Kundum, and the Hunter Who Watched the Dwarfs Dance

Kundum, and the Hunter Who Watched the Dwarfs Dance

A hunter named Akpoley was deep in the bush when he heard something that should not have been there: drumming.

He went toward it carefully and found a clearing, and in the clearing the dwarfs were dancing — the little forest people, in a ring, keeping time. He watched them until he had the steps, and then he went home and taught the dance to his people, and that dance is Kundum.

It is a harvest festival and a cleansing, and it works its way along the coast: each Ahanta and Nzema town chooses its own Sunday to begin, so the festival travels town by town for weeks. The first three weeks are night drumming at the Siedu, the ritual ground on the town's edge. In the fourth week it moves to the chief's palace, where a Kundum fire is lit and kept burning, and there is sacrifice, and the chief comes out in procession, and everybody eats.

And then the dancing is used for its real purpose: to drive the evil of the past year out of the town — out through the streets, out to the edges, out. At Axim it ends at the castle.

Kundum still moves from town to town along the coast. The dance is not a footnote to Nzulezu; it is one of the ways Ahanta and Nzema communities renew their history together.

If you visit Ghana. Axim, Beyin, Takoradi and the Nzema coast — the towns take it in turn, and Nzulezu sits inside this world.