Hail to the king, baby

Day 20 - Kumasi

Today is the Akwasidae festival, a celebration of Ashanti traditions and rituals. The ceremony is centred around the Ashanti king and nobles who attend in full traditional dress, including ornate gold jewellery, surrounded by elders and advisors. 

We started with a tour of the old Ashanti king's palace, which is now a museum. It included some interesting objects from days gone by, such as the first wireless radio in Ghana, and the refrigerator from the 1950s that was still working, as well as lots of gold artefacts (Ghana was previously known as the Gold Coast).

There was still some time before the Akwasidae festival would start, so we spent a short time walking through the Kumasi market. This one was very busy and covered quite a large area.

It was a short walk from there to the site of the king's festival. The festival is held every 42 days, but this one was a special one because it was the first festival of the year. It was also good for us because it was being held around the same time as the Voudon Festival in Benin, it's quite rare for the two festivals to occur so close together. 

We were given great seats to see the various chiefs and their entourages arrive as we were half way between the street entrance and the main entrance to the arena. It was an incredible experience with guns being discharged regularly (firing blanks fortunately), at the beginning we were jumping in shock but before too long we were used to it. There were so many chiefs with their offsiders carrying massive ornate umbrellas and accompanied by their own drummers. The explosion of vivid colours, music, dancing and joy was spectacular. 

After a couple of hours the King arrived in a car, we could tell it was the king as a mass of people converged on the car. The king exited and was transferred to a chair (he supposedly is not allowed to walk on the ground), then he was carried through to the main area where all of the other chiefs were. There was a huge throng trying to get a glimpse of the king, M managed to get close enough for a photo, but it was very packed and everyone else of course was trying to do the same thing. 

That's him

Once the King had passed through it was time to leave, but on returning to the car park we found that our vans had been blocked in. We waited for a while but eventually decided that lunch was more important, so we flagged down taxis to get to Ike's Café and Grill, which was by a small lake and very popular with the locals. The highlight of the lunch was probably when we had to provide instructions from Google to the chef so he could make a cheese and tomato sandwich!

We ended the day back at the same hotel as the previous night.