Homowo: The Ga People's Festival of Triumph Over Famine

On a Saturday in August, the streets of Ga Mashie, the oldest quarter of Accra, transform. The Ga Mantse, paramount chief of the Ga state, emerges from his palace on horseback. Women carry enormous pots of "kpokpoi," a ritual food made from steamed, fermented corn dough mixed with palm oil and palm nut soup. And everywhere, throughout the narrow lanes of James Town, Ussher Town, Osu, La, Teshie, Nungua, and Tema, the sound of celebration: drums, songs, and the distinctive gesture of Homowo, the ritual sprinkling of kpokpoi on the ground, on doorsteps, at crossroads, and in the compounds of the living and the resting places of the dead. This is Homowo, the festival of "hooting at hunger," and for the Ga people it is the most sacred event in the calendar.

The origins of Homowo are embedded in the Ga migration narrative, one of the great founding stories of the peoples of the Gold Coast. According to oral traditions recorded by the historian Irene Quaye and the ethnographer Marion Kilson, the Ga-Dangme peoples migrated westward from somewhere in the region of present-day eastern Nigeria or Benin, possibly from the ancient city of Ile-Ife in Yorubaland, though this connection remains debated among scholars. Some traditions point to a more proximate origin in the Volta Region or even further east near Lake Chad. What the traditions consistently recall is a long and arduous journey during which the migrating Ga people suffered a terrible famine.