Homowo — hooting at hunger

Homowo unfolds over weeks across the Ga towns of Accra — Ga Mashie, Teshie, Nungua, La, Osu and others — each keeping its own timing under the Ga Mantse and its priests. It opens with the planting of the first crops and a period of ritual quiet: a ban on drumming and noise-making is imposed so as not to disturb the gods and the ripening fields, a prohibition the traditional authorities enforce. As the harvest comes in, the ban lifts and the celebration breaks out. The festival's signature act is the sprinkling of kpokpoi — a steamed, fermented cornmeal dish eaten with palm-nut soup — by the chiefs and elders through the streets and at family thresholds, fed to the ancestors and the gods in thanks and to bless the town. There are rites for twins and triplets, who hold a special place in Ga belief; processions of chiefs in palanquins; the noisy, joyful Ga drumming and kpanlogo dance; and the homecoming, when Ga families scattered across Ghana and the diaspora return to their home towns to eat kpokpoi together and remember the dead. The famine the festival recalls is folded into a wider thanksgiving for survival and harvest. Homowo is the Ga assertion of identity in a fast-growing capital, and a yearly knitting-together of family, town and ancestors that the spread of the city has not loosened.