Akua Quotes

Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.

Akua rested her head against a rock, and did not speak until she heard the girls’ soft and sleepy breaths floating about her like tiny butterflies.

They were locked into either arm, head resting on either breast. Their cries were soundless, but Akua could see the sound, floating out of their mouths like puffs of smoke from the fetish man’s favored pipe. Akua had the urge to hold them, and she reached out her hands to them. Her hands caught fire, but she touched them still. Soon she cradled them with her own burning hands, playing with the braided ropes of fire that made up their hair, their coal-black lips. She felt calm, happy even, that the firewoman had found her children again at last. And

Your worth shouldn't be found in your ability to break your back, endure pain and wallow in stress

You are a sinner and a heathen," he said. Akua nodded. The teachers had told them this before. "Your mother had no husband when she came here to me, pregnant, begging for help. I helped her because that is what God would have wanted me to do. But she was a sinner and heathen, like you." Again Akua nodded. The fear was starting to settle somewhere in her stomach, making her feel nauseated. "All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.

It did not begin as obroni. It began as two words. Abro ni." "Wicked man?" Akua said. The fetish man nodded. "Among the Akan he is wicked man, the one who harms. Among the Ewe of the Southeast his name is Cunning Dog, the one who feigns niceness and then bites you".

When the islands were taken over, the princess, Ka’iulani, who had been tricked out of her kingdom cried out to Aloha Ke Akua.” The dots danced into the figure of a young woman, broken-hearted, sobbing on the floor beside her bed. “Aloha Ke Akua’s heart was torn apart by what he saw, so in one last act he touched the island of O’ahu.” The dots formed a giant hand and finger that touched the shape of the island. “And created Hunaia Awāwa. A sanctuary. The resting place of the resting place.

She had apparated out of nowhere, and just like that, his heart was spinning again, reeling off a course that had already sent it hurtling out in the wrong direction, and was “apparate” even a real word, or did J. K. Rowling just invent it and make him believe it was an acceptable thing to think?

Aloha,” Gray added, but it sounded way too forced, like when upper-middle class white people walk into a Mexican bakery and say, “Hola,” so he vowed to probably never say it again.

She looked familiar, and Akua wanted to ask her questions. She wanted to know if the firewoman knew the white man who had been burned. If everyone touched by fire was a part of the same world. If

By nightfall, Akua was afraid to speak. She crouched in the corner of the hut, praying to every god she had ever known. The Christian God whom the missionaries had always described in terms both angry and loving.

Akua didn’t respond. For nearly ten years, she had filled the Missionary’s hunger. Now she wanted to attend to her own.

Am I wicked?" the fetish man asked, and Akua didn't know how to answer. That first day she had met him, when he had given her the kola nut, the Missionary had come out and seen her with him. He had snatched her hand and pulled her away and told her not to talk to fetish men. They called him a fetish man because he was, because he had not given up praying to the ancestors or dancing or collecting plants and rocks and bones and blood with which to make his fetish offerings. He had not been baptized. She knew he was supposed to be wicked, that she would be in a sea of trouble if the missionaries knew she still went to see him, and yet she recognized that his kindness, his love, was different from the people's at the school. Warmer and truer somehow. "No, you're not wicked," she said. "You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua. The white man has earned his name here. Remember that.

Many chiefs of early Hawaiʻi believe they were descended directly from Kane himself and are of the Ulu or Nanaulu line. These chiefs ranked higher than other chiefs, who had a less distinguished family genealogy. Such prestige came with the power to dictate tapus and judge offenses. Sometimes their authority would even approach divine status, and they would hold sway over matters of life and death. They would otherwise be known as na liʻi kapu akua, or “chiefs with the tapus of gods.

The Maori legends say that ‘Io dwelt in the uppermost of 12 heavens and was served by angelic beings who also acted as messengers.10 Fornander said the Hawaiian legends relate that the triune God created three heavens, the earth to be their footstool (he ke‘ehina honua-a-Kane), and a host of angels or spirits (i kini akua) to minister to them.

Forty years later, after the death of Kamehameha the Great, Hewahewa, the highest kahuna in Hawai‘i and a direct descendant of Pa‘ao, became the first to set torch to a heiau and destroy it. When the old evil system was overthrown on the first kapu day announcing the coming Makahiki, Hewahewa, being the high priest, knew the Prince of Peace was on his way. Hewahewa knew the prophecy given by Kalaikuahulu a generation before. This prophecy said that a communication would be made from Heaven (the residence of Ke Akua Maoli, the God of the Hawaiians) by the real God. This communication would be entirely different from anything they had known. The prophecy also said that the kapus of the country would be overthrown.1 Hewahewa also knew the prophecy of the prophet Kapihe, who announced near the end of Kamehameha’s conquests, “The islands will be united, the kapu of the gods will be brought low, and those of the earth (the common people) will be raised up.” Kamehameha had already unified the islands, therefore, when the kapus were overthrown, Hewahewa knew a communication from God was imminent.2

You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua.

As Andrew Kimbrell has noted, “When scientists James Watson and Francis Crick first described the double helix of DNA in 1953 it was considered a historic ‘discovery,’ which has been called ‘the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century’ and ‘one of the epic discoveries in the history of scientific thought.’”4 From a critical Indigenous perspective, Watson and Crick were to genes what Columbus was to the Americas or Captain Cook was to Hawai‘i. Once Westerners discover and name a creation of akua, whether it be land or genes, they begin to utilize and develop it, and eventually they must devise ways to legally claim it as their own property.

The brother/sister unions treated in chant eleven must also be seen, at least in part, in a theological light. The child of a brother/sister union is a God, akua, because the Gods are a homogeneous set; there are no ‘exogamous’ unions among Them because there is nothing ‘outside’ Them, no ‘exterior’ to which They would bond Themselves. Chant eleven apparently concerns the emergence of this exteriority.