Paper short abstract:

Festivals provide a focal point for borderlanders, attracting prominent guests and achieving maximum media exposure. This paper compares 2 festivals on the Ghana-Togo border, demonstrating the different registers in which communities make statements about what it means to be divided by a border.

Paper long abstract:

Festivals provide a focal point for citizens of a self-defined community, including those living far from home who play a leading role in fund-raising and planning. In Ghana they aim to attract the most prominent guests and to achieve maximum media exposure.

This paper compares two festivals on the Ghana-Togo border, with a view to demonstrating the different registers in which communities make statements about what it means to be divided by a border. The first is Agbamevoza which unites the Agotimes of Ghana and Togo in a week of cross-border celebrations. The second is Godigbe in Aflao which is confined to Ghana but references historic claims to the Togo side. The comparison shows actors using these festivals to influence how the border is managed, insisting on rights to mobility. Speeches at Agbamevoza make much of the fact that while the Agotime capital is in Ghana, two-thirds of the settlements are in Togo. Because the focal point is kente weaving, Agbemavoza actively competes with other festivals in Ghana. By contrast, Godigbe identifies Aflao as a trans-national town with close cultural and historic links to Togo and Benin. In 2022, Nana Akuffo-Addo was invited, but strikingly no Ghanaian chiefs were amongst the guests of honour. Moreover, the speeches explicitly criticized the authorities for having kept the border closed long after the COVID pandemic had receded. In different ways, the aim is to maximize the margin for manoeuvre in a context where governments have come to prefer borders being only partially open.

Paper short abstract:

Homowo is the annual Ga festival, celebrated in the Greater Accra Region. The genealogies of the gods and the past memories are at the centre of processes of re-signification that in recent years have also called into play the "diasporic" ga in Togo.

Paper long abstract:

Homowo is the annual Ga festival, celebrated in the Greater Accra Region. The festival has both a family and public dimension but it is first of all the arena of the political tensions among the many family groups. The conflicts are historically played out on the different interpretations and reconstructions of the migratory flow that led to the creation of the Ga political unity.

The genealogies of the gods and the past memories are at the centre of processes of re-signification that in recent years have also called into play the "diasporic" ga, i.e. those groups which, starting from the last years of the seventeenth century, fleeing wars or following economic interests, left the regions of Accra and Elmina to found Glidji and settle in Aneho, in present-day Togo. Here the family divinities, over the centuries, have been reworked by the encounter with the local gods, above all the vodu, but have also maintained a strong link with their original land. For the priests in Accra, the Togolese "brothers" represent a reservoir of religious fervour but first of all it is a place where rebuild ties with the historical past. In Accra, the more influential families compete with each other to invite people from Aneho to join the celebration and the wulomo (Ga priest) do their best to participate to the Epe Ekpe festival in Glidji, in order to reinforce their mystical power, and play the link with Togo in theirs’ favour. My aim is to follow the people involved in this political and religious pilgrimage between the two countries and to understand how the history of the ancient migrations is reworked and the links refreshed in order to increase the repertoire of founding narrations that could be played out on the local political level.

Paper short abstract:

The kundum/abisa is the traditional festival in the Ahanta and Nzema areas of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. The celebration asserts a common ancestral unity ecompassing the region, providing at the same time a ‘palimpsest’ upon which relations between groups and the territory are constantly rewritten.

Paper long abstract:

The kundum or abisa festival is presently the most important 'traditional' annual recurrence in the Ahanta and Nzema speaking areas of southwest Ghana and south-east Côte d’Ivoire. This itinerant celebration follows an east-west route, involving all the Paramountcies between Sekondi, in Ghana, and Grand Bassam, in Côte d’Ivoire. The festival cycle is a constant assertion of a common ancestral unity ecompassing the region, providing at the same time a ‘palimpsest’ upon which actual relations between groups and between groups and the territory are constantly rewritten. On both sides of the International border, the festival is a highly visible political stage, where power games are vividly acted out by local and national leaders, through their active involvement, mere presence or emphatic absence. It is also the occasion in which existing divisions in local society and conflicts between groups and individuals inevitably come to the foreground. Indeed, during the celebration expressions of discontent and harsh criticism towards established powers are customarily expected and strongly encouraged. An exquisite domain of Chieftaincy, kundum/abisa provides a unique perspective that helps us to understand current and long-term local and transborder dynamics, including the recent, macroscopic revival (or reification) of ‘traditional authorities’ in the Nzema speaking areas of Côte d’Ivoire.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the Abissa festival celebrated across the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire border as an arena where the paradoxes of partition are reproduced, negotiated and/or contested in the organisation of popular music events and in the articulation of performance aesthetics.

Paper long abstract:

The Abissa (or Kundum) is an annual itinerant festival celebrated by Nzema-speaking communities across the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire border. Starting in August in southwestern Ghana, the festival crosses the international boundary and (usually) concludes its westward journey in the ancient Ivorian capital of Grand-Bassam in early November.

While the ritual, symbolic and political aspects of the festival have been widely scrutinised, my contribution proposes to look at the Abissa as a key arena for the articulation of regional music scenes in both countries and the negotiation of transborder relations. Rather than concentrating on institutional actors and traditional politics, I will focus on the perspectives of recording artists, DJs and other cultural producers who animate the nights of ambiance during the weeklong guazo (the public phase of the festival). From the structure of events to the aesthetics of performance, Ivorian and Ghanaian iterations of the Abissa show substantial differences that reflect broader trends in their respective national contextes and reveal the presence of misunderstandings and temporal disjunctures. At the same time, they constitute an opportunity for artists to take advantage of the interplay between cultural intimacies, close relations and possible gaps of meaning to project themselves into new musical landscapes and hopefully more desirable elsewheres.

The ‘Abissa nights’ highlight the tensions and contradictions surrounding the politics and economies of popular music in the Nzema borderlands and speak to the general paradox of partitioned communities.