The Hunter Who Found a Lake Where No Lake Should Be

The Hunter Who Found a Lake Where No Lake Should Be

A hunter called Akora Bompe was following a wounded antelope through the hills, and the antelope was going, and going, and then it was gone.

He came out of the trees and there was water — a great round sheet of it, held in a bowl of hills, where no river ran in and no river ran out. The antelope had walked into it and vanished.

Bosomtwe, he said. The god of the antelope. And the name stuck.

An enormous rock fell out of the sky about a million years before Akora Bompe was born and punched that hole in the earth, and the water that fills it comes only from rain. That is the geology. The Asante have never regarded it as the whole story.

The lake is an obosom. The dead of the Asante come here on their way to Asamando, and pass over the water, and so the water is not to be treated like other water. There is no motor allowed on it. There is, traditionally, no metal boat — fishermen go out lying flat on a padua, a single flat plank, and paddle it with their hands, because iron and engines offend the lake and the god does not accommodate you.

Sometimes the lake turns over. The deep water rises, the fish come to the surface dead in their thousands, and the villages take them. The scientists call it a limnic overturn, driven by oxygen and season.

The villages call it the god giving out food. Science names the same event a limnic overturn. At Bosomtwe, both explanations remain part of what the lake means.

If you visit Ghana. Lake Bosomtwe, 30 km southeast of Kumasi, in a crater a million years old.