Threaded Tribes

okay tribe, huddle up! 🔊🔊 the great fugu sale has arrived!

we’re making room for new things, so from 18 – 30 september, every fugu piece is half price.

sets. shirts. pants. shorts. all of it.

50% OFF ALL FUGU PIECES!

outlets:
elle lokko, osu
www.threadedtribes.com
threaded tribes, ixora drive

✨✨✨✨

outfit completer ✨ meet ‘crimson roots’.

the finishing layer that turns a look into a whole moment. deep crimson, effortless drama and made to be thrown over just about anything ✨

available online & in-store:
www.threadedtribes.com
threaded tribes, ixora drive, accra 📍🇬🇭
mon – sat: 10am - 5pm

for the lovers of nice things 💜 fabric, indigenous to c’ôte d’ivoire, available online & in-store for your gifts or creative use ✨

www.threadedtribes.com
threaded tribes, ixora drive, accra
mon – sat: 10am - 5pm

also available for purchase in wholesale quantities ⚡️
[email protected]

then came the sprinkling! 🍚🇬🇭

not just anyone gets to do that part. in both homes, it was the head of the house, or someone recognised as standing in that role, who carried it out. the same logic holds across the wider community - chiefs and family heads sprinkle within their own areas. even inside a single home, there was a hierarchy to who could do what.

it starts at the doorway, moves to the corners, then finally reaches the rooms where the family actually lives. home first. the street can wait.

and then we stepped outside, and everything shifted at once.

the drumming we’d only half-heard from inside was suddenly everywhere. elders and family heads moved through the crowd with kpokpoi in hand, people gathering around them as they passed. then a gunshot cracked somewhere nearby. we jumped. properly jumped. nobody else did. people kept talking, kept moving, like nothing had happened at all.

what also stayed with us was how many generations were doing the exact same thing, side by side. an older woman moved without a single wasted movement. younger relatives trailed behind her, still figuring out where they fit. a small child was being carried around, far too young to understand any of it, but already right there in the middle of it anyway. nobody sat that child down and explained the order of things. they were simply born into it.

once the sprinkling was done, the living got to eat. families gathered around the kpokpoi, served in earthen bowls, sharing the meal together. after all the ritual and the procession and the offering to those no longer here, there was this quiet moment of just sitting down and eating. hunger remembered, abundance shared.

we’d read about what homowo means. but standing in that street, watching it actually happen in real time, turned it from something we’d studied into something we witnessed. we had no claim on any of it. we were close enough to watch, nothing more.

later, once the crowd had thinned, we walked past a small bowl of kpokpoi sitting untouched on a ledge outside a house we’d never stepped into. no one nearby. it sat there anyway, still doing its job.

🌍

ART.

Adwoa Pokuaa Agyemang by TYSON PHOTOGRAPHY📸🇬🇭

‘obaapa’, available online & in-store
www.threadedtribes.com
threaded tribes, ixora drive, accra
mon – sat: 10am - 5pm

+ in Elle Lokko Concept Store & ＫＥＮＴＥＮ　ＡＣＣＲＡ

Somebody Has to Feed the Ancestors First…

there’s an order to homowo that most people never see, mostly because the part that gets filmed is always the part that happens last. we went to two traditional homes in osu to watch that order for ourselves, starting with the pounding of kpokpoi and following it all the way to the streets. honestly, it wasn’t the noise or the crowds that stuck with us. it was everything that had to happen first, quietly, before any of that could even begin.

kpokpoi is corn and palm oil pounded into a thick paste, and it isn’t made for the people standing around waiting to eat it, not first anyway. in Ga tradition, it goes to the ancestors and the gods before anyone living touches it. homowo remembers a time of hunger, so before the living eat, the dead get fed too.

it’s harder work than it looks. a woman was leading it, moving with that kind of rhythm you only get once your body’s done something a hundred times over. at one point another woman reached in and repositioned her grip mid-motion, without either of them breaking their conversation. kids and younger relatives drifted in and out of the space, caught up in their own business, none of it to do with us. nobody paused to perform anything for the cameras. life kept moving around the work.

by the time we left, the finished bowls were already covered and set aside. at the second house, that stage was long done. the bowls were ready, the whole place felt quieter. it hit us then that there wasn’t a single timeline running across osu. every household was moving through its own version of that morning, at its own pace, all converging on the same point later in the day.

next, the sprinkling. 🌿🇬🇭