Aboakyer Festival

The Aboakyer (animal catch) Festival is a celebration of the Simpafo (or Effutufo) people in and around Winneba, a town on the southern coast of Ghana.
The festival commemorates the settlement of the people in the area following a migration from the western Sudan in the middle of the first millennium CE. Once in the area, they provided a place for their deity at a site name Penkye, and they called their god Penkyi Otu.

The people today tell the story that soon after their arrival in their present home, while consulting the deity, they were told by their priest, who served as a mediator between the deity and the people, that they should annually sacrifice a member of the royal household. This message brought great distress upon the people’s leadership and was appealed. In a later message, the deity suggested that in place of the royal sacrifice, they should capture a wild cat and behead it in the presence of the god. The people complied and hunted down a wild cat. In the process, however, they lost a number of their young men. Thus they again appealed to the deity, and this time Penkyi Otu agreed to accept a mature bush buck (of a local species of deer).

To this day, in the annual deer hunting festival held each May, the people keep this story alive and repeat it to the young people as they sit around the firs at night and sing about it in their songs. The Aboakyer Festival is a major annual celebration in Ghana.

References
Brown, Kwesi Ewusi. “Social Conflicts in Contemporary Effutu Festivals.” MA thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2005. Wyllie, Robert W. “Pastors and Prophets in Winneba, Ghana: Their Social Background and Career Development.” Africa, 44, no. 2 (1974): 186–93.

Aboakyer Festival 2019-11-05T01:56:00-08:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: mc