Harvesting Food. Harvesting Fellowship.

Two months ago my research assistants (a married couple) told me fond stories about their home community’s annual yam festival held in September. As a lover of festivals—from my hometown’s Oktoberfest to New Orlean’s lesser known but still fantastic festival that celebrates the mirliton—I eagerly told them we should plan to go.  We did just that a few days ago.  We traveled to a small community just outside of the city Kintampo in the Brong Ahafo Region.  The Brong Ahafo represents an ecological transition zone.  This is where elements of the southern humid forests collide with the savanna of the north.  The region is suited for growing a lot of different crops in 2 rainy seasons.  Perhaps because of this fortuitous agro-ecological setting, this is a zone archaeologically shown to be one of the hotbeds of the origins of agriculture in West Africa.

At the most fundamental level, the yam festival is a celebration of the yam harvest.  It’s a time when yams are ready to come in from the farm and start feeding a household eager to start eating fresh yams.  If you’ve read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, yams are a centerpiece of that narrative.  The West African yam is a bit of a beast.  It’s not at all similar to the orange fleshed tuber we in the States call a yam. These yams are huge and hairy and the flesh is pretty purely white. If the soil is fertile and the rains consistent, as the Brong Ahafo is fortunate to still experience, these yams can grow to be the size of a baby. 

Worthy of a festival

To continue with this infant metaphor, the yams are cultivated in large mounds that serve as wombs to the growing yam.  In addition to building large mounds, tending to this crop involves staking the mounds so that the yam foliage has something to grow up and mulching so as to keep the sun from penetrating the mound too much. It’s a crop that many farmers consider to be the most labor intensive.  It’s also a foodstuff that many people consider to be their favorite. The West African yam is eaten steamed with various stews, fried as any tuber is fried, as well as pounded excessively into a dish that is perhaps the most ubiquitous of the West African staple meals—fufu. At the start of the yam festival, it is tradition to eat the yam lightly mashed with shea oil, salt and onion.  Once this has been consumed, people turn to fufu. I was served two fufu meals in the span of 45 minutes.

The mounds where the yams grow

And that's how you peel a yam

Mashed yam

Pounding yam for fufu--the mortars are shorter and the pestles longer than the ones used in the Upper West

My first fufu meal--served with a pumpkin seed soup and giant pieces of smoked fish from the nearby Black Volta river

The festival also represents important economic customs. The festival marks the time when farmers can start selling yams at the market.  This, I speculate, is a mechanism that helps ensure stable yam prices for farmers and consumers.  The economic purpose of the festival is also seen in each farming household  paying yams as tribute to the chief in thanks for the use of the land.  As is the case throughout Ghana, customary land rights are still widely employed in agricultural communities.  If you can farm and use the land well, you are given access to the land free of charge, minus a few token yams.

What became pretty evident to this festival lover was that the yam festival was about harvesting fellowship just as much as it was about harvesting food. People from the community who now live elsewhere return home to celebrate.  The festival marks social reunions and social traditions.  As we waited for a car to take us to the community, the station was quite abuzz, much like an airport on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  I got to witness my research assistants reunite with their friend who recently had a baby.  I further witnessed extended families having meetings to discuss how their social unit will give thanks to the land for another harvest.  

My friend's friends reunite and meet a new friend

Though we missed the most official social element of the yam festival, the chiefs dressed in their chiefly regalia to mark the start of what is a five day festival, my departure was marked with an exchange strengthening social and economic bonds.  The families of my assistants brought me a goat, a chicken and a basin of yams that I’m guessing weighed 100 pounds.  As an outsider (reportedly the first outsider to attend the yam festival), my friends’ families were honored that I came to participate in the festival.  The gifts were their way of showing that honor.  However, as an employer of their children in an economic context where securing any kind of steady pay is challenging, I’m sure these gifts mark thanks for my ability to employ their children.  As uncomfortable as such gifts may make me feel (I can’t enjoy being held responsible for a goat’s impending death, nor do I enjoy being a temporary employer),  to deny such tributes would be perhaps the most culturally insensitive thing I could do.  So, my screaming goat and squawking chicken and I boarded a cramped vehicle and rode back to the Upper West, one of us more satisfied than the others.