Traditional Rites of Passage

My roommate’s aunt died this week, which lead to a really interesting conversation on rites of passage in Ghana. There are rites and rituals for a lot of different points in a life. Monica said that as the country turns more toward Christianity and away from traditional religions, some of these traditions aren’t as prevalent as in the past. She still fully believes in their power though, and has many stories of success.

If a person is lucky, they will go through four or five rites as they age. If they aren’t as lucky they will go through at least two, birth and death.

At birth, there are many things that happen to ensure the life of the newborn is pure and successful. Once the baby is born, it does not touch the ground, leave the house or have a name until it is seven days old. Most Ghanaians believe that newborns are the closest to pure as one ever is. If the baby dies within the first seven days, keeping it from the way of the world ensures that it will enter heaven. After the baby survives seven days, it is given a naming ceremony. Until this time, the baby has had no contact with the outside world. The parents give a name and introduce the child to the community. The ceremony is also a way to cut the extreme bond between mother and child. If this ceremony isn’t preformed, the child may cling to its mother throughout life, causing problems (no marriage, no children, etc.) If the baby dies after this, the parents have two options when the next child is born. They can have the traditional ceremony in the same way again, or they can go to a traditional priest who will bless the baby, hopefully guaranteeing survival and the survival of successive children. The priest will make small cuts on the child’s face in a pattern that marks either where the child is from or why the ceremony had to take place. Monica says she doesn’t know how or why, but 9 times out of 10, after a baby dies and the next goes through the ceremony, the successive children all survive. Walking around Ghana, we see many people with scars on their faces. They’re considered to be beautiful and a strong part of their culture.

When children are born, there is a special ceremony for twins, especially fraternal twins with one boy and one girl. Twins are considered very jealous people in Ghana. The ceremony cuts the special bond that exists between them. If the bond isn’t cut, the twins can become too close as they grow. Fraternal cases with one child of each gender are extremely risky to waive the rites. Ghanaians believe that these sets of twins are basically married from birth. They closely grow together in the womb, and spend their lives together until marriage. If the boy has a girlfriend, or vice versa, the other twin may become extremely jealous that another is breaking the bond between them. If this bond is broken at birth, the children can grow separately and don’t have to go through trouble as they grow older. Monica was telling the story of a set of fraternal twins she knew that didn’t go through the ceremony. The boy was in the process of getting married, but the woman’s family insisted that the ceremony take place before the wedding. If not, the wedding would be called off. Many times if a family doesn’t complete the ceremony at birth, they will return within a matter of years to have it. Monica explained that sometimes things are just done. There is nothing Christianity or modernity can do to stop them.

The next ceremony is considered optional in the cultures of Ghana today. Puberty rites are only for girls and take place immediately after their first menses. Monica explained that this ceremony is basically only to keep young girls in villages in check. To go through this rite, you must be a virgin. If a girl has a baby before she goes through the ceremony or if she doesn’t go through the ceremony and later has a child, she will be exiled from the community and will receive no help with the raising of her child. Monica didn’t go into detail about what happens during this ceremony, and knowing what happens in other puberty ceremonies for girls, I’m sure I don’t want to know.

When Ghanaians start dating, the next ritual comes in. A man must formally introduce himself and his family to the family of a woman before they are allowed to be alone together. Parents have all the rights to object to their daughter seeing or talking to a man before his intentions have been brought to the family. The “Knocking ceremony” brings both sides of the man’s family to the door of the woman’s. It is essential that both sides of both families are present, or the ceremony can’t take place. The man announces his intentions, and the family of the woman either gives or denies him permission to court their daughter. It is the same way during engagements. A man must ask both sides of the woman’s family for her hand and again, he must have representatives from both sides of his own family present. Monica says that if this rite is not completed, the couple can’t be married. She says that because all parts of the families are coming together, it shows the couple the support they have. The couple can fall on this support for advice or action when there are problems in the relationship or marriage. She insists it prevents many cases of divorce. If these rites aren’t completed, the marriage may be doomed to failure because it shows lack of support for the marriage.

There are also other really random ceremonies for specific circumstances. Monica swears that a man or woman married to a person who cheats can complete a ceremony that repels people from their house. For instance, if it is the man who cheated, other women will find it very difficult to enter the family’s home. Monica said that all of a sudden they’ll remember something, or something will happen so that they have to leave. She claims it works very well and has seen it herself! I’m not quite as convinced.

The last ceremony a person will go through is a ceremony of death. There are traditional things that must be done before and after the funeral. If these aren’t completed, it’s said that the spirit of the deceased comes to haunt their family.

Monica and I don’t have many conversations where I learn so much but I love it when we do! She has so much to share with me that I don’t know about her culture and I always feel crazy when I can’t share such awesome things about our culture with her. If you have any ideas of things specific to American culture, let me know so I can share them with her!

Easter Wedding

We finally went to a wedding! Usually, all family events are on Saturdays: weddings, funerals, engagements, naming ceremonies, but because today is Easter, a friend's cousin moved his wedding to Sunday. Sarah, Hannah, and I went to Tema with our friend Eugene in the early afternoon. Before the wedding actually started, the church held its weekly service so we were in for both church and a wedding. Through the entire service the couple was sitting under a trellis covered in fake flowers, participating with the service. After an hour and a bit of Easter mass in both English and Twi, the actual wedding started! It was really different though. the bride and groom just stood up from their seats, said their vows and exchanged rings ad then it was over. It was like ten minutes long! They went into a separate room to sign the legal papers, came back out, and walked down the aisle. And that was it.

The reception was just as different as the wedding was. The bride and groom arrived and had their first dance, but it wasn't a slow dance. I suppose it doesn't really have to be, but it was hella awkward. There were a bunch of speeches, not necessarily about the couple but about marriage in general, Easter and other stuff. The MC was trying to keep our attention, but we were all so hungry it really didn't work! While we were waiting for food, the bride tossed the bouquet and I had to duck to miss it! Apparently the kitchen was really behind. By the time we could get in line for the buffet, it was already the time us girls had decided we needed to leave! We crammed in our food, had a piece of strange gingerbread/fruitcake wedding cake, said our congratulations to the bride and groom and were ready to leave. Apparently everyone else was as well. As soon as cake had been served, the place emptied FAST. There was no dancing or anything. But hey, I went to a wedding! Apparently the engagements are more culturally relevant, with more traditions and stuff. Overall the wedding was pretty western, even if it was missing all the dancing.

Togo, revisited.

 

Because Ghana is getting so routine, we decided we needed a little French influence again! Alanna and I went back to Togo to try to get our visas extended so we could spend a week there over exams or something.  We took off at about 9:30, turned around at 9:40 because i had stupidly  forgotten my passport (I really need to learn how to pack earlier than an hour before I leave…) and we were finally on our tro tro to Lome at about 11.

Our first order of business was trying to renew our Togo visas. We took the motor taxis, zemi-johns, through Lome and discovered actually how big the city is! I guess the three hours we spent there a few weeks ago didn’t really cut it. Go figure. The men at the passport office had no idea what we were talking about when we wanted extensions. We tried to tell them that a handful of other girls had gotten theirs extended but they wouldn’t hear it, probably because so many people were in line. So our entire reason for going to Togo was a fail.

There was a small Lebanese place on our way back, and starved of vegetables for three months, we decided an early dinner was necessary. The BEST Fatoush, ever. We ended up gong back for nearly every meal! it was nearly 8 by this time, so we headed back to our hotel. Luckily for us, Fridays are jazz night! There was a live band who played most of the night. Alanna and I were half dead from travelling, so we went to bead early and fell asleep to jazzed up bob Marley.

Saturday was market day! We hit up the Grand Market looking for touristy things and had plenty of help finding them. A lady who only spoke French followed us for about an hour before we could communicate enough to figure out what she was saying. In the end, she either wanted to take us to church, or to lunch. As soon as we could mime the fact that we had already eaten, she left only to be replaced with another man. He was Ghanaian, spoke with us in Twi and helped us find the right places in the market to get Batiks and Togo things. Of course all he really wanted was us to visit his shop and buy his EXTREMELY (and when I say extremely I mean, whoa. WAY overpriced) expensive little wooden carvings. Yeah right. So we jumped on zemi-johns and headed to the Voodoo market.

This market was sad. It was in a small parking lot in the middle of nowhere, stuffed with tables full of the dried heads of any animal you can think of. There were horns, teeth, claws, dried mice, chameleons, birds; heads with hair or skulls of cats, dogs, antelope, goats; hides of leopards, antelope, goats; caged rats, a vulture on a post, a live chameleon in a bag. it was a potpourri of stuff I would have rather not seen, but was too curious not to peek.

After this lovely market, we went back to the border and slipped through with a 60 day Ghanaian extension, enough to get us home, without having to bribe the gatekeepers.

Mole National Park

One of the biggest trips people take in Ghana is to Mole, the national park in the north that boasts many different animals and safaris. I left at 6 am with two other friends from ISEP and we barely made it to the bus by 7:40. Traffic was horrendous. We hopped on and found the seats we’d be sitting in for the next 13 hours. That’s right, longer than the flight here. We got into Tamale past my bedtime only to find out that a curfew had been installed because of serious fighting and there was no way we’d catch our bus in the morning. We slept in a hostel close by and got up at 5, an hour before the curfew lifted. So of course, when we walked out onto the street, there was a policeman stationed at every intersection which was unquestionably the most organized I’ve ever seen the police here. At 6 we finally caught a taxi, made it a block and a half before we saw a bunch of people running at top speed from the intersection we were headed for. Of course, a fight had broken out between a policeman and some guys. There were baton smacks, kicks and men on the ground, but that’s all I saw before the taxi driver punched it in reverse. We took an alternate route, obviously, to the tro tro station, waited an hour and a half, and squeezed into a tro with five people sitting across and 6 rows. There were also men on top with their bikes and a very unfriendly chicken at my feet. I don’t know HOW toes look like food, but apparently mine are delicious! The ride was supposed to be four hours but we hit a few speed bumps. First, our back tire blew about ten minutes after we turned onto an endless dirt road. So we piled off, they fixed it pretty quickly, then we all piled back on. Ten minutes later, the engine starts smoking, we book it off the tro, they spend a bit more time looking at the engine, then we cautiously sit back down. We got into Damongo in the early afternoon and caught a very expensive taxi ten miles into the bush before we got to the main gate.

After sorting out our rooms, we did what anyone would do their first time in the African bush!.. went swimming in the hotel pool. We were too late for any of the safaris for the rest of the day, so we relaxed after our extremely long trip. The next morning we took a 7am walking safari around the waterholes and through some of the back parts of the park. We saw a ton of antelope, mainly Bushbuck, Waterbuck and Cob. There were Warthogs, monkeys, crocodiles and lots of ants, but none of the only animal we went to see: elephants. We got back just in time for breakfast and another dip in the pool! We overheard a group of German boys (:D heh heh heh!) talking about a canoe safari and how cool it was supposed to be, so we joined their group. There’s a river that creates one of the borders of the park and during the dry season, now, it gets incredibly low. How they thought they could fit 7 people in a slightly larger than average sized canoe was beyond me. We paddled ten minutes down the river and turned around because the river was too low, but still paid for an hour tour… ahhh African tourism. So we went back to the information center and hopped on a 3:30 driving safari. We spent two hours driving around as much of the park as possible, seeing exactly the same animals. The only cool part was that we got to ride on top of the off-roader that was driving us around! Because we still hadn’t seen any elephants, we agreed that another day was the only way.

That night, we hiked out to a tree house set up about 45 minutes from the hotel/pool/restaurant complex that we had stayed at the night before. I’m definitely not a fan of night hikes; my clumsiness is just magnified in the dark. We heard a few hyenas, saw some baboons, and had an awesome conversation so the hike was actually worth it. When we got back to the hotel in the morning, we had breakfast and signed up for another 3:30 safari. There were more monkeys running around than usual, and they were much hungrier than the other days we had sat by the pool. Out of nowhere, baboons would run up and snatch anything food-like in sight! I lost a bag of nuts, another girl lost some crackers, and Adam, the guy we were travelling with, chucked a bottle of water at one to protect his peanut butter. The afternoon was seriously more entertaining than our last safari. No elephants had been seen in the park for two days, so we had given up hope. We had dinner with the Germans laughing about the stuff I remembered and I ended up explaining things to the two I was travelling with because the boys would go off in German. It was definitely a highlight of the trip!

Our bus back to Tamale left at 4 the next morning but luckily, when we got in, we found out a man had to drive down to Kumasi in his own car and was looking for people to ride along offset the cost. SWEEEET! So we paid less than the bus fare to drive comfortably down to Kumasi, which took hours less than what the bus would have taken. We were dropped off at the bus station and grabbed a cheap bus back to Accra, getting in at about 9:30. Hopefully I’ll never have to take buses for that long again! These past few days have been catch up days, full of much needed sleep!

International Football…Say Whaaaat!

Today a group of us woke up early to run downtown and secure tickets to what I’m sure has been one of the biggest soccer games we’ve seen live. It was $7 to get into two back to back games: Ivory Coast vs. Liberia in the Olympic qualifiers and Ivory Coast vs. Benin in the African Cup qualifiers! The Olympic game was nothing quite too special. To be eligible to play in the games no players can be in a pro league so they’re all under 20 basically. But the African cup game was AWESOME. It was a legit national team game! So the players on the teams are those that play in the world cup!! Plus, Drogba, a famous player for an English league was playing for Ivory Coast! To accurately explain how important he is to world, African and English soccer, I have a notebook with his face on it… along with hundreds of other people!

So one of the guys I w ent with decided it was too good of an opportunity to  miss. He sweet talked his way into a press badge and spent the second half of the first game and the entire second game on the field, taking pictures and chatting with photographers and press from all over the country and continent. He’s rubbed it in our faces since, trust me.

Togo, or Not To Go and Accra vs. Kumasi

Our visas are only valid for 60 days at a time so we either have to pay 40 Cedi each month to get them renewed… or leave the country. Tough choice… so today we went to Togo! It was only a day trip so we could keep costs down, but that meant that we could only spend so long across the border. It took about three hours to get there and hour and a half to cross into Togo (everything was ass-backwards: go here, then go there, then go back…) so we really only had about three hours to explore the country… Yep. So we took a taxi to the central market, wasted twenty minutes looking for lunch and then basically vegged out. We found a little hole of a restaurant and ordered lunch from a mixed menu. On one hand, there was couscous, on the other was fried chicken and Jollof, a Ghanaian staple. The couscous was awesomely regular but had a super delicious buttery cabbage soup as a side!

After lunch we had about 45 minutes to wander around before finding a ride back. The market in Lome sells much of the same things as those in Ghana, but with some distinct differences. Instead of people selling huge loafs of bread, it was tasty, crunchy baguettes! There were swarms of motorcycle taxis everywhere instead of cabs. Plus there was that tiny little French language problem. We did manage to find the BEST street food I’ve ever had, a baguette with chunky avocado, onion, lime and oil. Hoooo, we ate a whole one of those and brought another and two plain baguettes home! I’m really looking forward to needing to renew my visa again!

Sunday was another adventure day. We’ve been assigned this GIGANTIC research group project in psychology of religion. My topic is to compare the leaders of Christianity, Islam and Traditionalism. So of course, when our group split up to do interviews another study abroad student and I jumped at the chance to interview a few traditional priests! We went with a Ghanaian who knew his way around traditionalism to Jamestown and met with three priests. The first reminded me of my uncle, it was really weird. But each of them said a few of the same things. The first thing that each of them said was that they were appointed, by god, to the role. To be a traditional priest, you have to be born the oldest son of a practicing priest. So it’s thought that God chooses and directs a soul to fill the first baby of a priest. A good deal, but is lineage really all that a person needs to become a priest? Traditionalism is also one of those religions that believes there is a spirit for everything (trees, rocks houses, toothpicks, etc.) and that the spirit of the world, the one that keeps other spirits in and turns the globe and all that, is Djemawon. So basically how the religion works, is the people offer something to the priest asking for help, the priest offers something else to Djemawon asking for advice, and then Djemawon speaks to God, who in turn tells the priest what should be done.

We finished the three interviews and Miriam (studying here from Norway) and I went to the Accra vs. Kumasi soccer match downtown! This was seriously the biggest deal in the world to everyone in Accra. Apparently, the grudge between Accra and Kumasi is bigger than that between the Packers and the Vikings, and craaaaap did we see it! People were getting pissed at others that were standing in the way and punches were thrown. After the game cars all the way back were honking like mad, flags were hanging from side mirrors and taxi drivers were charging more to people from the opposite team! Accra lost pretty badly so a lot of people were sour for the rest of the day. But it was still awesome to see!

 

PS. I promise updates are coming about another football game and our trip up north!

Kumasi

Well, I’m a few weeks behind on my Kumasi post!... mainly, because there wasn’t anything interesting to report. The weekend was one big shopping trip, squished into three days. We drove to Kumasi on a dirt road so bad it could churn butter if we put milk in the back seat. A headache was inevitable, so by the time we got to Kumasi we were seriously considering staying forever.

We first went to the palace of the Asantehene, the chief ruler of the Asante state. They had a museum I the old palace that was pretty creepy! Inside, the palace was preserved exactly as it was when the Asantehenes actually lived there. Creepiest part: the Asantehenes are still there in wood form! They have crazy wood statues sitting in chairs all over the place!

We moved onto the cultural center across town, and the shopping began! They had great paintings, wood carvings, jewelry, clothing and everything else you can think of. Of course, I bought a ton of stuff for myself and people at home. Kente cloth is a woven piece of fabric made by weaving small strips and then sewing them together. It’s been fought over who was the first to make Kente, between the Kumasi and the Volta regions.

The guest house we stayed in on the University of Kumasi campus was AAAAMAZING. Marble, air conditioning (!!!!!), hot water for showers (!!!!!), and a bar! Wooot! And the best part is that we got to stay there for two nights!

Saturday we drove around Kumasi visiting villages known for their artistic abilities. In Bonwire, we toured another Kente factory and spent a bunch on “antique” kente. Not quite sure if it was really antique or just dirty. We also went to an Adinkra village that specializes in stamping cloth with special symbols. We each got to pick a strip of Kente, pick a few stamps, each with their own meaning, and stamp them ourselves! I picked three stamps, one of a goose looking back at its tail, which symbolizes learning from your past; one of a crocodile, symbolizing adaptability because he can live in the water and on the ground; and a star and moon, mosty because I thought it looked cool, but a little bit because it signifies the balance of harmony, love and faithfulness. Next stop was a wood carving village, though I wouldn’t call it as much of a village as it was a lion’s den. The second we stepped off the bus we were hassled. Even after I told them I spent the last of my money on the Adinkra cloth, they said that looking was free… so I went looking. Unfortunately I found a really cool mask. I had 10 cedi and the guy told me it was 30, so I was safe! I figured he wouldn’t come down 60% so I told him I only had 10 cedi… then he freaking said 10 was fine! So he got the last of my money, I got a nice mask, and poor Hannah got an IOU from me for the rest of the weekend.

We went back to the hotel for the night and had the option of going out for dinner or eating at the hotel. Hannah and I decided to stay at the hotel, mostly because I was out of money and she was tired. We went down to get dinner and I paged through the menu only to find Fattoush (a very awesome Lebanese salad that we make with some of mom’s friends)!! So of course I have to order it. Usually it’s made of lettuce and fresh parsley with a cool spice, veggies and lemon, BUT this one was made of lettuce, dried oregano and veggies: a major disappointment which marked the end of the weekend. The next morning we turned back for Accra, got another headache and vowed we’d only go back to Kumasi after taking some Advil.