Nana Kwaku Bonsam Featured In NY Times: A Visit From the Devil
Popular Ghanaian fetish priest-Kwaku Bonsam who has been living in the United States for some months now has succeeded in obtaining a gimmick feature in NY Times…
Check out what NY Times had to say about Kwaku Bonsam;
A Visit From the Devil…Feared Traditional Priest From Ghana Spends a Year in the Bronx
When the radio D.J. Prince Adomako received a call in April from a man identifying himself as Nana Kwaku Bonsam, he hung up immediately, terrified.
The man kept calling back, first from the same line, then from a series of new numbers.
“I got really scared,” Mr. Adomako, 21, recalled recently. “Nana is a famous fetish priest in Ghana. I thought he might want to put a curse on me.”
His fear was understandable. Mr. Kwaku Bonsam is a major figure in his home country, a traditional priest loved and despised for his spiritual powers. And he revels in his notoriety. “Bonsam,” a name he gave himself, means “devil” in the Twi language.
But in New York this spring, the devil just wanted to buy an advertisement. And so after listening to his voice mail, Mr. Adomako, who immigrated from Ghana six years ago, invited him by the offices of ZenoRadio, the online start-up where he works.
In place of the Ghanaian smock and kufi hat worn by most traditional priests, Mr. Kwaku Bonsam, 39, arrived in a shiny black Dolce & Gabbana tracksuit and a knit cap with “New York” woven in graffiti-style letters. His face was a mask of scar tissue from a near-fatal accident in his youth.
He had come to the city last year to visit a friend from Guinea, he said. But he extended his stay after his facial injuries became infected, requiring a number of operations at Harlem Hospital Center. “I love New York,” Mr. Kwaku Bonsam said in his newly improved English. “But it is too cold here.” He was planning to leave in August, a year after he arrived.
Back in Ghana, he has 14 children (9 of them adopted) and a religious empire: a network of shrines, a free elementary school, houses, cars and a cattle farm. He regularly appeared on television talk shows and could rally crowds of thousands.
Renowned as a healer, Mr. Kwaku Bonsam claims to treat everything from curses to impotence. But he is best known for his ambitious efforts to modernize the indigenous West African religion dominant before Christian missionaries began arriving in great numbers in the mid-19th century.
So why was Ghana’s most feared fetish priest living inconspicuously in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx?
In West Africa, traditional priests — often called fetish priests — have historically preferred secrecy and seclusion, carrying out their ancient rituals inside mud huts in remote areas. And since 1992, when a democratic constitution was approved in Ghana, traditional religion has come under increasing attack from a new generation of Pentecostal pastors, who use television, radio and the Internet to deride its rituals as devil worship.
In a clever reversal, Mr. Kwaku Bonsam has adopted these same platforms to promote traditional religion. His outsize public persona and his cosmopolitan credentials make the case that the old spiritual practices are compatible with being a modern African.
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