Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana

(Hardback)

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Kakaamotobe, meaning to scare, is known across southern Ghana, West Africa, as Fancy Dress performance. Masqueraders dress in colorful costumes and wear fancy and fierce masks; they dance energetically to drums or brass band music through the main streets of town during holidays, especially during Christmastime. Competitions held in two towns are intense annual events. This lively secular masquerade is a carnival form that has been practiced for well over a century primarily by coastal Fante people, and many additional ethnicities participate today. Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana explores the fascinating history, aesthetics, performance, and underlying messages of this masquerade with ties to other carnivalesque practices in the Black Atlantic. While Fancy Dress may engage with global cultures through some of its aesthetics, the practice is profoundly African. The utilization of elaborate costumes, masks, and brass bands expresses not a desire to imitate outside cultures, but rather the impulse of youth to adapt traditional culture to the contemporary environment. Courtnay Micots argues that the outward impression of folly belies the more serious refashioning of power, identity, and modernity in the community.

Reviews

A prodigious work of scholarship, and a deep dive into the subject based on sustained relationships.

--Jean Borgatti, Clark University

Fancy Dress - a festive hybrid performance genre with colorful costuming and masks, set to pulsating brass-band music - is wonderfully analyzed in this pioneering book, showing Black Atlantic carnival, Brazilian and Caribbean influences melding in a thoroughly Ghanaian form. With parades, balls, skits, street dancing and a host of imported and local characters, this lively, secular, democratic, century-old artistic complex has never before been shown in such historical and contemporary depth and detail.

--Herbert M. Cole, University of California, Santa Barbara

Observation of Kakaamotobe for over a decade provides a sound basis for Micots's profound contribution to understanding the arts of fancy dress. This book is insightful and a delight to read.

--Robin Poynor, University of Florida

Author Bio

Courtnay Micots is assistant professor of art history in the Department of Visual Arts, Humanities, and Theatre at Florida A & M University.