Kumasi and the Core of the Ashanti Culture

The sixth region I have visited is nothing else, but the Ashanti Region, which is the center where most of Ghana`s traditions originated from. The story of this area looks somehow like this:

Once upon a time there was a powerful kingdom, called Asante (or Ashanti Kingdom). It was founded by King Osei Tutu in the eighteenth century. His powerful priest, Okomfo Anokye based the unity of the kingdom by a Golden Stool that mysteriously descended from heaven to unify the Asanti states. Besides the Golden Stool, there were two other symbols that provided unity: a sword that was placed into the ground and could never be removed and also a bag that could never be opened, otherwise the unity of the people would fall apart. The kingdom was ruled by the king and the queenmother – the king always sat on a golden stool (but not real one of course!), while the queenmother was seated on a wooden stool. The two of them together ruled and took care of the people of the kingdom, that in the in the eighteenth century was even larger than the current Ghana. Whenever a king died, some of his people volunteered to be killed so that the king could be accompanied by them to death. Also, his stool was painted black and named after him (if he was a good king – if he wasn`t, they didn`t name any stool after him). The next king was always appointed by the queenmother from the male side of the family. After this point the new king didn`t use his former name any more, instead, with his eyes closed he touched the black stool of the king who passed away, and this way, he got his name as well.

The Ashantis were peaceful people, who liked celebrating various events. For example for them one month didn`t consist of 30 or 31 days, but 42 – and in every 42 days they celebrated the days passed and gave thanks to the gods for what they have received from them in the past month.

Although they were very peaceful, at the same time they were also ready to defend themselves if needed – either by power or tricks. In the nineteenth century when the British wanted to colonize the Ashanti Kingdom, they heard about the Golden Stool that was said to hold the strength of Asante. They demanded this stool from the Ashantis, but at last they got a fake stool – still, it took them decades to find out that they were tricked. Besides this, the people of Asante did go to war, too: these times they were wearing thick clothes on which various bones and stones were hanged that all held magical power to protect the soldiers. The last uprising against the British was in 1901, led by a brave queenmother, Yaa Asantewaa, who was already 65 years old when she led her people against the British!!! Still, after she was captured and taken to the Seychelles, where she died at the age of 85, the Ashanti Kingdom was colonized by the British and only gained independence again in 1957 as a part of the current Ghana. 

Based on this strong culture, today you can find a busy metropolitan city, Kumasi (it has about 3.5 million inhabitants!!) in the middle of the former Asante. The streets are full of people rushing from one place to another, selling and buying all kinds of goods or apparently trying to get a trotro to get to work or get home from there. One of Ghana`t largest markets can be found in Kumasi, too, which is always crowded – ot would be pretty hard to go against the crowd there. Getting a trotro is not easy either, usually you have two choice: to wait in a queue for a long-long time or to travel in a big circle all around the city to finally get home. Altogether in Kumasi I felt like that it was a large, moving and living city where everybody is busy doing whatever he has to do to make a living. 

But at the same time under the layer of the metropolitan city, the Ashanti traditions are still alive, too: besides the government, the area is still ruled by the king and the queenmother as well and they still celebrate various festivals, when the king and the queenmother come out, too, they are carried on richly decorated seats and dance to the traditional beats of the Ashanti drums.

Besides, if you only have a few days to discover the culture of the Ashanti people – like we had now - , you can gain an insight by visiting Manhyia Palace, which was the former home of the kings, and also the Cultural Center where besides the museum (with a very friendly lady to show us around) there are also various art crafts for sale.

Well, I`m really happy that I got to experience this region as well – I guess without seeing Kumasi, I couldn`t have said that I really understood what Ghana was about.

Kundum Festival (Western Region of Ghana)

This weekend I added two more regions of Ghana to the four that I have already seen (Greater Accra, Eastern, Volta and Central Regions), meaning that now I have been to six regions out of all the ten!!!

Now I`m going to write about my experience in the Western Region, where last week the people celebrated the famous Kundum Festival. This traditional festival is celebrated by the chiefs and the people of the region: starting in Takorade, which is the capital of the region, and then followed by town to town – every week it`s celebrated in different towns and villages.

The core part of the festival is the special Kundum dance, when people dance around and around to the beats of the drums played in the middle of the circle. Earlier it used to be also a time to show off with beautiful dresses, although today most of the people don`t wear their traditional dresses any more for the festival.

Well, we spent two days here, in the Western Region, during which I could get a taste of the festival: I got to experience the drumming and dancing both in the evening and early in the morning. I didn`t see too many people in traditional dresses, instead some of them were wearing crazier and crazier outfits: some people had white paintings on their faces, while others were wearing strange helmets.  Some of them where dancing around with children sitting on their children, others had whistles to provide some additional beat to the drums. Although first I felt more like an outsider trying to take pictures of this extraordinary event, soon I found myself between some of the people of the village, moving around the circle too and trying to imitate their dance. It was really a lot of fun, although again, I couldn`t really avoid getting into the center of the attention – it seems my skin was glowing too much in the dark… :)

Anyway, I think pictures can tell you more details than words, so here are some shots taken at Kundum Festival: 

School Activities

Although last time I wrote about how much the very small children are supposed to know here, it would be pretty far from to truth to say that at Emmanuel School everything is just about learning. Dealing with the students as whole persons who for example also need to have fun time, have common activities, or experience spirituality is just as important objective of the school as providing knowledge. The school`s motto is nothing else, but `Integrity, Knowledge and Power`, in which I think `integrity` refers perfectly to this concept: the goal of treating a child as a whole person with all different kinds of needs, not just somebody who is here to be taught.

As I see this objective is represented in a lot of ways: in the forms of the assemblies every morning (where they sing together the national and a school anthem), the worshiping every Wednesday morning (which also includes a lot of singing here) and the form of the school activities every Friday. These include various fun activities that the children can all enjoy together. One Friday for example they had a competition of filling up bottles with water that they had to carry in their hand, and also eating apple that was tied up over their head. Another day it was poetry recital, then next week we had  spelling competition. Although the smallest children are not always part of these afternoon activities, but sometimes we also have separate activities for the children in nursery and kindergarten. Last Friday for example we also had a competition, where they had to fill bottles with different colours of water, during which besides having fun (they really enjoyed it!) they also had an opportunity to practice the names of the colours.

This Friday our school activity was a lot fun, too: the members of the French club performed a play in French, where they presented the news of Emmanuel School for the first week of the reopening. We had two people presenting the news and also some reporters who `went to the field` and took interviews with some of the teachers and students (who were of course also all acted by students). They asked the administrator for example about how he felt about the reopening, they asked some new students about why they came to this school, then they asked the pastor who came for worship on the first week about why is it important to worship at school. Even I was the part of the play: I was asked about my opinion about the school and supposedly I said that that I love it here a lot and I like all the people at the school, too (which is very true! :)). They even had a guy who was acting the cameraman, filming the news! It was really a fun activity that the audience (meaning the other children and the teachers (enjoyed a lot, too).

Here you can watch the whole video of the sketch as well, so feel free to click on the video bellow: :)

Again another week we had a program like this: we had a quiz show which included all kinds of questions starting from English grammer and later continuing with general knowledge about Ghana's history and also some questions concerning current changes in the government and including the names of the new ministers. All classes starting from class five were represented by two people whom the questions were asked. In the case they couldn't give a correct answer withing a ceratin time, the question was passed to the next pass as a bonus question. Just like at every school activity all the other kids were present as an audience so that they could cheer for their class and also learn from the competition.
You can also watch the videos of the qiuz show under the following links: (For me the most interesting part was part 3, since that's the one which is about the history of Ghana.)


Quiz Show Part 1
Quiz Show Part 2
Quiz Show Part 3
Quiz Show Part 4

Lets See the Teaching Plan: What are the Four-Year-Olds Supposed to Know Here?

Since nowadays I spend all my day in one class, namely kindergarten 1, I thought that it makes sense to write a little bit about the content of the education - in more simple words: to write about what these little kids learn here. Alright, children here already start actual learning in the nursery, which usually means the age of 3-4. By the time they go to kindergarten 1, they are already supposed to be able to write the alphabet from a – z and also write numbers from 1 – 50 (although this doesn`t happen in the case of every child…).

As I said, since we reopened in September, I`m teaching K.G. 1  (Kindergarten 1) together with another teacher – although considering that there are almost 35 children in our class, lots of times the two of us doesn`t seem to be enough at all, I often feel that if I had 10 clones of me then that would be almost enough. But anyway, at the beginning of the year we mostly revised the letters and the numbers with these children. Since then that from maths they have a lot of matching exercises– like matching certain numbers of object with a written number. From English they are learning simple grammar, like the use of `a` and `an`, learn how to read two letter words and later also three letter words. From letter to letter they learn the phonetics, too, so that they won`t only be able to say the alphabetic sound, but also the phonetic one, which will make reading a lot easier for them. We also have picture reading here which means for example having pictures of different activities and saying simple sentences with them – like `He is bathing.` or `She is cooking`. A lot of time is spent with drawing and writing, which includes copying of `uuuu` and `mmm` patterns and also different patterns of lines, as well as copying different words, but developing skills of art and creativity is also an important part of the teaching plan. They also have science, from which the most recent topic was for instance making a difference between living and non-living things. Besides all these we also have to prepare them for practical life: this week for example we learnt how to bath properly: from the top of their head down to the toes. 

All these is happening half in the form of frontal teaching, half in the form of individual learning, during which we also help them with their work. It`s true that it`s not always easy to be at 35 places at the same time to help them, give them enough erasers and pencils (which is a usual problem) and also mark their work, but it`s really-really worth it and it`s a fun thing to do too! :) I hope I already made you feel like you should be a volunteer here, because the school would happily welcome any enthusiastic candidate! :)

Related to the topic you can see some more pictures here.

A Little Addition to the Wedding Ceremonies

Although a long time ago I have already written about a wedding ceremony that actually happened on my very second day in Ghana, I think it`s time to give you a little update about it again. I think it`s always the same way when you are getting to know something new (a new culture, a new person): at first you mark some of the differences and you think that you have understood something of the unknown, but later when you stop being an outsider and start getting involved, you realize that you hardly understood anything. Well, at least this is how I feel about the wedding ceremonies for instance…

The other weekend one of the school founder`s daughter got married. Alright, first of all I have a feeling that here the parents opinion about the ideal partner for their child counts a lot more that at home: without the permission of the parents a marriage would be a pretty difficult thing to carry out. Still before the engagement  there's a period of time called 'knocking' during which the families have time to make some investigation about the other family: they want to make sure that there's no genetic disease or unpleasent personality trait in the other family. Jumping a bit in time, about the actual marriage I was told that the preparations already started weeks before the ceremony, when the two families met to discuss the marriage: mostly the financial aspects – which means that they agreed about what presents and how much money the bride`s family was asking for in turn of the marriage. The man's family is supposed to give pre give presents to the bride's mother ofr giving birth to her, to her father for raising up her and to her brothers for taking care of her and scraing away all the other men who would want to marry her. To me all these show that the woman is highly respected and considered to be of a great value. The actual ceremony stared with a traditional part, just for the two families that this time was held on the school property. At first only the family members were present – the presents were given to the girl`s family. (Unfortunately since the ceremony was held in twi – the local language – I could only mostly follow it.) Later the guy`s family brought in the groom. He was asked some questions – like if he was sure that he wanted to marry the girl. Then before bringing in the bride, her family was asking for some more money: they said that otherwise they wouldn`t give the bride to the groom. All this of course also involved a lot of music and dancing. I was also told that this money question is already more like a playful thing nowadays, but in the old days it used to be pretty serious. After all these the bride`s family brought her in, too, and she was also asked some questions before she could take her seat next to the groom. She wasn`t wearing the typical white European wedding dress anyway, instead she had a beautiful blue and white Ghanaian dress. During this ceremony – which also involved a lot of singing and praying – a pastor was present as well, who at the end gave the rings to the bride and the groom and held a pretty similar speech to those ones that we have at an average European wedding ceremony. At the end, the two families also made a pledge that if  any problem occur between the couple, they are not going to get involved – although I was also told, that lots of time this doesn`t become the reality. Since hospitality is also very important to Ghanaians (which means that if you host somebody, you are pretty much supposed to give some food or something like that to them), at the end of this traditional ceremony, all the guests were given some packs of snacks, too. 

After this ceremony in the morning, a few hours later we also attended a ceremony at the church, where already a lot more guests were present. Here most of the ceremony sounded familiar, too, but an additional part was for example, that before signing their names as a confirmation of the marriage, the freshly married couple also had to kneel down so that they can be blessed by the pastor and also a lot of others. Besides, after all these we still stayed there for more prayer and dancing.

Finished with the ceremony at the church, we went to a very elegant hotel`s garden, where we still had some speeches, they cut the wedding cake and food was also served to everybody. 

An other interesting part though, that at the school property, we actually had a two-day-long party: a lot of the guest stayed at the school property all weekend, during which they were enjoying some music and drinks as well.