Major Ellis then avers that when Europeans reached the Gold Coast, in the fifteenth century, they ‘appear to have found’ a Northern God, Tando, and a Southern God, Bobowissi, still adored.  Bobowissi makes thunder and rain, lives on a hill, and receives, or received, human sacrifices.  But, ’after an intercourse of some years with Europeans,’ the villagers near European forts ’added to their system a new deity, whom they termed Nana Nyankupon.  This was the God of the Christians, borrowed from them, and adapted under a new designation, meaning ‘Lord of the sky.’ (This is conjectural. Nyankum = rain. Nyansa has ’a later meaning, “craft."’)[28]

Now Major Ellis, later, has to contrast Bosman’s account of fetishism (1700) with his own observations.  According to Bosman’s native source of information, men then selected their own fetishes.  These are now selected by priests.  Bosman’s authority was wrong—­or priesthood has extended its field of business.  Major Ellis argues that the revolution from amateur to priestly selection of fetishes could not occur in 190 years, ’over a vast tract of country, amongst peoples living in semi-isolated communities, in the midst of pathless forests, where there is but little opportunity for the exchange of ideas, and where we know they have been uninfluenced by any higher race.’

Yet Major Ellis’s theory is that this isolated people were influenced by a higher race, to the extent of adopting a totally new Supreme Being, from Europeans, a being whom they in no way sought to propitiate, and who was of no practical use.  And this they did, he says, not under priestly influence, but in the face of priestly opposition.[29]

Major Ellis’s logic does not appear to be consistent.  In any case we ask for evidence how, in the ‘impenetrable forests’ did a new Supreme Deity become universally known?  Are we certain that travellers (unquoted) did not discover a deity with no priests, or ritual, or ’money in the concern,’ later than they discovered the blood-stained, conspicuous, lucrative Bobowissi?  Why was Nyankupon, the supposed new god of a new powerful set of strangers, left wholly unpropitiated?  The reverse was to be expected.

Major Ellis writes:  ’Almost certainly the addition of one more to an already numerous family’ of gods, ’was strenuously resisted by the priesthood,’ who, confessedly, are adding now lower gods every day!  Yet Nyankupon is universally known, in spite of priestly resistance.  Nyankupon, I presume = Anzambi, Anyambi, Nyambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, the Nzam of the Fans, ’and of all Bantu coast races, the creator of man, plants, animals, and the earth; he takes no further interest in the affair.’[30] The crowd of spirits take only too much interest; and, therefore, are the lucrative element in religion.

It is not very easy to believe that Nyam, under all his names, was picked up from the Portuguese, and passed apparently from negroes to Bantu all over West Africa, despite the isolation of the groups, and the resistance of the priesthood among tribes ‘uninfluenced by any higher race.’