A Broadening Mind: Happy New Year! Well, Sort of…

Sunday night was the most memorable experience thus far. I went out with Izumi, Tamar, Susan, Sophie, and a handful of the Peace Corps volunteers to a local village named Kpanvo about 15 minutes away from the where I work to participate in “The Fire Festival”. We had visited there earlier in the day to go through the formal ceremony of meeting the chief (who was away in Germany working as a doctor) and the elders. After drinking Pito (fermented millet) and shots of gin, we walked to the other side of the village to have lunch with our host, Joseph. He works as a school teacher in the village, and is also the only Christian among all Muslims. We contacted him because the village already had a slow-sand filter for each household (roughly 190) plus some Kosim filters. Izumi and Sophie were very eager to take water samples from them.

We taxied over at 8pm when it was completely dark. The festival itself has two purposes: it’s the start of their calendar year, and it’s also a tradition based on a Dagomba legend. The story goes that a chief’s son was lost one night so all the villagers formed a search party, made torches and hiked all the surrounding trails chanting loudly to find him. One version also has the son “kidnapped” by a tree, and they had to throw their torches to make it release him.

This has become the foundation for the celebrated holiday. We kicked off the night by drinking some Pito and another alcohol called Apeteshie, which I swear must be a local version of moonshine made from distilled palm wine. It smelled and tasted disgusting; I would equivocate to having the bite of both Tequila and Whiskey. All the villagers (roughly 2,000) and us then gathered on the main path and navigated by moonlight to the head warrior’s house to “request” that we go on the journey. He then led the way with the chief on a trail far away (roughly 20-30 minute walk) to a tree while people chanted something in the local dialect called Dagboney and then threw torches at it. We then hike back for moonlight dancing.

Here’s a picture of myself and Izumi beforehand when we were having Apeteshie. Clearly it’s safer to have everyone playing with fire after a few drinks!

The most interesting stuff lies in the details. Many people paint their faces white (either completely or some sort of design), and while the children only carry torches, the adults carry machetes, cutlasses, and rifles.

They also pack pipe-bombs which they detonate off the trail while everyone is yelling to heighten the effect. Everyone is screaming and running around with torches, and I admit to feeling more than a little uneasy when I was separated from the group and found myself among the village warriors, who were all armed and yelling. I didn’t really have anywhere to go either because there were large fires on either side. All the heat and smoke made it pretty hard to see, and I had to keep a close eye on my torch because it burned fast. A lot of men were pretending to slash each other with the cutlasses or shoot at one another with guns.

Unfortunately my pictures didn’t turn out so well, but my videos are amazing. Some of the other students had much better luck with taking photos but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to procure them before I return to Cambridge. Here’s a few good ones though.