Akkrah and Adampe, Gold Coast, Afrh-a. 337 



localities habitually frequented by a concourse of people. Occasion- 

 ally the stray exhibition of a few articles may be noticed opposite 

 the domiciles of the vendors, or along the walls in the more secluded 

 passages. Compared to similar places of resort elsewhere in Western 

 Africa, they present an impoverished appearance, from the meagre 

 pittances of food and other indigenous products which are offered for 

 sale in such limited quantities. The whole are vended under the 

 patient instrumentality of women and children, who, squatted in 

 regular lines along the sides of the streets, or beneath the shade of 

 the adjacent houses, dispose their effects to the greatest advantage, in 

 assorted lots, spread out upon mats or in calabashes, around the spot 

 on which they are stationed. These collocations of edibles and other 

 necessary articles, for the most part comprise plantains, bananas, 

 peppers, limes, oranges, ground nuts, Malaguetta pepper, native soap, 

 pine apple, and other kinds of flax, tobacco cut in small pieces, ochros, 

 dried and fresh cassada, kankies baked or boiled, and other prepara- 

 tions of maize, pine apples, soursops, a few miraculous berries, 

 shallots, palm oil, and shea butter, kola nuts, dried and fresh fish, 

 smoked deer, and goats flesh, &c, with beads, earthenware, chintzes, 

 ramals, guns, copper basins, and a variety of native and foreign 

 cloths, suspended on lines attached to the different houses above the 

 heads of the anxious dealers, &c. 



Harvest Festivals. — The great annual festival of the Akkrahs 

 termed Homowavj, is one celebrated with much pomp and dissipation. 

 Numerous and important are the ceremonies enacted on these memo- 

 rable holidays, and multiform are the scenes that attest the vigour 

 and exultation of their commemoration. By every family in town or 

 country proparations on a proportionate scale are carried into effect 

 long antecedent to the period of their commencement, which in 

 general occurs early in the month of September, Friday being the 

 day that announces their wished-for arrival. In the year 1850 the 

 anniversary fell on the 6th of September, and the peculiar observances 

 attending the initiation were of the same determinate character as 

 those on previous occasions. The ordinary duration of these popular 

 orgies seldom exceeds ten days or a fortnight (a week being the 

 allotted term of fulfilment) ; but should a continuous supply of 

 potables, and other accessory stimulants, be furnished, or as long as 

 they possess the means to purchase them, their prolongation is 

 carried on with undiminished vigour, until it finally ceases, from an 

 exhaustion of their pecuniary resources. According to the reports 

 of residents and other local authorities, this particular season has 

 been consecrated by the blending of various religious and social 

 rites ; a series of aggregate concessions that portray the worship 

 of many barbarous races, when offering their grateful adulations 

 to a Supreme Intelligence, not only for the benefits conferred dur- 

 ing the past, but for the prosperous endowment of the approaching 

 year. From the semblance considered to exist between them and 



