Holloween

Everybody loves Halloween and the chance to have fun and dress up is so important and Black people have proven time and time again that we're the best at it.However, sometimes the connections we have to western holidays can feel somewhat misplaced. 

During slavery and colonisation religion's such as Christianity taught us to turn our back on our Ancestor's cultural Rituals and celebrations. But there are plenty festivals that originated before Halloween that are celebrated in the motherland that none of us are aware of. 

The western world has been good at modernising cultural festivals and traditions. This has allowed them to go continue on for generations and we're starting to see this in Africa as they try to hold on to their own cultural traditions, due to the continent becoming more modern. 

The Wag Festival was an Ancient Kemetic festival that took place in late August and was dedicated to the death of Ausar, the Kemetic God of wine, death, and the underworld, and honoring the Souls of the deceased on their journey in the afterlife. This festival followed the Wepet Renpet, but its date changed according to the lunar calendar. 

It is one of the oldest festivals celebrated by our Ancestors in Kemet and, like Wepet Renpet, first appears in the Old Kingdom. During this festival, our people would make small boats out of paper and set them toward the west on graves to indicate Ausar' death and people would float shrines of paper on the waters of the Nile for the same reason.