Hogbetsotso Za — the festival of the exodus

Hogbetsotso Za is held on the first Saturday of November at Anloga, the customary and ritual capital of the Anlo state on Ghana's eastern coast. The festival commemorates the migration of the Anlo Ewe from Notsie, where, the tradition holds, they escaped the tyrant Torgbui Agokoli by weakening the city wall with waste water and walking out backwards in the dark so their tracks pointed inward. The weeks before the festival carry ritual preparation — a period of peace-making and the ceremonial cleansing of the state, including rites at the lagoon and the settling of disputes, so the community comes to the day reconciled. The festival proper centres on a grand durbar: the Awoamefia, the paramount chief of the Anlo, processes to the durbar ground borne in a palanquin under the talking of the atumpan drums, with the sub-chiefs in full regalia, and sits in state to receive homage. Agbadza, the Ewe war-dance turned celebration, is danced through the day, its drumming and the bent-forward, wing-beating movement instantly recognisable. The festival gathers the Anlo from across Ghana and the diaspora back to Anloga, renews the authority of the traditional state, and re-tells the founding story that binds a coastal people to a journey out of bondage. It is a homecoming and a re-enactment of survival as much as a celebration.