There are intriguing festivals all year round in Ghana that you should experience at least once in your lifetime. Traditional festivals erupt with remarkable cultural and historical propensity. Art, food and music festivals come with creative dynamism, outstanding street tastes, and exciting rare rhythms!
The vibrant CHALE WOTE Street Art Festival, which gathered over 30,000 people last year, marks exchanges between Ghana-based artists/educators and international cronies in Accra’s streets. The multi-disciplinary community-based experience takes place in Jamestown; one of Accra’s most historic communities used as a port for movement, sales and confinement during days of exploitation and systematization of colonialism. It is such a refreshing, alternative platform to reconnect with intuitive concepts engineered for free form call-and-response expressions through performance, conversations and extensions of culture. The seventh annual CHALE WOTE Street Art Festival took place in Accra, Ghana from August 14th to 20th, 2017 on the theme: Wata Mata, the final installment of the trilogy (others being African Electronics and Spirit Robot)
Sabolai is the must-experience African indie music showcase which happens annually in Accra every December. There’s the best of original music from the mainstream and alternative scene, the contemporary scape to traditional tableau, fusions and non-conventional streams. 2019 is its eighth year, and we look forward to jam at the centre of the earth with you.
Nkabom Literary Festival goes out to network poets, novelists and spoken word artists with photographers, DJs, painters, illustrators, theatre artists, musicians, etc; with the inter-weaving of diverse content magnifying the perimeters that literature in commonplace is thought to accomplish. This year, the theme is ‘Unscrambling Africa’ and it runs in Accra from August 23rd to 26th.
Food lovers from Accra and worldwide meet to check out the mouth-watering plates in variegated tasting tents for affordable prices. Traditional and non-traditional cuisines serve the best of food and drinks from Ghana and other parts of the world in a pleasant ambiance. In its fourth year running, Accra’s kid-friendly festival promises to be a gastronomic paradise on September 23rd and 24th, 2017 from 11am to 7pm.
PANAFEST “the year of return”
Pan-African Festival of Art and Culture showcases aspects of historical and cultural legacy and endowment. PANAFEST was started by the late Efua Sutherland in the mid 1980’s as a project to influence homecoming for Africans all around the world. Roy ‘Gramps’ Morgan, a leading member of US-based family reggae group Morgan Heritage, was made an Ambassador of the 2017 Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival on May 23rd. 2017’s edition which marks the 25th anniversary starts on July 25th.
This year’s (2019) celebration was being held under the theme: “Uniting the Africa Family” with “Beyond 400 years: reaching across continents into the future” was the sub-theme.
The event was a master show of culture, custom and the best of African tradition as paramount chiefs in the Region rode in beautifully crafted palanquins and adorned in rich traditional regalia as they embarked on a royal procession from Abura to the durbar grounds at the New Cape Coast Sports Stadium.