a story.
The home page of her website says her office has an annual budget of $5 million. I wonder whether that’s coming from the Ghanaian government, the king’s budget or fundraising. It’s not clear from the website what it’s spent on, though the costs of pursuing her doctorate in order to amplify her influence as a global thought leader may be part of it.
The Dagomba are in no way the second largest ethnic group in Africa or even remotely close. The Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms do not date back to the eleventh century. Tamale was a mere village before 1908. This is fantasy-Africa, as beloved by Americans. It is a pleasant change to see the fantasy applied to Dagbon rather than Ashanti for once, though.
If you believe wikipedia, His Majesty Bukali II, present king of Dagbon or perhaps Dagbɔŋ, “was ordained by the kingmakers of Dagbon as the 41st Yaa Naa on January 18, 2019, following a chieftaincy dispute that left the Yendi skins vacant for 16 years.” He was enskinned, if that’s the right word, in the traditional capital of Yendi rather than the arriviste/social-climbing Tamale.
Incidentally, though one of these sources says that the place name “Tamale” is of unknown origin, it is said locally to be from tama yili “house of shea nuts” (= Kusaal ta’ama yir.) Seems fairly plausible, at any rate.
@JWB:
Yup, “enskinned” is right. Yendi is indeed the only place where a Ya Na can be enskinned. Dagbɔŋ is the Dagbani word, but the Dagomba kingdom is usually called Dagbon in English.
BTW, the Ya Na is (in principle) subordinate to the Nayiri, the Mamprussi king in Nalerigu, as is the Moro Naba, king of the Mossi. The Nayiri is the heir of Gbewa, founder of the Mamrussi kingdom of which the Mossi and Dagomba are cadet branches. The original capital was Pusiga, in Kusaasi territory, but had to be located after the Kusaasi and Bisa ungratefully successfully rebelled against their new overlords.
I hadn’t realised before that there has been a very long-standing power struggle in Tamale between the actual chief and the tindana, apparently going all the way back to British misunderstanding of what the traditional pre-colonial power structure actually was, when they came to set up their beloved “indirect rule” system.
https://www.myjoyonline.com/dakpema-palace-shooting-traditional-council-must-resolve-dispute-regional-minister/
The Brits screwed up similarly in Bawku, with results that have led to decades of intermittent conflict, exacerbated by post-independence politicians favouring one side or the other. In Bawku it’s worse; because the tendaan is Kusaasi (the only possible choice) and the chiefs were traditionally Mamprussi, though more recently this has been finessed by political marriages with tendaan families. Presumably in Tamale all parties at least regard themselves as Dagomba.
It does make you wonder (I hope, baselessly) whether there might be more going on with a tindana appointing a “chief” than is immediately apparent. It doesn’t strike me as a situation where it would be unproblematic for foreigners to be going round claiming to be traditional chiefs, no matter how sincerely they believe it and how much one side encourages them to do so.
Hopefully, the locals are not in fact taking this quite as seriously as the Americans suppose …