05/09/2026
then came the sprinkling! 🍚🇬🇭
not just anyone gets to do that part. in both homes, it was the head of the house, or someone recognised as standing in that role, who carried it out. the same logic holds across the wider community - chiefs and family heads sprinkle within their own areas. even inside a single home, there was a hierarchy to who could do what.
it starts at the doorway, moves to the corners, then finally reaches the rooms where the family actually lives. home first. the street can wait.
and then we stepped outside, and everything shifted at once.
the drumming we’d only half-heard from inside was suddenly everywhere. elders and family heads moved through the crowd with kpokpoi in hand, people gathering around them as they passed. then a gunshot cracked somewhere nearby. we jumped. properly jumped. nobody else did. people kept talking, kept moving, like nothing had happened at all.
what also stayed with us was how many generations were doing the exact same thing, side by side. an older woman moved without a single wasted movement. younger relatives trailed behind her, still figuring out where they fit. a small child was being carried around, far too young to understand any of it, but already right there in the middle of it anyway. nobody sat that child down and explained the order of things. they were simply born into it.
once the sprinkling was done, the living got to eat. families gathered around the kpokpoi, served in earthen bowls, sharing the meal together. after all the ritual and the procession and the offering to those no longer here, there was this quiet moment of just sitting down and eating. hunger remembered, abundance shared.
we’d read about what homowo means. but standing in that street, watching it actually happen in real time, turned it from something we’d studied into something we witnessed. we had no claim on any of it. we were close enough to watch, nothing more.
later, once the crowd had thinned, we walked past a small bowl of kpokpoi sitting untouched on a ledge outside a house we’d never stepped into. no one nearby. it sat there anyway, still doing its job.
🌍