Today I woke up at 5am with the muezzin call to prayer reverberating in the air. We aren’t in the Muslim area of Ghana yet, but clearly we’re getting closer. Tomorrow we’re headed to northern Ghana, which is the Muslim area.
After a leisurely breakfast, Chuku and I went off to the Internet café and then took a tro-tro to Ntonso and the adinkra (stamped-cloth) maker, David. David’s a good friend of Aba Tours and happily took me around for an adinkra workshop.
As we entered the courtyard, a giant tour bus pulled up and out poured a pile of American tourists, armed with cameras, camcorders, and little headphones from which they could hear the lecture of the guide (and clearly not much else). They came swarming in, stood around the guide, took photos and videos of everything in sight, chattered to each other, and generally behaved the way you’d expect a group tour to behave. Looking at them, being herded around and fed a carefully predigested form of Ghanaian culture, reminded me of why I loathe group tours, especially large-group tours. You really don’t have time to learn anything, or to interact with anyone except your guide.
Anyway, after they’d left, David had one of his coworkers show me how to carve my own adinkra stamp. They use pieces of calabash gourd. They told me the yellow stuff smeared on the calabash was shea butter ““ apparently the shea butter sellers in the market bring the butter down from the north in calabashes, then sell the empty calabashes to the adinkra makers for a small sum.
Adinkra consists of stamped symbols. There are over 150 symbols, each of which has a different meaning, but the most popular one is one that symbolizes “Under God”. It’s carved on the gates of the King’s Palace in Kumasi.
Anyway, my teacher demonstrated carving a stamp on a calabash gourd, then had me try my own. It was both surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult. The knife was a bit dull, and was clearly sized for a hand larger than mine, so it kept slipping out of my grip. (Fortunately, I kept my fingers well away from the blade, so my skin was never in any danger.) But the gourd was quite soft, and once I got it started it went pretty smoothly. Inside of half an hour I had my own adinkra stamp!
Then David explained how they make the adinkra dye. They take badie tree bark (imported from the north), break it into big pieces, then soak it for 24 hours, then pound it in a mortar and pestle until it breaks up into very small fragments. After that, they mix it 50-50 with water and boil it until they get a rich red-brown dye. They continue to boil it down until it thickens, and looks like VERY used (black) motor oil, except with a reddish-brown tint. That’s the adinkra dye, and it’s ready for stamping.
David then dipped the stamps for me (apparently dipping and removing enough of the dye is the part that takes practice) and I stamped myself a set of six placemats. Then we went on a tour of his village (while we were waiting for the placemats to dry). After that, we went to Adanwomase (I may have the spelling wrong there), a kente-weaving village.
There’s not much to say about Adanwomase, if you’ve just spent five days studying kente weaving with a 29-year professional weaver. There were lots of kente weavers at work, mostly doing relatively simple/coarse patterns ““ I wasn’t too impressed. They were weaving Ashante-style, though, which was mildly interesting ““ they use tapestry weave techniques to create allover patterns rather than individual motifs, like the Ewe.
One interesting point came when we met the chief. He was sitting outside an open door, and the tour guide hastily explained that there had been a funeral yesterday, so to appease the gods/spirits for bringing a dead body into the ground, they had slaughtered a sheep and let the blood drain out as a libation, then made an offering of other parts of the sheep. I was nodding my understanding when I glanced through the open door and saw the sacrifice”¦a pool of blood part on a bucket, part on the floor, with flies buzzing all around”¦and the severed head of a sheep/goat with a small pile of intestines on its head. Some ribs seemed to have been piled on top of the shrine. They wouldn’t let me take a photo, which is probably just as well. Still, the sight was compelling.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow is a travel day, so don’t expect to hear much from me ““ we’re boarding a bus to Tamale at 7am, and it’s a 6 or 7 hour journey on the bus ““ a good 280 miles to Tamale, says my guide. If so, I’d be surprised if we actually make it in 6-7 hours, but, well, we’ll see. In all likelihood we’ll get there just in time to make plans for tomorrow, find a hotel, and crash.
