This Year’s Emancipation Day Celebrations: The Full Deets

This year’s PANAFEST/ Emancipation Day celebrations is under the theme:

“Reclaiming The African Family, Confronting The Past To Face The Challenges Of The 21st Century And Emancipation“.

The event fell off with a Northern Journey from the 19th of July, 2023 and will run through to August 1, 2023.

The Pilgrimage tour which started on the morning of Wednesday July 19, took participants from Accra toward the Northern part of Ghana, and back toward the Southern part.

Participants had the potential chance to experience the historical slave routes which our progenitors went through before they were taken to the Cape Coast and Elmina Palaces lastly to their unknown destinations.

The 5-day tour included a durbar of Chiefs at the Pikworo Slave Camp in the Upper East District, alongside atonement ceremony at the Salaga Slave Camp in the Northern region of Ghana.

There were discussions with Older folks and a memorable tour through the Bono Slave Market in the Bono East region, where it finished with the crossing of the River Pra at Assin Praso in the Central District.

The event went on with Wreath-laying services to honor the predecessors at the W.E.B Du Bois Center, George Padmore Library and the Kwame Nkrumah Dedication Park on Monday, 24th July, 2023 in Accra.

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Other activities such as inter-faith dialogue, colloquim, return journey and akwaaba ceremony, youth day, durbar of traditional leaders, women’s day and reverential night took place in Cape Coast.

The event was climaxed with the 25th Anniversary Day Durbar at Assin Manso in the Central Region and a few others in Accra that included ‘Return Conversations‘ with the theme: The Role Of Film And Music In Uniting The Global African Family.

This conversation was had several celebrity and top personalities as panelists at the Accra International Conference Centre.

PANAFEST is an acronym for Pan-African Historical and Theatre Festival. It is a cultural event held in Ghana every two years since 1992 for Africans and people of African descent to promote and enhance unity, Pan- Africanism and the development of the continent of Africa.

Emancipation Day marks the Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies in 1834. It is an annual observance introduced in Ghana in 1998.

About 50 participants were selected for the pilgrimage tour. They include staff of the Ghana Tourism Authority, tourism industry practitioners of the various associations and the general public.

The associations include; Tour Operators Union of Ghana, Car Rentals Association of Ghana, Tour Guides Association of Ghana, and Ghana Hoteliers Association. The rest are Tourism Society of Ghana, Ghana Progressive Hotels Association and the Diaspora Community.