“This procession be about what?” This question has been asked again and again, online, on the streets, and within festival conversations. The social media post about the Gba Gba Sete procession has garnered the most viewed entry in this year’s catalogue, a sign of its intrigue. Many have tried to interpret it; others have simply allowed it to be. At first, I too was inclined to let it be, to allow each person their own encounter and interpretation. We live in an era of meaning-making, so why not? Yet my own long-standing fascination with processions; exploring their power to shape memory, knowledge, and world-making compels me to trace the story of Gba Gba Sete procession.
This writing, however, should not be taken as a foreclosure of all the multiple meanings that have already been given to the procession. After all, during Chale Wote the people on the street are the critics and co-creators of meaning. Their gazes and encounters with the artworks leave its imprint on the work. The procession, thus, lives through this multiplicity, refusing to be contained by a single narrative.
If there was ever an injunction towards rehearsing liberatory praxis, the Gba Gba Sete procession embodies such inclinations. It is wild, unruly, communal, disruptive, and guerrilla in spirit. It commands attention while dissolving the rigidities of how art is usually encountered. This procession was born out of a serendipitous conversation last year and it has quickly become a permanent element of the Chale Wote repertoire.
Gba Gba Sete is sensuously overwhelming. In Gba Gba Sete, artists push their works of towering murals, kinetic installations, and sonic interventions directly into the streets. Unlike static murals where one must travel to see, these works travel to be seen by people. Here, art too dey walk.
Chale Wote as a Ga word is an invocation of the act of walking. For the festival, walking allows festival goes to move from one place to another. At the same time, it is a method of knowing, a means of inscribing memories, histories, aesthetics, and statements onto bodies, the city’s alleys, walls, crossroads, and corners.
An anthropologist, Tim Ingold (2011), reminds us that walking is a form of dwelling with the land, where knowledge grows through movement. Similarly, Sarah Pink (2015), an ethnographer, suggests to us that walking entangles body, imagination, and material environment. It becomes a way of knowing and sensing the world that is inseparable from our movement through it. For Chale Wote, knowledge is painted, written, or performed and walked into being.
In dialogue with this year’s theme, The Orbs Beneath the Nile Lead to Kongo, the Gba Gba Sete procession was an orb itself. It was a moving vessel of memory, connecting Nile to Congo, Accra to global histories of extraction and resistance. It is a reminder that to walk together is to rehearse liberation, to make the street a site where art, history, politics, spirituality, and future possibilities come together.
This year’s Gba Gba Sete procession overlapped with Martin Toloku’s Rejuvenate: Kaxoxo. Seven performers, in surgical-green scrubs, carried wooden fetuses, walking barefoot as though bearing fragile oracles. In front was Martin, bare-chested, barefoot, and wrapped in bandages so that you could only see a tiny bit of his eyes peeping for passage.
His figure called forth the silence of a mummified corpse, yet equally the raw terror of a victim of a devastating fire outbreak, or a body mangled in an accident. He was guiding the procession while himself appearing uncertain if he could retrace his own way on the street.
In African cosmologies, violent and untimely deaths disturb the spirit’s journey, leaving the soul restless, circling, unable to find rest. Toloku’s body channelled that disquiet. It presented a spirit wandering among the living, carrying with it the unburied grief of destruction.
The carved wooden fetuses deepened the metaphor; brown, fragile, and uncanny. They howled of deformed births, toxic mutations, and futures mangled by anthropogenic destruction. The imagery spoke to global crises, from Congo’s plundered resources to the radioactive shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uranium for those atomic bombs was largely mined from Congo’s Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province of the Congo. Congo’s minerals exploitation thus lives within nuclear devastation, binding Africa’s ecological precarity to global ghosts. Rejuvenate: Kaxoxo reminded audiences that ecological collapse is not a distant threat; it is already written into our bodies.
As our elders say, Kaxoxowo nu wo gbia yƐyeawo do, which translates as, we must build on previous prototypes, following the footsteps of those who paved the way. Toloku’s work thus warns against the ruin born of greed and extraction, urging us to remember what unchecked desire could cost humanity.
If Toloku’s fetuses spoke of fragile inheritances and wounded futures, the murals extended this lineage into another register: speculative, ancestral, and insurgent. The Gba Gba Sete procession did not speak in one voice alone. The moving murals offered another language of liberation rooted in ancestral imaginaries and speculative visions. The murals portrayed beings that seem to exist in the cracks and margins of worldmaking. These sci-fi-looking figures may have undertaken some interstellar travel to appear as ancestral presences, walking beside us in the here and now. The murals presented a reality that grounds liberation in African spiritual imaginaries and the layered realms of Accra itself.
During the procession, the murals enchanted public spaces to assert African futures that are authored here, at the intersections of reality, memory, spirituality, and speculation. The Gba Gba Sete procession was a spectacle of witnessing.
Unlike forms of detached observation, the Gba Gba Sete procession evokes what Dwight Conquergood describes as a mode of “co-performative witnessing,” a participatory practice that moves beyond the “stance of detachment and objectification” into a dialogical encounter (Conquergood, 1991).
The audience in the procession were not passive; they followed the route, photographed, asked questions, and walked alongside the moving murals, thereby co-creating meaning in real time.
D. Soyini Madison (2012) suggests to us that such acts of embodied engagement constitute an “ethics of performance,” where spectators become implicated in both the vulnerabilities and the possibilities staged before them. In this way, witnessing the Gba Gba Sete procession was communal and reciprocal; an exciting exchange that blurred the line between artist and audience, turning the street into a shared site of knowledge-making.
Written by: Dr. Kwame Boafo
Photo Credit: Fotowalker & Basit Badango.
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interesting