The Adae Festival of Akan People

The Akan peoples of West Africa, who are concentrated in Ghana but are also found in parts of Ivory Coast to the west and Togo to the east, renew their connection with their past and present leaders once every three weeks in Adae ceremonies, held alternately on a Wednesday and a Sunday. Most of them also perform the Odwira New Year purification ceremonies and national festival in conjunction with either one of the last two Adae of the local Akan calendar.

Connecting with Revered Ancestors

The 378-day Akan year is made up of nine 6-week cycles called Adae. This is also the name of a ceremony that is celebrated twice during each cycle: first as an Awukudae, or Wednesday Adae, and then as an Akwasidae on the third Sunday thereafter, when the rites are more elaborate. The ritual is intended primarily to honor departed rulers and invoke the blessings of their spirits by recalling their names and deeds (although nature spirits are also recognized in the Brong version of Adae in Ghana’s Northern Region). Most of the ceremony takes place in the resting or sleeping place of these rulers, which is where the Akan word adae comes from.Here, a lineage whose heads hold political office keeps all the stools of those who died while in power—provided they have proven worthy. Akans believe that they each have a sunsum (a part of the soul that wanders out of the body during sleep and joins the world of shadows after death) and that it is normally tied to his or her special white stool. However, they blacken the stools of their dead rulers with soot and egg yolk to preserve them as shrines. On an Adae, the current successors of those rulers may call their spirits by name to these shrines to dwell there again.

All families commemorate their dead in a similar fashion on the Adae. However, they only permit a select few senior members of their lineage to follow its head into the stool house.While the chief offers water, food, meat, and eggs to his ancestors to ensure his tribe’s prosperity and the soil’s fertility, the queen mother does the same in her own stool house. No work or travel are allowed on the Adae except in connection with the ceremonies. All the articles needed for the ceremony are gathered and brought home, along with firewood, the day before.

This day is called Dapaa—either Benada Dapaa, for a Tuesday, or Memeneda Dapaa, for a Saturday. Children born on these days are named Dapaa or Adae. This reflects the Akan belief that each day of the week is matched by a different kind of kra (a breath-like life-force in the soul that flies back to God as a bird at death).

The Typical Adae

The day of preparation for Adae is Dapaa, when all dwellings and their surroundings—as well as the stools and calabashes needed in the ceremonies—are tidied up. Drummers are heard playing in every chief ’s house from sunset until late at night. The following morning, the principal “divine drummer” gets up early to greet the chief with ceremonial songs. Then, the chief has a meal of mashed yam or plantain. Before the chief and his party proceed to the stool room or house, whatever ritual food remains is taken out and sprinkled in the courtyard to feed the dead courtiers and attendants. No salt is used (since the Akans believe the spirits cannot stand it), and a bell is rung to signify that the spirits are eating. The chief ’s attendants go back and forth to the stool room, returning with the blood of sheep they slaughter and prepare as additional offerings to the spirits in the stools. They use the blood to mark their master’s chest and forehead. At the same time, the queen mother makes an offering of fufu—a cassava or yam paste—on the spot. Finally, the head attendant pours rum on the stools; any leftover rum is passed around among those present. The chief ’s subordinates and subjects then come to wish him “Adae morn” in the main courtyard, where he sits in state while a court poet recites the deeds of past chiefs. The celebrations go on until dusk, accompanied by the beating of drums and the blowing of horns. The offerings are only removed from the stools late in the evening; and any pieces of fat are left there even longer.

The Great Adae

The ninth Adae is the“Great Adae” or Adae Kese. At this ceremony, the chief carries the sacrificial sheep to the stools himself. Adae Kese ushers in the New Year under various names. The dates also vary from place to place between July and October, although several Akan states—such as Akim, Akwamu, and Ashanti—hold this ceremony in January.

This is when a number of Akan peoples—such as the Akuapem and the Brong—carry out the Odwira ceremony (pronounced “Oh-je-rah”) of “purification” of the shrines of ancestral spirits and “cleansing” of the nation’s defilements. In most states, it tends to overlap in timing and content with the yam harvest and associated rituals—hence the misnomer “Yam Custom” by which it was long known to Europeans. In the Akuapem town of Aburi in Ghana’s Eastern Region, the two-day New Yam Festival of thanksgiving for first-fruits (centering on a fetish of the sky god Ntoa which aboriginal clan heads brought from Nkoranza in Brong country before the arrival of Akwamu and Akim settlers) even takes the place of Odwira on the ninth Awukudae. Like Odwira, it is preceded by forty days of adaebutuw or “turning over of the Adae,” when the ancestors are left alone in the stool house, and there is a ban on all loitering and noise-making in the streets. Even funeral ceremonies are scaled down to a minimum, as a barely tolerated transgression that should be atoned for by sacrificing a sheep.

The point of these restrictions is to avoid disturbing dead ancestors and living elders who may reside elsewhere but often return to their ancestral villages for the duration of the festival. These lesser chiefs have their own Odwira ceremonies in the villages, usually on different dates than those held in the state capitals. Like all able-bodied men and women, the elders are required to attend the state events. At this great national festival, where all the social ties binding different groups—living or dead, human or divine—are renewed, recently enstooled chiefs swear allegiance to the paramount chief. How ever, the paramount chief leaves all secular state functions to his second-in-command for the seven-to-twelve days the festival can last. The festival is observed by a ban on eating yam. Both the royal family and the paramount chief abstain from the new yam until completion of purification rites that the chief leads at the stool house and over graves of past chiefs.

The ban on eating yam may be lifted earlier for the common people. In Akropong, the Akuapem capital, for instance, fresh tubers are paraded on the second day. There, the official Odwira date is the day after the ninth Wednesday Adae. It occurs in September or October—as does Aburi’s Yam Festival. The difference is that there, Adae Kese is considered a day of general mourning, especially for those departed in the past year. It is also when people who may have died since the previous Monday are buried. Though there is much drumming and drinking on this day, Thursday is the primary feast day. At the royal palace, feasting is open to subjects and foreigners alike; in every private home, food and drink are made available to all comers, and a procession takes a ritual meal to the dead at their shrine outside of town. Yet after nightfall, a hush falls over Akropong, and people are warned to stay indoors since none but a privileged few are entitled by birth or office to cast eyes on the shrines of the nation’s revered ancestors, which are taken out in a solemn procession to the river and back to the stool house. An actual washing of the sacred stools of the state in the nearby stream is the “cleansing” that gives Odwira its name. When it is over, volleys of muskets are fired to give the all-clear.