Covid-19 and the Celebration of the Fetu Afahye Festival in Ghana

Festivals are important occasions that African societies have used to bring members together to foster unity and forge development of the communities. Traditional leaders also use festival to propitiate the ancestral spirits and deities to help dispel evil in the society. Throughout the year, festivals and durbars are held in various parts of the country for reunions and developmental purposes, and to the strengthen beliefs of the society. Festivals help the community and people to forge a closer bond with their ancestors and to ask for their protection. Festivals are also held in order to purify the whole state so that people can enter the New Year with confidence and hope. This paper, uses newspapers, interviews, major secondary works and articles on the internet as a source of data. It also uses qualitative and phenomenological methods to assess the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the celebration of the Fetu Afahye festival among the people of Cape Coast (Oguaa) in Ghana. The advent of the pandemic in Ghana altered the lives of the people in the traditional society since it led to the cancellation of the celebration of their festivals. The paper also examines how the non-observance of such festivals, especially the Fetu Afahye, impacted the ritual lives of the people. The paper concludes that even though a ban was placed on the celebration of festivals, due to its significance the traditional leaders found a way to perform the rituals associated with them in the face of the pandemic. This was done in order to avoid incurring the wrath of the sacred and to give the members in the community a sense of identity.