Porporty
Anlo Ewe  ·  Bate Clan  ·  Est. 1670

Porporty

From Notsié to Anlo. From the lagoon to the world.

A house of the Bate royal clan of the Anlo Ewe — shaped by the lagoon country and carried from generation to generation, wherever its descendants have made their home.

Bɔ nu, Se nu, Wɔ nu

Be still · Listen · Act

Anloga · Volta Region · Ghana Scroll
I — The Motto A discipline, in three moves

Bɔ nu

Be still

Gather your mouth. Before anything else, stop speaking — the first discipline of the house is the one that costs the most.

Se nu

Listen

Hear it whole. The elder and the youngest, the one who speaks well and the one who cannot — silence is only useful if something enters it.

Wɔ nu

Act

Then move, and move once. Counsel that never becomes action is not wisdom — it is a comfortable way of doing nothing.

II — Origins Notsié → Anloga

They left a walled city and walked backwards into the future.

1670 The year the house
takes its reckoning from

Tradition holds that the Ewe fled Notsié, the walled city in what is now Togo, under the hard hand of its ruler Agɔkɔli. The women were sent nightly to pour water at one place on the wall until the clay softened; when it gave way, the people passed through and walked backwards, so that their footprints faced the city they were leaving.

Those who came furthest south settled the plain between the sea and the Keta lagoon. Anloga became their capital, and the paramountcy of the Anlo — the stool of the Awoamefia — came to rest between two royal clans, alternating between them. Bate is one of the two.

PORPORTY descends from that line. What we hold is not a title alone but an obligation: to the roll, to the lagoon, and to every generation that has to be told where it came from before it can decide where it is going.

See the ground it happened on
III — The Values

The motto is how we conduct ourselves. These three are what we are for.

I

Family

A house is not a building. It is the roll of names that answer when called — those at the lagoon, those in Lomé and Accra, those born far from Anloga who have never yet come home. We keep the roll whole.

II

Justice

A judgement that arrives before the listening is not judgement. It is force wearing a robe. The house sits, hears both sides out, and rules — and having ruled, does not quietly revise it for whoever is loudest afterwards.

III

Audacity

Our ancestors broke a wall by wetting it nightly, then walked out backwards so their footprints pointed home. Audacity is not noise. It is the patient, unreasonable act — done anyway, and done first.

A people who walk backwards are not retreating. They are making certain the way home stays readable.

IV — Crest

The Bee

Industry without applause. A single bee is small; the swarm is sovereign. It makes sweetness out of labour, defends the hive without hesitation, and keeps an order no one has to enforce.

the PORPORTY crest

Arms of the House · Bate

The Shield

What is carried in front, not behind. It marks a house that stands between its people and harm — and it is held, never mounted on a wall. A shield only means something while someone is still lifting it.

V — Denyigban 5.7956° N, 0.8972° E

A spit of sand, the sea on one side, the lagoon on the other.

Anloga sits on the narrow strip between the Atlantic and the Keta lagoon — a shallow, brackish water nearly fifty kilometres long. Salt, shallots and fish came out of it; so did the reason the Anlo stopped walking here.

Fig. i — Anloga, Keta & the lagoon Drag to move · pinch or use + to zoom

The route out, and the routes since.

One line runs from Notsié down to Anloga — the walk that made us Anlo. The others left within living memory: Kpalimé, Lomé, then Britain, France, Germany — and Canada twice over: Montréal, then Trois-Rivières. The pale lines are the ones we did not walk: houses joined to ours by marriage, in Tanzania, India and Haiti. A family grows sideways as well as forward.

Fig. ii — the exodus, the diaspora, the marriages Solid: the walk out Dotted: where the house lives now Dashed: joined by marriage
VI — The Clan Hlɔ · Bate · the junior royal house

Fifteen houses. Two of them may sit.

15 clans in Anlo
two of them royal
8–10 generations a clan reckons
back to its founding father

Every Anlo belongs to a hlɔ. There are fifteen of them, and a hlɔ is not a village or a household: it is the body of men and women who keep the same totems, hold the same taboos, serve the same clan gods, and trace themselves back through some eight to ten generations to one founding father. The line runs through the father — the tɔ-ƒome — in every clan but one.

The fifteen are not equal. Lafe is reckoned the eldest and makes the kings. Lafe and Amlade hold the priesthoods. And two clans — Adzovia and Bate — hold the paramount stool itself, which passes between them and nowhere else. Bate is the junior of the two. This house is Bate.

Read from outside the tradition the arrangement looks like a settlement between two populations. In Sandra Greene’s account the Bate are identified with the community already on this land when the Ewe-speakers arrived; the Adzovia are the newcomers. The clan system itself, she argues, is younger than the clans say — it took its present shape in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when refugees crowded the strip between sea and lagoon and access to farmland had to be regulated. Her window and the house’s own reckoning of 1670 are the same window.

The fifteen hlɔwo

  • Lafe

    Eldest · kingmakers

  • Amlade

    Hereditary priests

  • Adzovia

    Royal · senior

  • Bate

    Royal · junior · this house

  • Like

  • Bamee

  • Tovi

  • Klevi

  • Getsofe

  • Agave

  • Tsiame

  • Ame

  • Dzevi

  • Vifeme

    Traced through the mother

  • Blu

Why Bate sits at all.

In the flight from Notsié the stool itself was left behind — the Awoamezi, the seat the paramountcy sits on. Togbi Sri I asked his own sons to go back for it. They refused. His sister’s sons went instead: Adeladza and Atogolo, back into the city they had just broken out of. They brought it out.

Sri’s reward was not a gift but a rule: Adeladza would sit before Sri’s own children. Three and a half centuries later that rule is still the constitution of Anlo — the stool alternates between the descendants of Sri, who are Adzovia, and the descendants of Adeladza, who are Bate. No third clan has ever held it.

Adzovia

Senior

Togbi Sri II

1906 – 1956

Togbi Sri III

2011 –

Bate

Junior · this house

Togbi Adeladza II

1957 – 1997

Instituted Hogbetsotso Za in 1962. The festival at which all of Anlo retells the walk out of Notsié was founded under a Bate stool.

Fig. iii — the alternation, through the last century Between 1997 and 2011 the stool stood empty while the succession was disputed

One line. Four ways of writing its name.

Two family documents survive: a typed charter of the Anlo forebears out of Dogbo and Tado, and page twenty of a printed booklet on the paternal Bate clan. They were made independently, and they carry the same fingerprint — the same ancestor, and seven children in the same order. The charter adds an eighth the booklet does not have. Laid over each other they give the line below.

The house has carried its name in other forms too — Adagbra, Wotodjo — and those are set down here as well. Nothing else has been filled in to make the line look complete: where a document is silent, the diagram is silent.

Tier one — oral tradition, not record

  1. Dzoboku
  2. Kodisenu
  3. Kugborka Gbeof Ketu
  4. Gemedrraof Notsié
  5. Dotse
  6. Kpotsui
  7. Fui Avorkr

Tier two — the founder

Togbui Tsatsu Ayro Adeladza

Founder of the Bate clan. Reckoned to have flourished between about 1650 and 1690. The booklet’s title claims him for the paternal Bate line; whether he is Adeladza I, the man who went back to Notsié for the stool, is the question the stool records at Anloga would settle.

T · B

Tier three — the children, in the order both documents give them

  1. 01NukporgbuiT · B
  2. 02NukpornukuT · B Kluga→six sons⋯Agbotui→Victoria Agbotui→J. J. Rawlings The branch the booklet develops, and the one that can be checked outside the house. It runs down to Victoria Agbotui, born at Keta in 1919, and to her son Jerry John Rawlings, head of state and later elected president of Ghana. He is in the public record — which is what makes this part of the page testable against something that is not the page. He is not himself Bate: the clan runs through the father, and his was Scottish. Where Agbotui joins the six sons is not fixed on the page, so it is not fixed here.
  3. 03AyisaT · B
  4. 04AgordormatuT · B
  5. 05AkortsuiT · BAn echo, not an identification: the palace list carries an Akotsui I of Bate among the early holders of the stool.
  6. 06KporkportiT · B One name, four ways of writing itAdagbra·Wotodjo·Porporty Which man carried which form of the name, and when, is what is still being gathered from the elders at Anloga. The line runs; the roll of names inside it is still being written down.
  7. 07Adela AkoT · B
  8. 08AhordoetorT onlyIn the typed charter, absent from the booklet. Kept, and marked, rather than quietly dropped.
T — the typed charter B — the printed booklet Dashed — asserted, not evidenced
Fig. iv — the patriline, with its sources marked

Kporkporti, Adagbra, Wotodjo, Porporty — four ways of writing one name. Across three centuries the spelling moved with whoever was holding the pen. What was carried was never the spelling.

VI — continued Totems and taboos

A clan is known by what it will not do.

A hlɔ carries totems, and around each totem a prohibition. They are not decoration and they are not metaphor: they are the practical test of membership, observed daily, and they are what an elder asks about first. Bate keeps five, and the lists that record them note that Bate’s are reckoned among the most powerful in Anlo.

What follows is set down as it is given in the clan-and-totem lists circulated in Anlo. It is reported here, not prescribed.

Leopard

No part of it is to be destroyed, touched or handled. No one of the clan sits on its skin.

Hippopotamus

Held as a totem of the clan. The lists that spell out the other four record no separate prohibition for this one — so none is invented here.

Dog

A Bate is not to be licked by a dog. Anyone who is must kick it away — the act that turns aside what would otherwise follow.

Crab

Galadzeŋi is not eaten. Nor is a crab that has been put in the pot turned over, with its legs upward.

Raphia

It is not to be looked upon in the morning; whoever looks must lick it. It is never burnt as firewood. And at the end, the face of a Bate is covered with raphia leaves, specially woven.

The rule that is not a totem

The wife of a Bate man, while she is carrying, receives nothing from anyone across a fence.

What breaking them is said to cost

Rashes, or a loose tongue. For the gravest, the lists name a vɔ — a child born carrying the features of a python. The sanction is stated plainly, and it is stated as belief, which is how it is recorded.

The clan cults

Bate, and Fiazikpui. Each of the fifteen has its own; these two are the ones this house is called to.

VI — continued Sources, and what they disagree about

Four clocks, and they do not agree.

A house that dates itself owes the reader the working. Here is every clock we have, including the one that contradicts the others, and the reason we did not simply take the one with the oldest number on it.

  1. The palace list

    Adeladza I, 1504–1524

    The regnal list kept by the historian of the Awoamefia palace puts the first Bate holder in the early sixteenth century. It is the only source that gives a hard date, and it is the one we do not follow.

  2. The exodus

    The seventeenth century

    The walk out of Notsié, and the settling of the coast behind it, are placed in the seventeenth century by the tradition itself and by every historian who has written on it. A founder seated in 1504 would have been sitting before the journey that produced the state he sat over.

  3. The scholarship

    Late 1600s, early 1700s

    Working from European records rather than from the traditions, Sandra Greene dates the formation of the clan system itself to that window — the clans as we now have them being a way of regulating land under population pressure. This agrees with the exodus and not with the list.

  4. The booklet’s own count

    About 250 years — too few

    Counting generations down the page from the founder to a woman born in 1919 yields roughly two and a half centuries. That is short by one to three generations, and the shortfall sits precisely where the arrows on the page cross each other. The page telescopes; it does not lie.

So the house reckons from about 1670 — not because a document hands us that year, but because three of the four clocks land on it and the fourth cannot be made to fit the road out of Notsié.

Sources

Held in the house

  • ANLO (DOGBO & TADO) POMEAWO

    Typed charter of the forebears, undated. The source of the oral-tradition tier and of the eighth child.

  • Paternal Bate Clan

    Printed booklet, page twenty. The source of the developed second branch. Neither document is published; both are held by the family.

Published

Still open

  • The men between Kporkporti and the living house, one by one. The line runs and the name is continuous; the roll of who carried it is being taken from the elders at Anloga, and that work has a clock on it.
  • Whether the family’s Adeladza is Adeladza I himself. The booklet’s title implies it. The stool records at Anloga would settle it.
  • Six groups of siblings on page twenty whose attachment is drawn with crossing arrows and remains unresolved. Akorli Bamea is one of them. Nothing has been invented to close them.
  • On spelling: Ewe words and names are given in their plainest form, so that they survive any keyboard — the one Ewe letter this page does not print is written as a plain v. Where the two documents spell a name differently, both spellings are kept as evidence rather than corrected into one.
VII — Lineage
  1. c. 1600s

    The wall at Notsié

    The Ewe leave the walled city and scatter west and south. One column, led by Torgbui Wenya and his kin, presses on to the coast.

  2. Anloga

    The settling of the plain

    The Anlo state takes shape between the sea and the lagoon. Its clans are constituted, and the stool of the Awoamefia is seated at Anloga.

  3. 1670

    PORPORTY is founded

    The house takes its name and its charge within the Bate clan. From here the roll is kept — every branch, every departure, every return.

  4. 1962

    Hogbetsotso Za

    The festival of the exodus is instituted at Anloga. Each November the clans gather, the durbar is held, and the walk out of Notsié is told again.

  5. Today

    Three and a half centuries on

    The house sits in Anloga and Lomé, in Kpalimé, in Britain, France and Germany, in Montréal and Trois-Rivières — and by marriage in Tanzania, India and Haiti. The lagoon has not moved. Neither has the obligation.