Kwahu Easter is, first of all, not Kwahu’s traditional festival. Kwahu, just like many Akan tribes, celebrates Akwasidae – which is Kwahu’s transitional festival.
The Easter festivities in Kwahu can best be described as a homecoming for Kwahus. Actually, that is how the popular revelling season began on the mountains. It started as a homecoming for Kwahus in the diaspora, especially those in Accra.
The majority of Kwahus live in the Greater Accra Region as compared to mainland Kwahu. This move to the capital city as well as overseas was for trade and commerce. Kwahus are known to be predominantly traders and businessmen and women, who travel far and wide to trade.
In Accra, it is no coincidence that you would find the majority of Kwahus in trading centres such as Abossey Okai, Kantamanto, Okaishie, CMB, among others. Aside from their commercial life, they also reside in principal areas of the capital city including Kokomlemle, Adabraka, Dansoman, Pokuase, and Amasaman, among other areas. This has left mainland Kwahu to become more like a ‘deserted town’ where the majority of its youth and working class are abroad making ends meet, living a few of them and the aged behind back home. However, they return home often to build properties, especially magnificent buildings, which they hope to return to when they retire and go back to their homeland.
Kwahus with most of them being traders and businessmen and women often couldn’t go to their hometown during the Christmas festivities as it was a season of cashing in on sales, so they couldn’t leave to visit families on the mountains, because most of them were in Accra’s busy business districts trading.
Nonetheless, they realized the Easter holidays as a flexible period to visit their families in Kwahu. It was these visits during the Easter holidays that propelled the Kwahu Easter phenomenon. They would often visit the mountains with friends from Accra and other parts of the country. It became somewhat customary that often colleagues in Accra would join the Kwahus to visit their families so that they could catch glimpse and experience their bespoke natural, tourist sites as well as the chilly weather.
It was not surprising that later on it became an annual homecoming for them to return home within the Easter season for family and community meetings in Kwahu. This has been sustained to date among the Kwahus and other Ghanaians and even foreigners who troop into the chilly mountains for their revelling moments during the Easter holidays.
Over the years, the holidays on the Kwahu mountains have become more interesting with the introduction of the Paragliding event which was introduced in 2005 to complement the holidays. International pilots come from other parts of the globe to fly parachutes at the Odweanoma Paragliding site to mainland Nkawkaw. This in particular has given Kwahu Easter global prominence.
To conclude, Kwahu Easter has come to stay. Nonetheless, regulations needs to be put in place by the government and the traditional authority in Kwahu to make the festivities worth its prominence and status as not just an event of merry-making but one that drives economic growth and development in tourism.
Compile by Jesse Kwadwo Owusu Ampah
(Kwahu History Society; Kwahu Connect)
