Ransom Notes: Hoot our many blessings

In Ghana, it is known as Homowo. It is an African harvest festival that features dancing, singing and lots of exuberance. Homowo is a traditional celebration of the migration of the Gas tribe in Ghana. According to Gas oral tradition, a severe famine broke out among the people during their migration to present day Accra (now the capital of Ghana). The famine led the people to begin a tremendous food planting program that eventually yielded them a great harvest.

Their hunger ended and, with great joy, they “hooted at hunger” this is the meaning of the word “homowo.”

We don’t do much harvesting these days. Much of our agriculture is controlled by huge conglomerates that dig up billions of dollars worth of corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton. Black-owned family farms were stolen by unscrupulous speculators, and abandoned by a generation that thought getting their hands dirty in the soil was beneath them.

But this week, we get an opportunity to celebrate Homowo, as a time of thanksgiving.

We get to hoot at hunger by showing off all that we have in our cupboards and spreading it out on the table to feed our families.

I don’t know if there are Homowo sales at the department stores and Homowo soccer games dominating television, but it is a kind of Thanksgiving Day.

Of course, Homowo is not just about the crops. Our harvest includes our children, our homes, our health, our assets, our friends. It is an acknowledgement that our gifts, our harvest, comes not just from our hard work but from someone much larger than us, who gives to us in so many ways.

For those who celebrate Homowo, they recognize that God has allowed them to have that harvest. In Ghana, that God may have been called by a different name than most of us use here, but when you are giving thanks, it is the thanks that is most important, not the name.

This year, there is something new to be thankful for. It is our own doing, our own hard work sowing in the political fields that helped with this special harvest. We can look and see our harvest this year in the person of Barack Hussein Obama. Surely, it is his achievement because he will be the 44th President of the United States. He had a vision and was able to convince a disbelieving populace to embrace his vision. He put together a team, an organization, a movement, and it swept him into the White House.

But it is also our achievement, because we went out and cast those votes expectorating in the face of all that history, all that racism, all that opposition. Barack Hussein Obama, son of a Kenyan father, is a child of the African continent (yes, Sarah Palin, it is a continent). Our historical ties to the mother continent are realized in him, and we can be thankful that his homeland is also our homeland.

I realize that in the face of a worsening economy, with layoffs all over the country and a stock market in a nosedive, taking personal retirement income with it, not everyone feels like giving thanks. If you’ve had your house foreclosed on, or lost your job, or found out that your paycheck doesn’t stretch from payday to payday, you may not want to say thank you. If you’ve had a hospital stay and found out that your health care coverage doesn’t really amount to coverage, your ‘thank you’ might be muted.

But if you are reading this, you have your eyesight, and you have probably have the 50 cents to buy this paper. If you woke up this morning–and it wasn’t a police officer nudging you to get out of the stairwell or off the bench–you can be thankful you have a home. If you woke up, no matter where it is, you have another day for things to possibly get better.

In 2008, we have many blessings to harvest. We have many hungers to hoot at. We have the opportunity to hoot at racism. Hoot at economic worries. Hoot at political naysayers. Hoot at those criminals who make everyone think that everyone in our community is a criminal. We can hoot at those who said Obama’s win would never happen (even when that someone is yourself.)

So, our harvest this year, our Homowo, goes beyond the things we normally give thanks for. Happy Thanksgiving and joyous Homowo.

Lou Ransom is Executive Editor of the Chicago Defender. He can be reached via email at lransom@chicagodefender.com