The 1892 Eviction and a Christianising People

For generations before colonial contact, Krobo religious and political life was centred on Klo Mountain, a defensible highland stronghold in what is now Ghana's Eastern Region, held under Krobo chieftaincy and priesthood. In 1892 a dispute between Krobo authorities and the British colonial administration of the Gold Coast ended in a military expedition that drove the population off the mountain entirely and dispersed it into new towns on the surrounding plains, Odumase and Somanya prominent among them, which remain the community's main centres today. The eviction is remembered in Krobo historical memory as the community's central rupture, the loss of the physical ground its religious life had been tied to.

Christian mission work reached Krobo communities even before the eviction: the Basel Mission, a German Protestant society, was active in the area from the mid-nineteenth century, and its work continued under Presbyterian successors after Basel missionaries were expelled during the First World War. Conversion accelerated through the twentieth century until Presbyterian and other Christian affiliation became the norm for most Krobo people, a trajectory that ran alongside displacement rather than following from it directly. What survived through both changes is Dipo: Hugo Huber's fieldwork and Grace Adinku's more recent study both document the rite continuing as customary practice, observed by Christian and non-Christian Krobo families alike, in the resettled communities of today.