Culture · Essay
Homowo: a festival that hoots at a famine nobody alive remembers
The Ga people of Accra keep the memory of a migration famine by eating. On the thirty days of silence that precede it, the sprinkled kpokpoi that feeds the ancestors, and a festival whose name means jeering at hunger.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-21 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
The name is the argument. Homo is hunger. Wo is to hoot at something, to jeer, to make a derisive noise. Homowo is the festival at which the Ga people of Accra shout at a famine, and the famine in question is not one that anyone now alive has experienced, or that anyone can date.
The tradition holds that during their migration to the coastal plains of what is now Ghana, the Ga went through a period of severe hunger. They planted, waited, and eventually harvested enough to be safe. When the food came in, they held a feast and mocked the hunger that had nearly finished them. That feast has been held annually ever since, and its content is entirely determined by the crisis it commemorates.
Homowo does not begin with the festival. It begins with a prohibition.
Some weeks before the celebration, the traditional authorities of the Ga towns impose a ban on drumming and public noise-making. The stated reason is agricultural: the crops are in the ground, and the period is one of quiet so that the growing is not disturbed and the gods are not distracted from it. The ban is announced, it has a fixed end, and it applies across the town.
In modern Accra this is where the tradition meets the city, and the meeting has been contentious. The ban falls on a metropolitan area with a very large number of charismatic churches whose services are amplified and loud, and there have been repeated disputes, occasionally physical, between traditional enforcement and congregations who regard the prohibition as having no authority over them. The dispute recurs most years and has been the subject of negotiation, court cases and mediated agreements between Ga traditional councils and church leaders.
The disagreement is not really about noise. It is about who has the standing to declare a period sacred in a city that contains several different answers to that question.
Before the ban comes Ngmaa dumo, the planting. The maize goes in, and the festival at the end of the season depends on it having grown.
The ritual food of Homowo is kpokpoi, sometimes written kpekple: maize dough, fermented and then steamed, worked into grains and eaten with palm-nut soup. It is unmistakable, it is made only at this time of year, and it is not a delicacy in the ordinary sense. It is subsistence food, the plainest thing a household can produce from the crop it just harvested.
That is exactly why it is the ritual dish. The festival could have been marked with the richest food available. Instead the memory of a famine is kept by eating something that tastes of having only just enough. The archive here is not a document. It is a recipe that a whole population makes on the same weekend.
The central act belongs to the wulomo, the traditional priest, and to the heads of families.
Homowo in Accra. The wulomo carries a bowl of kpokpoi through the town and sprinkles it at thresholds and road junctions before anybody living eats. Photograph by Pambelle12, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Carrying a bowl of kpokpoi, the wulomo moves through the town and sprinkles it: on the ground, at thresholds, at shrines, at road junctions. The words spoken with it ask for peace, for good harvest, for the health of the town and for children. The food is being given to the ancestors and to the gods, and it is being given in the street rather than in a temple, so that the whole settlement is fed at once.
Family heads do the same thing on a household scale, at the door and around the compound, and only then do the living eat.
A day is set aside for twins, hoemeli, who hold a particular status in Ga tradition and are washed, dressed and honoured in a ceremony of their own. Fertility runs through the whole festival, which makes sense in a commemoration of famine: the point of surviving was that there would be more people afterwards.
Homowo is a homecoming. Ga people who have moved to other parts of Ghana or abroad return for it, and the towns fill with relatives who have not been seen since the previous year.
Attached to that is a formal expectation of reconciliation. Grievances within families and between families are supposed to be raised and settled before or during the festival, and the elders take an active part in it. A family that arrives at the feast still in dispute is understood to be doing the day wrongly.
This is a common feature of harvest and ancestral festivals worldwide, and it is a practical one. If a tradition depends on the extended family assembling annually, it has to contain a mechanism for dealing with the reasons people stop coming.
The greeting exchanged over the period is a wish for a peaceful year, and the response is a wish for a fruitful one.
Most memory decays because it depends on somebody choosing to recall it. Homowo does not rely on that. It has fixed the memory of a famine into a crop cycle, a prohibition, a dish, a homecoming and a set of obligations, so that a Ga family observes the hunger of its ancestors by planting maize, keeping quiet for a month, cooking a plain porridge and going home to see its cousins.
Nobody has to remember the famine for the festival to work. The festival remembers it for them, and the memory is carried in what people do with their hands.
The limitation is the same one every communal tradition runs into. Homowo preserves what happened to the Ga. It does not preserve what happened to a particular grandmother in Teshie, what she was like, or what she said when the family came home. That layer has always depended on somebody telling it, and it goes first.
Thirty days without drums
Planting, and then the food that carries the memory
The sprinkling