The masqueraders’ festival has been held in Cape Coast, the former capital of Ghana, to usher in the Year of Return and Panafest celebrations.
The groups of masquerades from Cape Coast and Winneba treated the audience to splendid dances and acrobatic displays, which lasted for six hours.
The event was held at Victoria Park in Cape Coast, which is located on the shores of the blue Atlantic Ocean from which the slaves were ferried abroad during the slave trade.
More than 4,000 people watched the historic event. Heads of government institutions, departments and agencies, traditional authorities, students, traders, security agencies, fishermen and foreigners thronged the venue to watch the beautiful and colourful festival.
The festival was used to whip up local interest for the Year of Return celebration and make them to own the event. Panafest and Emancipation Day celebration recorded massive patronage in 1992, when the festival was first celebrated in Ghana.
During the celebration, famous diaspora musicians like Steve Wonder, Muta Barouka, late Joseph Hill of Culture fame and Isaac Hayes and academicians, including Professor James Small, a former history teacher of University of New York, among others participated in the celebration.
The large patronage continued in 1994, where a great number of Africans in the diaspora took part in the Panafest and Emancipation Day. It was during that period that some diasporans like Rabbi Kohain Helevi now the Executive Secretary of the Panafest Foundation repatriated to Ghana from the U.S.
After that period, the patronage dwindled and the situation was made worse after September 11, 2001 terrorists attack on the US, which affected movements of airlines across the world. The West stopped patronizing the festival and it nearly collapsed. Six years after, the festival was revived through “Joseph Project” which tells the story of how Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery.
Meanwhile, the Government of Ghana recognizing the importance and the power of the Panafest and Emancipation to attract investments and quality of humans resource from the diaspora, has injected some funds into the celebration, which coincides with 400 years of slave trade on the West Coast of Africa, perpetuated by European merchants.
The Masqueraders’ festival is one of the activities lined up to mark the Year of Return and the local people have bought into the idea, which in a way lightened the sky for the celebration.
Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo graced the event with his large entourage.
DAP/GIK/APA