The Sunsum: The Soul Underneath the Soul

You are not one thing.

The Akan have always known this. Long before Western psychology proposed the unconscious and the ego and the complex layers of self, the Akan had a precise vocabulary for the different components that together constitute a person — and they understood that the components were not always in harmony, that misalignment between them was the condition that produced illness and bad fortune, and that healing required not just physical treatment but spiritual reconciliation.

You have a kra.

The kra is the divine spark placed in you by Nyame before your birth. It is the life-breath — literally, the breath that Nyame breathes into you at the moment of your first existence. It is what makes you alive rather than merely biological. It is what returns to Nyame when you die. The kra is your connection to the source, the thread between you and the sky god that persists through everything that happens to you in the world.

Because it comes from Nyame, the kra is the same in everyone: the divine substance does not vary. What differs is how much of it a person can hold, how clearly it can shine through the particular personality it has been placed in. A saint is a person whose kra is very visible. A monster is a person in whom the kra is very buried.

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You also have a sunsum.

The sunsum is different from the kra in nature and origin. Where the kra is a divine gift, the sunsum is an ancestral inheritance, passed through the paternal line — the sunsum of a man is the sunsum of his father, modified by his own character and experiences. It is the dynamic, personality-bearing part of the spiritual self: where the kra is light, the sunsum is character.

The sunsum is what can be hurt.

When someone speaks harshly to you, it is your sunsum that flinches. When you succeed at something difficult, it is your sunsum that swells. The sunsum is responsive to the world in a way the kra is not. The kra remains what it is regardless of what happens. The sunsum changes.

The sunsum is also what leaves the body during sleep and travels in dreams. Most dreams are the sunsum’s night journeys — visiting the sunsum of relatives, encountering the sunsum of the dead, exploring places the waking body cannot go. This is why the Akan take dreams seriously: they are reports from the sunsum’s actual travels, not symbols or neurological noise. When a dead relative appears in a dream and speaks, they are visiting in the spirit-mode that is their current existence.

A sick sunsum produces a sick body. The healer who diagnoses illness in the sunsum — through divination, through dream interpretation, through the patient’s own account of their inner state — and addresses the sunsum before addressing the body is working with the causal level rather than the symptom level.

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The mogya completes the person.

There is a third component that the Akan add to the spiritual self: mogya, blood, inherited through the maternal line. The mogya is the physical-spiritual medium of identity in the most concrete sense — you belong to your mother’s clan because you carry her blood, and her blood is the blood of her mother and her mother’s mother going back to the clan’s founding ancestor.

The mogya is what makes you Asante, or Fante, or Denkyira. It is the social identity that is simultaneously biological and spiritual. When you die, your kra returns to Nyame, your sunsum joins the ancestor world, and your mogya — your ancestral blood-identity — continues in your children and is what they will remember you as.

The full person is therefore: divine spark (kra) plus personal spirit (sunsum) plus ancestral blood-identity (mogya). Three components, each with a different source (sky god, paternal line, maternal line), each with a different destiny. The skill of Akan healing and spiritual practice is the management of the relationships among these three.

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The day of the week on which you were born names your kra.

Every Akan child is given a soul-name at birth based on the day they arrived: Monday’s child is Kojo (male) or Adwoa (female), Wednesday’s child is Kwaku or Akua, Sunday’s child is Kwasi or Akosua. These are not mere names. They are invocations of the specific quality of kra that Nyame distributes on each day of the week. A Sunday-born person has a Kwasi-kra, which has a specific character, specific strengths, specific vulnerabilities.

The Okyeame linguist who will feature in another story, the king whose stool fell from heaven — all of these persons are also kra-types, walking among the people with the quality of their divine breath visible to those trained to see it.

You are not one thing.

You are the sky’s gift, your father’s spirit, and your mother’s blood.

All three, all the time.

Walking through the world carrying more than most worlds know how to name.