The 1950s Gold Coast accounts of Sasabonsam

Record summary

Sasabonsam is an Akan forest being associated in ethnographic and oral accounts with danger, illness, hunting and attacks on people entering particular wooded places. Postwar Gold Coast documentation and folklore writing preserved accounts of the figure while Christianity, colonial administration and changing land use altered how such traditions were discussed. This lead may help compare place-bound forest beings with later cryptid classifications. It is a traditional and religious category, not evidence of a zoological creature, and individual stories may have circulated orally long before being recorded in the target period.