Performing Ferocity: Fancy Dress, Asafo, and Red Indians in Ghana

It is good entertainment. It is part of our culture.”1 The words of tailor Francis Kodwo Coker sum up how the lively secular masquerade known as Fancy Dress has become an integral part of local celebrations in coastal Ghana today (Fig. 1). Adopted by Ghanaians in the early twentieth century from a European form of masked ball popular during the Victorian era, Fancy Dress arrived through Black Atlantic connections and for a variety of reasons. This article will address the hybridity of Fancy Dress and, more specifically, the hybrid origins of a character known as the “Red Indian,” which was performed during the twentieth century and, to a lesser degree, sometimes appears in the twenty-first century (Fig. 2). The Red Indian is an appropriation of the Plains warrior, a stereotype generated by American media when depicting Native North Americans. The Red Indian has been a widely popular character, the only character adopted by asafo groups as well as Fancy Dress. Asafo, an old Akan institution with paramilitary and community responsibilities, utilizes performance at ritual celebrations and serves as a local inspiration for Fancy Dress performance. Fancy Dress and characters like the Red Indian exemplify the selection and transformation process, according to artists and individuals who are exercising a complex set of personal and cultural preferences. Such agency has broad applicability to worldwide Carnival forms. Seeing the development of the Red Indian character as a hybrid form through the theoretical model of “cultural authentication” offered by Tonye Victor Erekosima and Joanne Bubolz Eicher (1981:51) provides a deeper understanding of the fluid creativity and political undercurrents in festival arts of the Black Atlantic World. Fancy Dress Fancy Dress participants comprise young men and sometimes women between the ages of three and forty-five; the majority are in their teens and twenties, with leaders in their thirties and forties. While most identify themselves as Fante, an Akan subgroup who dominate Ghana’s Central Region, members from Effutu, Ahanta, Ga, and other coastal communities are also involved (Fig. 3). Fancy Dress street parading (walking) involves periods of intense dancing in front of chiefs’ palaces, hotels, and public squares. In competitions, like those in Winneba, five performance elements including costume inspection, a “march pass” (similar to parading), and three different types of dancing are judged. Tailors, often group members, craft the patchwork and striped costumes. These are paired with either a local mask made of cloth, wire mesh, or papier-mache, or a rubber animal or horror mask purchased in Accra and Takoradi or imported from America (though most are made in China) and given to the members by friends and patrons. A headdress constructed of fiber, cloth, Christmas garland, and/or mirrors may be added. Early travel journals, colonial records, and coastal newspapers did not document this performance art in Ghana, and scholars have shown remarkably little interest in it. John Kedjanyi (1966, 1968) was the first to write about Fancy Dress in the 1960s, in two brief articles. It was not until 1977 that art historians Herbert Cole and Doran Ross documented Fancy Dress in their book The Arts of Ghana. Elmina participants told Cole and Ross that Fancy Dress was inspired by Europeans, particularly the Dutch, as an alternative to violent asafo in-fighting (Cole and Ross 1977:185–86). Several decades later, Kwesi Ewusi Brown (2005) documented the history and current politics of Fancy Dress in the port town of Winneba in his master’s thesis for a degree in music. Anthropologist Keith Nicklin and historian Jill Salmons