Ho

Ho is an Ewe town, founded by families who moved west from Notsé, in present-day Togo, in the wave of migrations that Ewe tradition dates to the seventeenth century and explains as an escape from the tyranny of King Agokoli. The settlers of the Asogli state established themselves among the hills below Adaklu, in quarters — Bankoe, Ahoe, Heve and Dome among them — that still structure the town's chieftaincy. It was a farming place rather than a trading port, inland from the lagoon states of the coast and well away from the European forts.

The nineteenth century brought the missionaries. The North German Missionary Society, the Bremen mission, began work among the Ewe from the 1840s, reducing the language to writing, translating scripture and founding schools and congregations that became the Evangelical Presbyterian Church — an institution that still marks Ho's skyline and its school system. Political control followed trade and mission: the hinterland here was claimed by Germany as part of Togoland in 1884, and Ho was administered from Germany's district stations until the First World War.

British and French forces took Togoland in 1914, and the western part, Ho included, passed to Britain as a mandate and later a UN trust territory. In the plebiscite of 1956 the territory voted to join the Gold Coast, and Ho entered independent Ghana in 1957. It was made the capital of the Volta Region, and government offices, a regional hospital, secondary schools and, from 2011, a university built around health sciences have made administration and education the town's business ever since. The Oti Region, approved by referendum in December 2018 and inaugurated in 2019, cut away the region's northern half.

Ho is the seat of the Asogli state, and its chieftaincy is visible in a way the quiet streets are not: the Agbogbomefia, the paramount chief, presides over a hierarchy of divisional chiefs and queen mothers whose ceremonial year peaks at the Asogli Yam Festival in September, when a durbar fills a field with umbrellas, palanquins, linguists' staffs and drumming, and the new yam is ritually eaten.

Ewe is the language of the town, and Ewe cultural forms are its pride. Agbadza, danced with a bent back and beating arms, and borborbor, a brighter recreational dance with brass and bells, are performed at funerals, festivals and church occasions alike. Drumming schools and cultural troupes work through the region, and Ewe drumming is studied well beyond Ghana.

Christianity is strong and mostly Presbyterian and Catholic in older families, a legacy of the Bremen and Catholic missions, with Pentecostal churches growing alongside; traditional shrines and vodu practice persist in and around the town without much publicity. Funerals are the biggest social events of all, announced on posters and held weeks after a death, with matching cloth, all-night wakes and hundreds of guests. Ewe kente, woven in narrow strips at Agotime Kpetoe east of Ho, is worn for these occasions and is distinct in pattern from the Asante cloth.

About 180,000 people lived in the Ho municipality at the 2021 census, which makes it a middling Ghanaian town rather than a city, and it feels that way: low buildings, a lot of trees, and hills at the end of most streets. Government is the main employer, followed by the university and the teaching hospital, schools, banks and trade; farming — maize, cassava, yams, vegetables and some cocoa and coffee in the hills — supports the villages that ring the town and supplies its market.

People live in the old quarters on the slopes and in newer bungalow districts spreading along the Accra, Aflao and Hohoe roads, with student housing clustering near the campuses. Shared taxis and motorbikes cover the distances; car ownership is higher among the civil-service households than in the surrounding countryside.

The day starts before six, with market trading and office hours done by early afternoon and the evening given to grilled food, drinking spots, church meetings and football on television. Young people leave for Accra in numbers, and remittances and returning families are part of the local economy. Water and power interruptions, the state of the feeder roads into the hills and the cost of living are the standing complaints; Ho's ambitions to draw more of the region's tourist traffic are a regular subject of local debate.

Ho eats Ewe food. The staple is akple, a smooth, slightly sour dough of maize flour that is pinched off by hand and dipped into soup — most often fetri detsi, an okra soup thickened until it draws, or a palm-nut or groundnut soup, with goat, beef or fish. Abolo, a lightly sweet steamed maize bread, and yakayake, steamed cassava grains, are eaten with the same stews, and kenkey and banku appear everywhere.

Fish comes inland from the Keta lagoon and Lake Volta, smoked, salted or fried; abɔbitadi, a herring stew with tomatoes and pepper, is a household standard. Beyond the Ewe dishes, the town eats the national repertoire: waakye for breakfast and lunch, jollof rice, red red with fried plantain, fufu in light soup, and grilled tilapia with banku and shito in the evening. Kelewele, spiced fried plantain cubes, is sold from braziers after dark.

Palm wine is tapped in the surrounding country and drunk fresh; because it ferments within a day it is also distilled into akpeteshie, the strong local gin, poured at funerals and libations as well as in bars. Sobolo, the deep red hibiscus drink, and sachet water are what most people carry through the heat.