Hohoe

Hohoe is the principal town of the Gbi, an Ewe group whose tradition traces their movement west from Notsé, in present-day Togo, before they settled on these slopes. The towns and villages of the Gbi traditional area — Hohoe, Gbi Wegbe, Gbi Bla, Gbi Kledzo and others — grew as farming communities on fertile slopes, trading kola, palm oil and foodstuffs along paths that ran east into what is now Togo rather than south to the coast, and the area lay outside the reach of the coastal states and the European forts.

From 1884 the hills were claimed by Germany as part of Togoland. German officials, planters and the North German Missionary Society, the Bremen mission, introduced cocoa and coffee to these slopes, built roads and schools and founded the congregations that became the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and Hohoe became a local administrative and market centre. German rule ended when British and French forces took Togoland in 1914; the western part, including Hohoe, was administered by Britain as a mandate and then a United Nations trust territory.

In the plebiscite of 1956 the territory voted to join the Gold Coast, and Hohoe entered independent Ghana the following year, with the border leaving relatives and farms on the Togolese side and a long habit of cross-border movement. The town has lived since on cocoa, food farming and trade, with a nursing and teacher training tradition, a district hospital and a university campus adding institutional employment. From the 1990s the community tourism projects at Wli, Tafi Atome and Afadja gave it a second identity as the base for the Volta highlands.

This is Ewe country, and Hohoe's public life runs through the Gbi chieftaincy: a paramount chief with divisional chiefs and queen mothers, linguists carrying carved staffs, and a festival at which the state appears in full, with umbrellas, palanquins and drumming. Stools and land are held in trust for lineages, and disputes over both are settled as much by custom as by the courts.

Drumming and dance belong to every occasion. Agbadza, danced with the body bent and arms beating like wings, borborbor with its brass and bells, and the funeral repertoires are performed by town groups, church bands and school troupes. Funerals themselves are the largest gatherings of all, announced on posters, held weeks after a death, with matching cloth, all-night wakes and hundreds of guests who come from Accra and abroad.

The Evangelical Presbyterian Church, rooted in the Bremen mission, and the Catholic Church are long established, with Pentecostal congregations growing quickly, while traditional shrines and vodu practice continue quietly alongside them. Sacred groves and the protected monkeys at nearby Tafi Atome show how religious ideas and conservation have reinforced one another. The Zongo quarter adds a Muslim, largely northern, community with its own mosque and trading links, and Hausa is the second market language after Ewe.

Hohoe is one of the larger towns of the Volta Region — the surrounding municipality counted about 167,000 people at the 2010 census — but it is still a place where most people know the market by stall rather than by name. Farming underlies everything: cocoa and coffee on the hill slopes, plus cassava, maize, plantain, yams, cocoyam, oil palm and vegetables, much of it sold through the market to traders who truck it to Accra and Ho.

Alongside farming and trade, the hospital, the schools, the teacher and nursing training institutions and a university campus provide salaried work, and the community tourism sites in the hills give guiding, lodging and food income to several villages. Many young people still leave for Accra or abroad, and remittances show in the newer houses on the edges of town.

Life starts early: farms are worked before the heat, the market is busiest in the morning, and by evening the streets belong to grills, drinking spots, church meetings and football. Motorbikes have largely replaced walking for short distances. Cocoa prices, feeder roads that break up in the rains, water supply and power cuts are the standing concerns, and the border with Togo a few kilometres east remains part of ordinary economic life.

Hohoe eats Ewe food. Akple, a smooth and slightly sour maize dough, is pinched by hand and dipped into fetri detsi, an okra soup thickened until it draws, or into palm-nut or groundnut soup with goat, beef or fish. Banku and kenkey are eaten the same way, and abolo, a lightly sweet steamed maize bread, and yakayake, steamed cassava grains, appear beside the same stews.

The hills supply the rest of the table: plantain roasted at the roadside with groundnuts, cassava pounded into fufu or grated into gari, cocoyam leaves and garden eggs in soups, and avocados, oranges and pineapples in season. Fish comes up from the Keta lagoon and across from Lake Volta, smoked or salted, and the national dishes — waakye for breakfast, jollof rice, red red with fried plantain, grilled tilapia with banku and shito — are everywhere. In the Zongo the food is northern: khebab skewers, koose and koko.

Palm wine is tapped in the surrounding farms and drunk fresh within a day, or distilled into akpeteshie, the strong local gin used in libations at festivals and funerals as well as drunk in bars. Sobolo, the tart red hibiscus infusion, palm-nut and coconut drinks and sachet water are the everyday refreshments.