Asafotufiami means, roughly, the firing of musketry, and that is what happens.
Ada Foah, where the Volta meets the sea. First weekend of August.
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Firing the Guns at Ada
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Firing the Guns at Ada
Asafotufiami means, roughly, the firing of musketry, and that is what happens.
The Ada remember migrating into this country and fighting for it, and once a year they do it again. The asafo companies come out in war dress with flintlock muskets, and they fire — volleys, in formation, black powder, enormously loud, in a crowd — and they re-enact the battles their ancestors fought to hold the estuary.
Before the noise there is the quiet part: the elders go to the ancestral stools and to the river, and the year's dead are remembered, and libation is poured to men who died in wars three hundred years ago and are named individually.
Then the durbar. Then the drumming that does not stop.
At Ada, the festival turns migration and warfare into a public memory the whole town can hear. The guns are loud, but the point is older than the noise: this is how the Ada remember belonging to the estuary.
If you visit Ghana. Ada Foah, where the Volta meets the sea. First weekend of August.
Asafotufiami means, roughly, the firing of musketry, and that is what happens.
The Ada remember migrating into this country and fighting for it, and once a year they do it again. The asafo companies come out in war dress with flintlock muskets, and they fire — volleys, in formation, black powder, enormously loud, in a crowd — and they re-enact the battles their ancestors fought to hold the estuary.
Before the noise there is the quiet part: the elders go to the ancestral stools and to the river, and the year's dead are remembered, and libation is poured to men who died in wars three hundred years ago and are named individually.
Then the durbar. Then the drumming that does not stop.
At Ada, the festival turns migration and warfare into a public memory the whole town can hear. The guns are loud, but the point is older than the noise: this is how the Ada remember belonging to the estuary.