How to describe yesterday, that is the question.
Most of my blog entries are of the summary variety, updating the world (or at least those unfortunate enough to have been sent the link to my blog :P) on a whole list of things over the past week or whatever.
Well today, I’ll just write about one thing.
All week Nana had been talking about going to this festival for her ethnic group (or tribe). There are like fifty or a hundred different ethnic groups in
She made the entire office go. I even tried to get out of it because I had too much work, but she insisted upon us going. I’m glad she did, because it may have been the highlight of my trip so far.
The basic premise is that once a year, the Ga have this festival celebrating twins. I expected the twins part to be a bigger deal, but it certainly didn’t stand out.
Nana took us by taxi, all like 20 of us, to the area where it was going to be. We went to these random couple of houses where they were beginning to party. We saw this family, who had little baby twins, and they were making this ceremonial…I don’t even know what. If you look at pictures you’ll see, I want to call it a “stew”, but I don’t think that’s right.
It was a combination of random leaves, apparently part of a dead chicken, and who knows what else. Alcohol for one thing. The man of the house dipped his hands in to it and proceeded to wash his head with it. In other words he took an Italian shower in dead chicken, random vegetation and liquor.
Then we went to this other random place. It was really cool because with Nana (and our other Ghanaian colleagues), you kind of can go into the back alleys of these slums, not just look at things from the street.
Oh, and like usual, the kids love for you to take pictures. I’ve decided that taking pictures of kids and then showing them the picture is one of the best things you can do as an obruni. They are fascinated by the camera, love the attention and overall it’s just really fun.
Anyways, we then go and find a little “spot bar” to have a drink waiting for the main event.
The main event is basically what amounts to a….parade.…of people. It’s like the ‘running of the bulls’ in
Basically that ceremonial concoction (supposedly) has the power to make people possessed when they put it on their head. So this “parade” is basically this. Instead of floats, there are people walking with these bowls/buckets of dead chicken, vegetation and alcohol, on their head.
Only they aren’t really walking. They’re stumbling, unable to keep upright on their own (themselves or their pants by the way). Sometimes they run like zombies, other times they can barely walk. They swing around the street with a crowd guiding them. Liquid falling and splashing around.
The entire thing quickly became the most chaotic, craziest thing I may have ever seen. There aren’t a lot of people with these things, it’s at best a 1 to 100 ratio, but you get these people running down the street with this. And everybody’s watching. Hundreds of thousands of people watching I’m quite sure, as they barrel down what feels like the race course for the bull running (or the running of the Jew from Borat, nice!).
I really don’t know what else to say about it. You have men cross dressing, all sorts of people with their faces chalked in white. Then random people start putting random things on their own head. There is enough liquor flowing to keep
And every time one “possessed” person comes near you, you have to be ready, because they may swerve right in to you. I even got a video on my camera of it, as we have to jump over the open sewer back on to the side walk so not to get leveled by a possessed Ghanaian man with who knows what on their head.
Ultimately the pictures won’t describe it. The videos probably won’t do it justice. But I’ll try and post both.
But suffice to say, it was crazy.
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