The Noise Silence Makes: Kplejoo Festival and the Sonic Whims of Ga Deities

Sacred silence blankets the town of Nungua every July as the Ga people of Ghana prepare to celebrate Kplejoo, their annual harvest festival. The deities and ancestors flock to the town to communicate with the ritual specialists and offer their blessings to the community. To honor their presence, the Ga traditional priests introduce a week-long restriction on drumming and noise-making. The ritual silence of Nungua is unique in many ways, but most notably, it completely defies the conventional categorization of “silence” as a sonically neutral category. In the Ga ritual context, “silence” does not actually mean elimination of high frequencies of sound, but rather creation of the perfect sonic habitat for the visiting deities, whose aural sensibilities cannot be subsumed under the worldly sonic categories. If “silence” is an active sonic habitat contingent on the preferences of the aurally capricious Ga deities, how can we rewire ourselves as ethnographers, or simply as listeners, to better understand this community? Through this question, the paper contributes to the exploration of varieties of silence by shedding light on the author’s ethnographic attempts at comprehending the culturally contextualized silence teased out from the Ghanaian ritual space. By answering this question, the paper contributes to the exploration of varieties of silence, and sheds light on the author’s ethnographic attempts at comprehending the culturally contextualized silence teased out from the Ghanaian ritual space.