"Me Do Wu," My Val: The Creation of Valentine's Day in Accra, Ghana

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Fair, Jo Ellen

Val Day: A Media Production

Many in the West consider Valentine's Day a thoroughly contemporary contrivance, a holiday manufactured by the greeting card industry. But the holiday has a deep history in Western culture: apparent pre-Christian antecedents in the Roman festival of Lupercalia; a pair of Saints Valentine putatively beheaded by Claudius II in the third century; churches and shrines dedicated to the martyrs' memory throughout Europe; and a long association of the holiday with the desires of the human heart (Chase 1956; Myers 1972; Baird 1990; Santino 1994; Schmidt 1995).

Europeans brought Saint Valentine's Day with them to North America, but in the United States the holiday was obscure until 1910, when Joyce C. Hall established Hallmark Cards, specializing in the sale of holiday greetings of all kinds, including valentines, that neatly packaged common expressions of love (Stern 1988; Schmidt 1995:94-102). Today in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, Valentine's Day ranks as a major gift- and card-giving holiday (Cheal 1988; Netemeyer et al. 1993; Otnes et al. 1994). In the United States alone, consumers spent $3.6 billion to celebrate Valentine's Day in 2000, with the average celebrant parting with sixtyfive dollars.4

Given its European heritage and cultural resonance, how did Valentine's Day find its way to Ghana?5 "It has always been here," said one older Ghanaian gentleman (interview with customer, Accra shop, Jan. 31, 2002). If "always" means his lifetime, he may be right. This informant attended Achimota, one of the country's premier secondary schools in the mid1950s, just prior to Ghana's independence from Britain in 1957. There, he remembers making and exchanging Valentine's cards. Yet, the current headmistress of Achimota (interview, Feb. 6, 2002), who also attended the school during the 1950s, has no memory of Valentine's Day being celebrated in those days. On the other hand, nearly all Ghanaians who went to school in the capital, Accra, during the 1970s and 1980s remember making or buying and exchanging cards with friends. One woman, now in her forties, who attended Accra Girls School (interview, Feb. 4, 2002), remembers Valentine's Day as a "low-pressure holiday, fun with friends." By the 1980s, it seems that Valentine's Day had become more serious, at least among secondary school and university students. Several men recalled wanting to make an impression on their chosen Valentine by paying "a small boy" or employing a courier service to deliver cards and gifts to their beloved. One man recounted how his girlfriend at the university would not speak to him for days because he sent a domestic brand of chocolate instead of an imported one.

At least among secondary and university students, Valentine's Day appears to have enjoyed widening popularity from the 1980s onward. But the holiday did not catch the imagination of a larger public. From 1953 to 2001, Ghanaian newspapers made no mention (no stories, no advertisements) of Valentine's Day except for a very short feature that appeared in the weekend tabloid the Mirror (Feb. 10, 1990) explaining the history of the holiday and giving tips on how to celebrate it.6 One ad from a card shop also appeared, introducing readers to the holiday: