ABOUT MY CULTURE(DAGOMBA), STEEM GHANA CONTEST WEEK 3 @chambas
Good afternoon to you all Steemians wherever you are. I hope we are all doing great today. I Am excited this afternoon as I came on our noble platform to see such a contest running. Thanks to @nattybongo and @mcsamm for such a beautiful contest.
To start with, Dagomba is my tribe and we are the second largest ethnic group in Ghana and as well as the largest in the northern part of Ghana. And we call our king as Yaa-Naa which means, “King of Absolute Power”.
YAA-NAA and Nana Akufo Addo(President of Ghana)
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We speak Dagbani as our language and my culture is heavily influenced by the Islamic religion.
And according to our history, we migrated from Lake Chad in the 13th century to settle at our current location.
DAGOMBA TALKING DRUM(known as “Lunga”)
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“Most of our history has been passed down through deep oral tradition with drummers as professional griots”. However, our main occupation was farming until recently.
Our traditional dress is known as the Smock. “ Before they started wearing the smock, they used to dress in animal skins.”src
With regards to our traditional festivals, we celebrate fire festival (known as Bugum Chugu) as the first festival of Dagomba lunar year.
Again, we celebrate other festivals such as the Damba festival(in memory of the birth of Holy Prophet Mohammed S.A.W), kpini Chugu(“observed as a harvest offering to the gods”.src) just to mention a few.
When it comes to our traditional food/dishes, we have a lot of varieties which range from TZ, Sakoro(Fufu), Wasawasa, Gablai, Yankaha, just to mention a few.
Picture of Wasawasa
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Our Traditional Dance
We have various types of dances which are always joyful to entertain ourselves with. This includes TAKAI, JERA, Bamawa, just to mention a few. Going forward I will like to describe a bit for you especially Bamawa(my favorite) and the TAKAI.
Bamaaya is a dagomba which simply means the river or the valley is wet. And this is my favorite because it is the most popular music and dance among us as far as our culture is concerned.
And the bamaaya dance is symbolic in meaning. Dancing involves moving your feet swiftly and twisting your waist many times are you dance around the drummers. Isn’t that interesting to you, haha I guess it is.
And I hope you are shaking yourself now as you read through haha.
However before you get yourself into this particular dance, you will have to tie your waist and chin with cymbals and beads so it will make noise as your thumb your feet while dancing.
Bamaaya video you can watch
The next one is the Takai dance, this is a royal dance especially to our chiefs and princes who usually perform it on most festive occasions like the Damba festival and in most of our chief’s durbar. With this dance, it involves, as one will say, “a rotational movement or pivot turns” and swinging of your torsos, as well as stamping to the rhythms of the Gungon and Lukna, which are the only drums we use in this type of dance.
Takai video you can watch
Hopefully, you find my culture worthy of sharing it with you.
Thank you for sparing your time to read.
Ghana is such a pretty place
It's a beautiful place to be
Beautiful culture bro, i love how well you elaborated on other aspects of your culture, you tackled lots of things too, thank you for your entry
You are welcome. Thank you for the encouragement