A Tema-based rental company, SLYDONCEE VENTURES LTD. has donated a quantity of designer breast-cover clothes and a portable water pump to the Chief Priest of the Manya Krobo Traditional Area, Nene Madjanor Otrieku Okumo III, as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative.
The donation is intended to support efforts to gradually transform the ‘Dipo’ puberty rite for teenage girls in the Krobo area.
‘Dipo’ puberty rites take place every year in the Yilo and Manya Krobo Traditional areas in April and May respectively, to usher teenage girls into womanhood.
Speaking during the presentation, on behalf of the Executive Director of SLYDONCEE VENTURES LTD, Mr Gideon Akweh, the company’s manager for the Krobo enclave, Benjamin Nyarkonor Abrantea, said the company was ready to support any initiative aimed at modernising the age-old traditional rite, to make it more aligned with contemporary sensibilities.
During the ‘dipo’ rites, breasts of the teenage girls undergoing the ceremony are traditionally left uncovered.
The practice has been described by some community members and observers as obscene in a modern context.
The Chief Priest received the donation and welcomed the company’s support toward evolving the rite while preserving its cultural significance.
According to him, during the ‘dipo’ rites performance, the priests relied solely on water that flowed freely from the bordering Akwapim-Togo range to bathe the girls, but that cannot be said today.
These mountain-fed streams, which plays significant role as part of the sacred ‘dipo’ rites, have now been blocked by developers who built on the water ways and the few surviving ones are left at the mercy of ‘open-defecators’.
“The degradation and pollution has compelled me to sink a big well and construct a shower house for use by our teenage girls,” he said.
SLYDONCEE VENTURES LTD. discovered that the Chief Priest was striving with the water situation and also provided the much needed pump to send water into an overhead tank for their use.
Due to unexplained circumstances, the Priests do not drink water from the Volta River, neither do they use it to cleanse the ‘dipo’ teenage girls.
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