Lobi tribe

The main goal of my ghana trip was to see people of the Lobi tribe, get a taste of their culture and the way they live their life. After several attempts to get to Lobi villages I finally found a young man, who was willing to take me back in time - to a remote Lobi village.
The Lobi are well documented for their animist beliefs. The worshipping of spirit ancestors and fetishes is distinct in Lobi culture and fetish houses outside their mud compounds are daily practices. Christian missionaries working in southern Burkina Faso reported that an elderly man in a Lobi village renounced the spirits in favor of Christianity by discarding his fetishes in a nearby lake. As he turned his back on the traditions, the fetishes leapt out of the lake onto his back again to reclaim him.
In Lobi animism, Thagba is the creator of all living things. They have little contact with Thagba, but are dependent on nature spirits known as thila, invisible intermediaries which can harness their supernatural powers towards good or evil. They set rules zosar which dictate how a lobi should behave in all aspects of life, but similar to Greek or Roman gods the thila themselves are subject to mortal virtues and vices. In Lobi society there is often a village diviner, a thildar which acts as a village priest in interpreting the rules of the spirits. A particularly intuitive and receptive thildar is capable of interpreting as many as 50 spirits at a time.
Villages typically several priests, often individuals which specialize in the interpretation of singular spirits rather than multiple in the way that a chief thildar may.

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