Around the world people celebrate the great transitions of human life and passages within the lunar year with ritual. Through these rituals the deepest values of a community are variously revealed and affirmed. For the Ga people of West Africa, such a patterning of revelation and affirmation is exemplified by the harvest festival of Homowo.

The Ga people constitute a small group within the modern nation state of Ghana, numbering 235,210 in the 1960 Census or about 3.5% of the total population. Their homeland on the Accra Plains in southeast Ghana extends along the Atlantic coast for about forty miles between Laloi Lagoon and the Densu River and is bounded by the Akwapim scarp on the north. The Ga heartland for three centuries has been a series of coastal towns, each with its dependent villages and hamlets. These towns -- Accra, Osu, Labadi, Teshi, Nungua, and Tema -- are welded into a loose confederacy under the Ga king (Ga mangtse).

Each year the Ga gather in these coastal towns to observe Homowo, the quintessential Ga harvest ritual. Any Ga person who fails to celebrate Homowo will incur the wrath of ancestral shades and die -- according to traditional belief, adhered to to this day by some. Few Ga, whatever their socioeconomic status, fail to observe this annual ritual.

Contemporary Ga participate in diverse ritual systems, some deriving from African traditions, while others are based on the world religions of Christianity and Islam. Although the ritual systems are distinct from one another, their memberships overlap, as individuals seek to satisfy different psychological and social needs. People, for example, may attend a Christian church on Sundays and participate in traditional Ga religious ritual when they are ill.

The traditional ritual systems of the Ga are varied and diverse, reflecting the multi-ethnic sources of Ga culture, developed through lengthy interaction with neighboring African traditions. Ga observe three major sets of traditional agricultural rites, each involving the cultivation of a different crop and each linking human beings to different categories of spirit. The ritual cultivation of millet (ngmaa) is associated with kpele gods, the cultivation of maize (able) with ancestral shades, and the cultivation of yam (yele) with otu gods, chiefs' thrones (stools), talking drums, and twins. Ga associate the ceremonial cultivation of millet with the "true Ga" (Ganyo krong) who lived at inland Great Accra centuries ago, the ritual harvesting of maize with all Ga people, and ritual yam feasting with their Akan-speaking neighbors.

Each year from late July until early October, the overlapping celebration of harvest festivals within these three ritual systems produces a period of intense ceremonial activity. This is most pronounced in Accra, the most culturally heterogeneous of the Ga towns and the national capital of Ghana. Within a thirteen-week period, at least fifty-seven harvest festivals are celebrated, variously honoring kpele gods, chiefs' thrones, and talking drums -- to say nothing of innumerable yam festivals for the spirits associated with every pair of living twins and the observation by every Ga household of Homowo itself.

Homowo, the ceremony of "hooting at hunger," is the most widely observed of the traditional Ga harvest rituals, celebrated by families in every Ga town. One family in Accra, Lante Dzan we, traditionally celebrates Homowo in advance of all other Ga families, their celebration commencing in late July or early August. Following this, other ceremonies begin, all families within a given town celebrating together on a date that varies from year to year. The last Homowo within the Ga area is observed in September.

Homowo, as the Ga people speak of it, is the festal day on which Ga families assemble in their ancestral homes in seaside towns to share a ritual meal with dead and living family members. While this ritual meal is the central Homowo event, the traditional celebration extends from four days in most towns to four weeks in Accra.

The classic pattern of Homowo events in Accra includes opening the fishing season, assembling living and dead family members, participating in preparatory rituals of gift giving and house purifying, eating the Homowo meal, performing the Homowo dance, and observing the Day of Remembrance. During this period, normal economic activities are suspended, while Ga focus on renewing relations with one another and participating in ritual activities.

Before Homowo in Accra, the highest ranking kpele priest ritually opens the bream fishing season. Since bream is used in making the Homowo meal, the opening of the bream fishing season is an essential prerequisite to the Homowo feast. Moreover, these ritual events illuminate one subtext of Homowo, the interdependence between the Homowo and kpele ritual systems.

Two days before the Homowo feast, Ga villagers return to their ancestral homes in coastal towns. In Accra, a kpele priest ritually clears the road for the returning villagers. The arrival of the villagers inaugurates a period of social harmony in which, on pain of death from avenging ancestral shades, debt payments cannot be demanded, oaths cannot be sworn, and legal proceedings cannot be initiated. These restrictions on socially disruptive activities reinforce the out-of-time quality of the Homowo festivities.

The day before the Homowo feast is filled with preparatory ceremonial activities. In Accra representatives of one divisional chief go to the inland site of Great Accra to honor the founders of Ga society, to inform them that "we will hoot at hunger," and to accompany ancestral shades to Accra. Demonstrating respectful deference, on Homowo Eve day daughters-in-law bring mothers-in-law firewood, sons-in-law give bottles of gin to fathers-in-law, and secular chiefs present logs to kpele priests. Senior women in Ga houses smear purificatory ochre on lintels and sills to protect houses from evil spirits that may have entered the town with the villagers. On Homowo Eve, guns are fired to warn people to stay within their houses, while ancestral spirits walk the streets. Late at night the Ga king sacrifices a sheep and shares it with senior members of the Ga state.

Early on Homowo morning, women begin to prepare the festal meal of kpekpei (kpokpoi), a palm oil fish stew consisting of steamed corn dough, bream, and okra. In Accra, chiefs offer the first libations to their ancestors and sprinkle kpekpei. The heads of Ga families then sprinkle kpekpei and offer libations to their ancestors. Finally, living Ga enjoy their meal. All the family members within a house gather around a bowl of kpekpei simultaneously dipping into the stew. The eating of kpekpei further illuminates the timeless nature of the Homowo period, for ordinarily the serving of food expresses sharp distinctions of rank, with senior members eating before junior members and men eating before women.

Following the festal meal, the Homowo dance is performed. In Accra, Homowo dances begin formally with chiefs deferentially presenting logs to kpele priests, priests offering libations, and chiefs symbolically hooting at hunger by drumming their knees. The dances, however, quickly develop into joyful boisterous jostling dances in which anyone may participate, anyone may touch anyone else, people may dress in tattered rags, people may don the clothing of the opposite sex, and people may sing songs ridiculing prominent personages. The lyrics of the commonest Homowo dance song are "You jostle your mother, you jostle your father (oshi onye, oshi otse)." In short, while the Homowo dance is performed, all customary social statuses and constraints are in abeyance.

In Accra following the Homowo feast and dance is the Day of Remembrance. Ga women gather to mourn family members who have died during the year. Men and women go from house to house greeting relatives and friends and wishing them well in the coming year. Ga call the Day of Remembrance ngoo wala (take life), from the customary greeting of the day. Consistent with the absence of social distinctions within the Homowo period, the same greeting is used for everyone: "May you have life." Additional customary greetings on the Day of Remembrance include "May the year meet us," "May we do as long ago," and "May we sit here next year." On this day people who have had disputes can resolve their differences and marriages can be arranged. The Day of Remembrance, then, serves to reaffirm the ties among dead and living Ga kinspeople, to establish new relationships, and to renew amicable kinship and friendship relations among living people.

Finally, more than three weeks after the Accra Homowo feast, Ga children celebrate the end of the Homowo harvest festival with licensed looting in the markets.

What understandings can we derive from the Homowo rituals, taken together? Homowo's central theme, the celebration and renewal of the Ga community, rests evidently upon paradox. Most notably, the celebration of Homowo affirms the principles of social differentiation while denying social difference. In addition, while Homowo is the quintessential celebration of Ga ethnic identity, it has adapted to changing social conditions.

Homowo occurs within a timeless period when ordinary activities of day-to-day life, from gaining a living to engaging in interpersonal animosities, are suspended. In this timeless time, Homowo ritual actions both articulate and deny the basic social differences out of which the fabric of Ga culture and society are constructed. On the one hand, ritual actions distinguish between and ascribe differential social value to living and dead, village dwellers and town dwellers, secular office and sacred office, affinity and consanguinity, youth and age, female and male; on the other hand, differences in rank and status are denied and cast aside in the communal eating of the Homowo feast, the boisterous jostling of the Homowo dance, and the greetings of the Day of Remembrance. In Homowo as in so many rituals of communal celebration and reversal around the world, the social fabric is renewed in its denial.

Homowo is at once the quintessential Ga harvest festival and the most adaptive of the three major Ga harvest rituals to changing social conditions. All people who consider themselves Ga participate in Homowo except for those very few belonging to exclusionary Christian sects. Significantly the festal food of Homowo is maize, the staple of the Ga diet but a New World crop. Homowo has adapted variously to changes in Ga society: villagers entering the towns to celebrate the feast in their ancestral seaside homes may come by lorry and car as well as by foot and often wear identical clothes cut from the same imported fabric; gin has replaced rum as the principal libation liquor; some professional Ga celebrate Homowo not in their ancestral town dwellings but in their suburban homes. Thus, while for some Ga the holy days of Homowo have become the holiday of Homowo, for others it retains sacred meanings of affirming ties between living and dead family members.

Among the rituals in which Ga participate, Homowo is in several respects unique. Although ancestral shades are invoked in all traditional Ga prayers, Homowo is the only ritual addressed solely to ancestors. Among Ga harvest ceremonies, only Homowo belongs to all Ga people. (While kpele is a traditional Ga cult, for example, only certain Ga families may participate in its rituals.) And although participation in traditional Ga cults or in Christian congregations may be associated with socioeconomic differences among Ga, all Ga participate in Homowo whatever their social status. Yet within the context of Homowo, patterns of conspicuous consumption may express status differences, even as the basic equality of all Ga is affirmed. If you are a Ga person, you celebrate Homowo -- exultantly praying and singing, "Woyawo homo yi (We are going to hoot at hunger)."

NOTE

A version of this paper was presented at a memorial session for St. Clair Drake, celebrated authority on African diaspora communities, at the Society for Applied Anthropological Annual Meeting in 1991. This paper pays tribute to Drake's relatively unknown interest in Ga culture and well known concern for common folk.

SOURCES

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Kilson, Marion. Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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Quartey-Papafio, A. B. "The Ga Homowo Festival." Journal of the African Society, 19 (1920).