Life's a Happy Song: Kumasi!

This weekend I went to Kumasi!!! Kumasi is the second largest city in Ghana, with 5 million people. This was our ISEP organized excursion, so all 20 some of us went together in one bus and one small van. We left at 7:30am on Friday morning (thankfully I don’t have lectures on Fridays) and went to the Manhyia Palace Museum. Kumasi is in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, which was historically and populated by the Asante kingdom, nicknamed the kingdom of gold. The Asantes were very dominant and powerful and ruled their kingdom through chieftaincy until the British came to colonize. However, there are still chiefs today in this region although they don’t hold real political power. They settle disputes within the region and are more of a symbolic figure. If the president of Ghana comes to Kumasi, he has to greet and show respect to the Asantehene (the supreme chief of all of Asante) but ultimately the president is the one with power. Besides the chiefs there are also queen mothers, who have final say as to who is appointed the new chief. The Asantes have matrilineal lineage, so the queen mother has a decent amount of authority and women are allowed to own land, but from what I understand very few do. Anyways, the Manhyia Palace was where the Asantehene lived, but has now been turned into a museum and the chief resides elsewhere. It was really cool and I learned a lot. Unfortunately we couldn’t take any pictures inside, but there were even wax figures of the chief and the queen mother made by Madame Tussaud! It was pretty cool!

On Saturday we went to several craft villages. There was Bonwire, which is the Kente weaving village. Kente cloth is woven by hand and has very specific symbols. The cloth is a trademark of the Asantes and the most expensive kente is worn by the chief and queen mother. The village we went to was not very big but PACKED with kente. It really was pretty expensive if you wanted to get a few yards of it. They also have smaller strips that can be used to decorate clothing made of other materials or as a scarf. These were a little bit more affordable. It was really fun to barter with the vendors and I have to admit I came away pretty proud of my ability to get the price I wanted!

Then we went to Ntonso, an Adinkra Cloth Village. Here they had those same Kente strips, but you could pick a stamp of an Adinkra symbol and print in on the cloth yourself! The adinkra symbols are also an Asante thing and they have a ton of different ones with different meanings. There were even some already made with Obama’s face! I thought that was pretty funny. They showed us how the dye is made, which was really interesting. There’s bark from a tree that is pounded and then mixed with water and then concentrated I believe until it turns into the ink. After we left I saw that the lady who was going to keep doing the pounding was doing it with a baby tied to her back!!! There are some strong women in Ghana!!

After Ntonso, we went to Ahwiaa where there is a lot of wood carvings. The vendors there were really excited to see us and my friend and I had guys waiting for us to finish at one shop so that they could take us to theirs. It was a little overwhelming, but we got to bargain again which was fun. Then we went to the grand central market which was ginormous. I just looked around a little but our bus was parked in the parking lot of their basilica. I climbed up in the steeple and got a really amazing view of the city. It was beautiful! That night we ate “the best pizza in Ghana”…… definitely not impressed. Oh well! We also got to reflect on our goals and talk about our experience so far as a group. It was really nice because we haven’t all been spending time together since orientation so there were people I really got a chance to catch up with.

We left this morning at 6:00am and made it back to campus around noon. We stopped for a kind of long breakfast, but it’s about a 5-6 hour ride. Actually, on the way there we stopped at a restaurant to eat lunch and I had fufu for the first time here!! I had it with ground nut soup and it was actually pretty good. Marty and I had made fufu in St. Louis before I came, but we used the flour mix that comes in a box. They have that same stuff here and they call it “neat fufu”. This one was the real deal and it was a LOT better than the one at home! It still wasn’t very tasteful, but when you mix it with the soup it was not bad. The soup, however, was extremely spicy! I had a runny nose and I drank almost a huge water bottle as I was having the soup!! I’m glad I got to try it here though, finally! Overall it was a really great weekend and I’m glad to be able to check Kumasi off my list of places to see. :)