Aboakyer in year 3,000
This year’s Aboakyer Festival has been launched by the chiefs and people of Efutu Traditional area in traditional pomp in Winneba.
The million-dollar question is, will this festival which has become an important national festival also be launched come February the year 3,000?
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My scepticism about the survival of this important national festival for the next 100 years stems from the way we stick to the old ways of doing things.
Admittedly, traditions are conservative, but how can we sustain a national festival for the next 100 years, the climax of which is slashing the throat of wildlife animals just captured from the bush?
Within the context of climate change and rapid urbanisation that we find ourselves, it will sound like a fantasy or fairytale when a child of tomorrow reads from the history books that there was once a festival in Ghana where human beings ran to the bush to compete to capture a live animal to be slaughtered to climax the festival.
With rapid urbanisation, by the next 50 years, Accra would have swallowed Winneba and even beyond.
Climate change would also play its part and there would be no forest thriving with wildlife for them to be captured to be slaughtered annually.
Significance
Agreeably, the slaughtering of the animals has its own cultural and traditional significance, but culture and traditions have over the years gone through radical modification.
Are we not told that there were days that human beings were killed as sacrifices to the gods?
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Or situations, where chiefs were buried alongside slaughtered children who it was believed, would serve as servants to the dead chiefs in afterlife?
The effusion of time and modernisation have flushed all these archaic practices away.
Move
If Ghanaians want to sustain this important national festival, we have to move from our present catch-and-slash method to catch-and-conserve method.
Conservation of the wildlife we catch holds the key to the survival of the Aboakyer Festival.
I dream of an eco-tourism park created within Winneba and its environs where wildlife caught during Aboakyer Festivals would be released into, with each proudly bearing a tag on its ear indicating the year it was caught.
The government in that situation could donate a cow to the chiefs and people to climax the festival and also to signify the religious and spiritual significance of the festival.
In this my dream park, the animals would roam freely in secure environments where they would graze and breed.
With such a park, the festival would survive the year 3,000. This time, the race to bring the first catch to the chief would no longer be in the bush but within the confines of the park.
If we want this national event to survive the year 3,000, we have to depart from our catch-and-slash method and stick to conservation, and with that conservation, tourists would have a feel of this wildlife and flock in, in their numbers.
The writer is a lawyer. E-mail: Adomakoacheampong55@gmail.com