Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Ghana NEXT Seder

by Michael Dreyfuss My friend Mohammed and I slipped off our sandals and ducked into the chief’s palace, a mud hut like the others in Gushei, our small village in northern Ghana. Chief sat on an animal skin, his elders around him. Mohammed and I moved through the formalities, offering greetings and the traditional gift of kola nuts. After a year and a half as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was used to my village’s routines. I wanted to show it something new, a part of my life that was not Peace Corps. With grant money from Birthright Israel NEXT, I was going to host a Passover Seder for the 600 people in Gushei. Naturally, the chief had to be the first invited. My village is almost entirely Muslim.  I am the first Jew any of them had ever met. But they had shared their holidays with me-during Ramadan, for instance, I fasted with them. Now, I would share a holiday of mine that I grew up with in Northern Virginia, adapted for Gushei. With the chief’s approval, we were off to prepare for the feast that retells the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt. Along with the village butcher, we went to a market in a nearby town, where I bought two live rams, along with lots of fresh vegetables. There was no point in looking in the town for matzo, the unleavened bread that is a Passover requirement because it reminds us that the Israelites fled Egypt in such haste that they had no time to bake bread. I downloaded a matzo recipe and returned to my village to try my hand at baking. The result, to be honest, was truly the “bread of affliction,” although it proved popular with my villagers. On the day of the Seder, cooking started early in the morning. The women built fires under cauldrons of a size I had only ever seen in Bugs Bunny cartoons. They cooked Sagg’Tuliga, a local corn flour-based staple that looks and tastes similar to matzo balls, and vats of peanut soup to put the Sagg’Tuliga in. At my request, the village imams had sent a representative to slaughter the two rams – not kosher, but as close to halal as our village gets, and I made sure to get a shankbone for the Seder plate.  From the beginning, I had worked to get the imams involved in the holiday preparations. The out-of-town guests – some of the few Jews in northern and central Ghana – started arriving around noon, and my village went out of it’s way to make them feel welcome, finding traditional clothing for them.  The other men and I wore bungma and hats.  Bungma are smocks, which flute out at the waist into pleats that flare out during the traditional twirling dances.  The women were done up in dresses of matching fabric with headscarves. The Dagomba tribespeople of my village mark every major event with drumming and dancing.  They play the talking drum; pulling cords to adjust the drumhead tension and change the pitch.  Our drums called everyone to the central Neem trees to start the celebration. Our village dancers started with the takai or “dancing with sticks.”  The men form a circle around the drummers, holding metal bars symbolic of cutlasses.  As the drum beats out its rhythm, they spin and step in whirling circles, clinking their bars with the men in front and behind them, adding a note of swordplay. As the choreographed battle ended, I pushed through the crowd, carrying the Seder plate, and set up in the center, ringed by the villagers.  My Dagbani is passable in most situations. But for this, I was out of my depth, so Mohammed translated for me.  Through him, I introduced the holiday.  I told them how Jews throughout the ages have celebrated the anniversary of our people’s going forth from slavery in Egypt, as described in Exodus. An imam told the Passover story in Dagbani.  The village sat in rapt attention with frequent murmurs of agreement and choruses of “ami” “amen” in Dagbani as he moved through the narrative. When he finished, I moved through an introduction to the Passover meal: what we eat and why. The other Jews and I said the blessing over the matzo together in Hebrew and English, which Mohammed translated.  Because my village prays in Arabic, they seemed to feel right at home with the idea of us praying in Hebrew.  The two languages even sound similar. For the children, we hid three small pieces of the middle matzo in the village.  The three who found the matzo would win candy.  The children searched the sprawling village at full sprint, finding the matzo in record time.  Better yet, even though there were only three official winners, they shared the prize.  The three really won bragging rights; everyone got candy. I wanted the village to know what the holiday means to me, and what it means to me to celebrate it there with them.  On Passover, we are commanded to remember “we were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and I, coming from a suburb of D.C. to a village in rural Ghana, felt at home by my village. When I closed Seder proper, the meal and the dancing began.  There was enough for everyone to eat a good amount of Sagg’Tuliga and a portion of mutton. In the dancing at the end, the drummers called out all the Westerners, whose attempts at traditional dancing provided a good laugh for the village. As the sun set in my village, my guests and I head back to my place to change out of our smocks and dresses so they could catch a taxi back to Tamale, the nearest large city.  The entire village, flanked by the drummers, walked us back to my room to bid us farewell and then dispersed back to their compounds. I know the village will talk about the Seder for decades.  I will never forget it. 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