Before coming to Hohoe we had a seen a video of some African-American CCS volunteers being welcomed back to Africa through a ceremony with a local chief and some elders. Although coming to Africa was a deliberate choice -- have Sylvie experience a culture in which people who look like her are the majority -- we weren't sure what to make of the ceremony and whether it was something we should persue or let it go and let Sylvie decide it was something she would like to do when she's old enough to make the choice. One of our reservations is that they match you up with an "African Mother" (land of your ancestors' birth and all that) and at the moment Sylvie has enough mothers and we didn't want to add any more (symbolic or not) into the mix.
As it turned out they performed the ceremony for the African-American volunteer who left last week. We found out yesterday that Sylvie was supposed to be part of it, but the early departure for our trip to Cape Coast last Friday meant that we missed it. We were asked whether we wanted to have Sylvie participate in a follow-up ceremony. Once we established some ground rules -- no new mothers, no huge entourage of elders -- we decided that it would be a nice gesture. The ceremony would involve the presentation of some beads as a welcome back gesture.
The ceremony last week was done outside but because of the torential rain storm that passed through in the late afternoon, the chief decided to have the ceremony in his living room. I think this indoor venue, more than anything else, contributed to the strangeness of the event. It was not a very big space and most of the room was taken up with puffy leather couches and chairs and a very large flat screen television. It's a point of pride to have a large television (with satellite) and so the tv was left on for the ceremony, rather than being turned off as a similar occasion might require at home.
During the first part of the ceremony BBC news was on -- a technology report, if memory serves. Alcohol is big part of traditional Ghanaian ceremony and so everyone was given the opportunity to sip from a glass of schnapps. The difficult with having the ceremony indoors, however, is that you are supposed to provide some to the ancestors by spilling it on the ground (or spitting it) once you have imbibed. The chief accomplished this by spilling and spitting on a little rug made out of goat's hide at his feet. The rest of us just had to pretend to spit once we had tried the schnapps. I can tell you it's an awkward process to be sitting in a stranger's home, drinking sipping cough-syrup-like alcohol from a communal glass and then pretending to spit on his living room carpet. We did our best.
We then presented the chief with our own offering -- two bottles of gin. This part was also a little more confusing than it probably would have been otherwise because of the chief's assistant. We had asked that the ceremony be kept to only a few people but it's tradition that the Chief needs an assistant. The regular assistant, however, had been late so a younger man was filling it, but wasn't familiar with all the processes and procedures and so the chief was trying to help him understand what he should be doing, while explaining to us what was happening in each step. I thought that this assistant-in-training was very nervous and unsure of himself. It turned out that he was very drunk (a condition that preceded the schnapps drinking, but probably wasn't helped by the fact that it seemed to be his responsibility to drain the glass of whatever couldn't be inconspicuously spilled on the living room carpet...).
The gin we brought was tied up in a plastic shopping bag (like everything you buy here) because one of the staff had carried to the ceremony on the back of his motorcycle. Handed this to the assistant without undoing the knot in the bag. The assistant was instructed to hand the bag back so that we could open the bag. By way of explanation, the chielf gave a long speech about how his is a very coveted position and he must always be careful about assassination attempts, including possible bombs in bags. By this time the channel had been changed on the TV to Tele Afriq which shows Nigerian soap operas. The particular scene that accompanied the always-be-wary-of-potential-assassins speech was a long extended shot of man sitting in his bathroom enjoying the pleasures of a very large joint. I'm sure to Sylvie it just looked like a man enjoying a poorly rolled cigarette but most everyone else in the room had to suppress a smile.
The chief talked a lot about the important of ceremonies like these and the challenges of combining tradition with the demands of modern life. There was no mention of the television accompanying our meeting (nor the cell phones that were going off periodically and being answered), but the clash of the traditional and the modern was definitely something front and centre for everyone in the room.
By the time we got to the acutal welcoming part of the ceremony the channel had changed again, this time to hip hop videos. We started off with some Drake (appropriate Can-con, I suppose). As he talked about black and white coming together ("whites adopting blacks, blacks adopting blacks" and the gradual disappearance of racism in the world...) the video changed to one filmed in Paris and South Central LA. The Eiffle Tower was appropriate given that France is the next leg of our tour. The gratuitous ass-shaking and other hip-hop tropes from LA, however, were less appropriate (even Sylvie tweaked to this, as she told us afterwards). By the time the chief was winding up and had presented the bead bracelet and necklace, "Don't You Worry Child" by Sweedish House Mafia had come on -- one of Sylvie's favourites (and appropriate in terms of both lyrics and visual content).
At the end, they asked if there were any questions. The Chief had mentioned that he became chief by being "captured"; Alice asked what that meant. The answer was long, but interesting. I probably should have mentioned, in case you were picturing some grizzled old man, that this chief is only 31 and by day is a psychiatric nurse at the Hohoe hospital. When the last chief died he was in his last year of his studies at Cape Coast university. The community's elders got together to choose a successor. When they decided on him, some in the community travelled to Cape Coast and "captured" him as chief and brought him bask. He was then ensconced in a house for 8 days and educated into the ways of being cheif (one of his responsibilities is to settle disputes and so there was some conflict resolution training, among other things). Then on the 9th day, he was let out of the house and installed as chief (and warlord, he confided to us proudly) for life.
In the end, I think Sylvie liked the sentiment and the beads. It was a nice counterpoint to the slave castle visit last weekend and the brutality that befell her ancestors. I think Sylvie knows she is welcome many places in the world and that must feel good (though I suspect if you ask her, she'll tell you that she still feels most at home in Ottawa -- which is just fine with us!)
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