Adze

The Ewe word for witch is adzetɔ. The suffix -tɔ means “one who has” or “owner of.” An adzetɔ is a person who has an adze. The creature and the witch are not separate beings. They are the same thing in two forms.

This is the detail that Western monster encyclopedias tend to miss. They list the Adze as a type of vampire, a creature of its own kind that happens to look like a firefly. In Ewe understanding, the adze is the witch’s spiritual substance, the power that leaves the body at night to feed while the person sleeps. Jakob Spieth, a Bremen Mission missionary who documented Ewe religion in Die Ewe-Stämme (1906) and Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-Togo (1911), recorded this belief in its own terms. The creature is not a species. It is a condition.

The Firefly

In its feeding form, the adze appears as a glowing insect, indistinguishable from the fireflies that are common across the Volta Region of Ghana and the coastal areas of Togo. It flies at night. It finds a house. It enters through the keyhole, through the crack under the door, through any gap in the window shutter. The insect form is small enough to pass through any opening.

It feeds on sleeping victims, and it targets children. It drinks blood. It also consumes coconut water and palm oil, connecting it to valued foodstuffs in the Ewe economy. Victims, especially children, fall ill: fever, wasting sickness, failure to thrive. Repeated attacks lead to death.

The terror of the adze is the terror of indistinguishability. You cannot tell an adze from a regular firefly. Any luminous insect near a sick child’s house could be the one. The belief creates suspicion around every point of light in the dark, and that suspicion is the mechanism through which the belief maintains its social power.

The Transformation

If you catch the firefly, it transforms.

The adze becomes a human being. That person stands revealed as a witch. They look like an ordinary person. No fangs, no red eyes, no distinguishing features. The witch could be a neighbor, an aunt, a co-wife, anyone in the community. The transformation is the moment of accusation made physical: the instant the firefly becomes a person, the accusation becomes irrevocable.

The social dynamics follow the same pattern documented across West African witchcraft beliefs. The accused are often marginal: elderly women, people with grudges, those who stand to benefit from a rival’s misfortune. The firefly provides the mechanism, but the accusation follows fault lines that already exist in the community. Birgit Meyer, in Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (1999), documented how these beliefs persisted through and were reshaped by over a century of Christian missionary activity. The German Pietist missionaries of the Bremen Mission categorized Ewe spirits as demonic, which did not eliminate the beliefs but gave them a new theological vocabulary.

The Involuntary Witch

In some Ewe traditions, a person can harbor the adze without knowing it. The witchcraft substance is inherited, often matrilineally, or acquired without consent. The adze leaves the host’s body while they sleep, feeds on the neighbors’ children, and returns before dawn. The host wakes with no memory of what their adze did in the night.

This involuntary witch is the most troubling figure in the system. A person held responsible for harm they did not intend, did not choose, and do not remember. The community’s response, accusation, ordeal, expulsion, or worse, falls on someone who may be as much a victim of the adze as the children it feeds on. The pattern mirrors what Evans-Pritchard documented among the Azande and what anthropologists have recorded across the continent: witchcraft as an inherent, sometimes unconscious capacity for harm that operates below the level of conscious will.

The distinction between voluntary and involuntary witchcraft matters for how communities respond. A deliberate witch is a criminal. An involuntary witch is a problem that requires a different kind of solution: cleansing, separation, spiritual intervention. But in practice, as Philip Gibbs documented for the parallel situation in Papua New Guinea with the Sanguma, the distinction often collapses under the pressure of grief and fear. When a child is dying, the community wants someone to blame, and the question of whether the accused meant to harm is secondary to the fact that harm occurred.

The Neighbors

The Adze sits within a constellation of related creatures across West Africa and its diaspora.

The Akan Obayifo, documented in neighboring Ashanti territory, is a living witch who leaves the body at night as a ball of light to feed on victims, especially children. The glowing-light-at-night motif is shared with the adze, and the Akan and Ewe have centuries of cultural exchange. The Sasabonsam is an Akan forest vampire of a different kind: a physical creature that hooks victims from trees, operating in the wild rather than infiltrating the home.

The Roman Strix is a night bird, sometimes described as glowing, that enters homes and feeds on infants. The functional parallel with the adze is direct: a flying, luminous, shapeshifting predator that targets children in their beds. Ovid described the strix in the Fasti two thousand years ago. The pattern of the nocturnal infiltrator that feeds on sleeping children appears across cultures that had no contact with each other.

In the Caribbean, the Soucouyant of Trinidad, Dominica, and Guadeloupe is an old woman who sheds her skin at night, becomes a ball of fire, enters homes through keyholes, and sucks blood. The parallels with the adze are striking enough to suggest a historical connection: shapeshifting, luminous form, keyhole entry, blood-drinking. Given the West African origins of Caribbean populations, the Soucouyant may descend from Ewe or related Gbe-speaking peoples’ beliefs carried across the Atlantic during the slave trade.

What Survives

The adze belief remains active in Ewe communities in the Volta Region of Ghana and in southern Togo. Witchcraft continues to provide an explanatory framework for unexplained illness and death, particularly of children. Accusations carry real consequences.

Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, growing rapidly across Ghana, have incorporated adze beliefs into Christian demonology. Meyer documented this process in detail: “deliverance” sessions targeting witchcraft spirits became a modern form of anti-adze practice. The adze was reinterpreted as a demon that could be cast out through prayer and spiritual warfare. The churches did not eliminate the belief. They baptized it.

The fireflies still glow in the Volta Region after dark. Some of them are insects. The belief that some of them are not has survived German missionaries, British colonial administrators, Ghanaian independence, and the arrival of Pentecostalism. It has survived because it answers a question that no other framework answers as effectively for the communities that hold it: why do children get sick and die when no visible cause can be found?

The answer the adze provides is terrible. But it is an answer.