Onyame

The creator and supreme god in the Akan tradition.

Onyame, also called Nyame or Onyankopɔn, is the creator and supreme god in the Akan tradition of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Another of his names, Odomankoma, speaks of him as the endless inventor of all things. He stands far above the world. A well-known Akan story tells how he once lived close to people, until a woman pounding fufu kept striking the sky with her pestle, and he withdrew to where he is now.

That distance shapes how he is honoured. Onyame has few temples and no priests of his own in the way the abosom do. People speak to him directly, and many older compounds had a Nyame Dua, a forked post holding a vessel of water, as his altar. At a libation he is called first, before Asase Yaa, the abosom and the ancestors. The Adinkra symbol Gye Nyame, except God, expresses his supremacy, and it is one of the most widely used symbols in Ghana.

Onyame gives every person at birth the ɔkra, the soul, together with nkrabea, the destiny that person carries. In that sense every life begins with him.

In dreams Onyame rarely appears as a figure. In Akan thought his will usually reaches people through the abosom and the ancestors, not face to face. Dreams of a vast clear sky, of light, or of rain after a long dry spell are sometimes felt as a sign of his blessing, but there is no fixed rule. A dream that seems to speak of God is, in the tradition, something to bring to an elder or an ɔkɔmfo rather than to settle alone.