Thanksgiving Around the World, Part 1: Africa — The First of the Harvest Isn't Yours

Part 1 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day.

Renenutet, cobra goddess of the harvest, from the tomb of Qenamun, Egypt — a copy of a painting some 3,400 years old. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.)

Long before there was a United States, before there was a Plymouth or a President Lincoln, human beings were doing what we do every fourth Thursday of November — stopping at harvest time to say thank you. And the oldest written-down chapter of that story is African, in Egypt, where the whole year was built around one river.

Ancient Egypt lived and died by the Nile flood. The year had three seasons, and all three were about water and grain: the flood, the growing, and the harvest. When the harvest came in, thanks came first — and I mean that literally. At the threshing floor, where the grain was beaten loose, farmers set up little altars and bowls as offerings to Renenutet, the cobra goddess who guarded the harvest and the granary. Think about that picture for a second: before the bread, before the beer, before anybody ate, the snake at the edge of the grain pile got hers.

The biggest harvest rite belonged to the king. At the Festival of Min, held at the very start of the harvest season, the god's statue was carried out in procession — priests, incense, a white bull, the statues of kings long dead carried along to watch. And the pharaoh himself cut the first sheaf of grain and laid it before the god. You can still see it carved in stone: the temple reliefs of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, from roughly 3,200 years ago, show the procession in detail. And the festival was old even then — the cult of Min reaches back to about 3300 BC, more than a thousand years before those carvings.

Here's the rule underneath it all, the one this whole series keeps running into: the first of the harvest isn't yours. It gets offered up before it gets eaten.

Travel south and forward a few thousand years, and that same rule is alive and well.

In southeastern Nigeria, the Igbo people hold Iri Ji — the New Yam Festival — town by town, sometime between August and October. Yams are serious business there, the king of crops. And the rule is absolute: nobody eats the new yam before the ceremony. Not a bite. The first yams are offered to Chukwu — God the Creator — to the ancestors, and to the earth that grew them. The eldest man, or the king, or the yam priest tastes first. Only then does everybody else sit down to roast yam and palm oil, drumming, dancing, and masquerades.

In Ghana, the Ga people of Accra keep a festival with the best name in this whole series: Homowo — "hooting at hunger." Their tradition says their ancestors survived a terrible famine, and when the harvest finally came in heavy, they literally mocked the hunger that had nearly killed them. There's a month of quiet first — no drumming, no noise — and then chiefs sprinkle a sacred food called kpokpoi along the streets and at the family houses, feeding the gods and the ancestors — including, the Ga say, the ones who didn't survive the famine. Then the whole town eats together.

A little east, among the Ewe at Ho, the first dish of mashed yam is served to God and the ancestors "before any living being tastes it." That's their words for it, and I don't think the order is an accident anywhere it shows up.

And it shows up nearly everywhere on the continent. In Ethiopia, the Oromo people gather by the lakeshore every fall for Irreecha — hundreds of thousands of people in white, carrying green grass and yellow flowers, dipping them in the water to thank Waaqa, God, for the rain and the harvest and the peace. In Rwanda, Umuganura, the first-fruits festival, was once suppressed under colonial rule — it's now a national public holiday, and the old rule still frames it: the elders taste the new harvest before the family does. In South Africa, at the Zulu first-fruits ceremony, the king tastes the harvest and smashes a calabash — that broken gourd is the signal that the people may now eat. The British banned that ceremony after the war of 1879; the last one was held in the winter of 1877–78, and it stayed banned for over a century, until King Goodwill Zwelithini brought it back in 1990.

Now, one honest note, because I believe in giving it to you straight: Egypt's rites are carved in stone — we can date them, name them, walk up and look at them. Most of the living festivals have no written birthday. Their histories were carried by memory, not paper, so when you see a website claiming one of them is exactly 6,000 years old, or that UNESCO has certified the yam festivals — it isn't so, and we won't pretend otherwise here. Genuinely old in tradition is true enough. It doesn't need decorating.

But step back and look at what we've actually got. A pharaoh cutting the first sheaf 3,000 years before Plymouth. A Nigerian grandfather who won't touch a yam until God and his fathers have been served. A Ghanaian town hooting at hunger because the famine is over and the pots are full. Different gods named, different foods, different languages — and the same human move underneath all of it: stop, look at what's been provided, and give thanks first.

Next time: Asia — where some of these harvest thanksgivings have been kept, unbroken, for thousands of years, and one of them is written into the Bible itself.

📺 Learn more by watching the curated playlist that goes with this post — Thanksgiving Around the World, Part 1: Africa on YouTube.