The Naming Drama of the Ga People

Abstract

The processes and ceremonies that mark the progress of an individual's life cycle in traditional African society are fraught with rhetorical, dramatic, and symbolic qualities. When these ceremonies are structurally analyzed, they often yield salient elements of dramatic form: personae, setting, action, theme, dialog, poetry, music, song, and dance. However, in many previous works on such rites de passage (Van Guennep, 1908) the tendency has been to explicate them primarily as indices to indigenous African notions of cosmology, puberty, and sexuality.' Their creative, dramatic, and rhetorical dimensions are thereby obscured. In what follows, an attempt will be made to analyze one such rite, that of infant naming, practiced by the Ga2 people of Ghana. The analytical stress will be laid on the Ga naming ceremony as a multifaceted communicative system through which the people express, not only their ideas of personhood, self, and group identities, but world view, aesthetics, creativity, moral, social, and religious values as well. The ceremony in which a newly born child acquires a name in traditional Ga society is called Bi Kpojiemo (child out-taking)3. It is so called because the day (kpojiemo gbi) on which the ceremony takes place is the day the infant is taken out of isolation and privacy since birth to establish initial contact in the public realm with individuals and groups, families, and family friends-among

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