Fancy Dress Festival

The Fancy Dress Festival(known locally as Kakamotobi) is a masquerade festival held on Christmas to the first day of January every year by the people of Winneba in the Central region of Ghana. It is a colourful festival that features brass band music.

Dutch and British traders at the Winneba seaport began the tradition of the festival in the 19th century. Wearing assorted masks, they danced and drank in white-owned bars celebrating Christmas. Janka Abraham, who hailed from Saltpond, also in the Central region, and worked as a bar attendant at one of these bars, thought of incorporating the masquerade tradition and festival into local custom. He founded the troop known as Nobles with his friend, pharmacist A. K. Yamoah, in the Alata Kokwado neighbourhood around 1923 or 1924. People who belonged to A. K. Yamoah's football club and indoor games groups joined. Membership required the ability to speak the English language.

The members of the Nobles would gather before dawn on Christmas Day, dressed up in costumes, such as garb of doctors, nurses, teachers, ministers, pastors, farmers, fishermen, prostitutes, pastors, drivers, cowboys, sailors, angels, or even the white colonial masters. The idea was to imitate the various town professions and parody the Europeans. The troop would then parade through the streets of Winneba, backed by adaha music, and would continue all day into the evening.

The name "Fancy Dress" was used because the Egyaa group, which was made up of fishermen who spoke no English, had a hard time pronouncing the word “masquerade.” Instead, they used the term “Fancy Dress,” which they pronounced “fanti dress.”

After some years, membership in the Nobles was opened to all residents of Winneba. This led to an increase in the membership. Based on the activities of the Nobles, in 1926 the paramount chief of Winneba, Nana Kow Sackey (Ayirebi Acquah III), and his friends formed Egyaa, a second group, at Aboadze, a fishing community. The town folks referred to the Nobles as “Number One” and Egyaa as “Number Two”.

In 1930, members of the Gyateh royal family, who did not approve of Kow Sackey’s support for the Egyaa group, formed another group in the Gyateh area of Donkoyemu. Called Tumbo rusu (pronounced tumus)—which translates as the sound of the blacksmith’s anvil—the group was led by Gyateh family members Arkoful, a blacksmith, Kweku Akom, and Inkabi. It drew its membership from Catholic youths with little education from local fishing communities, and members of the nearby Winneba Catholic Church. The European priests paid for new costumes each year and for European masks, funding the group so well that it became the most highly esteemed Fancy Dress Company. One of the group's members was enamored of the character of Robin Hood, but accidentally shot the nephew of a priest in the eye with a stray arrow on Christmas Day in 1930. The tragic mishap led the groups to ban portrayal of that character in the Fancy Dress celebrations by anyone over the age of seven.

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