A Day of Celebration
A Photo Essay
Text by: Maurine Jensen Proctor
Photography by: Scot Facer Proctor

click photos to enlarge

PART FOUR

The obedience of the Ghanaian people to the gospel is the first thing visitors note.  “If they are told to wear a white shirt on Sundays, they wear a white shirt,” said one missionary.  “It is a powerful lesson to learn.”

President Hinckley told the members to attend their meetings, read the scriptures, pay their tithing, and pray.  Later, many of the members said they were planning to do the four things the prophet asked.

African Folklorica

Later that afternoon, thousands of African Saints joined at the Accra Sports Stadium to see the Latter-day Saint youth perform.  It was an unprecedented event that the youth had greatly anticipated because they going to perform for the prophet.

It was also the opportunity to meet other Latter-day Saint youth from among the 23,000 members in Ghana.  Buses had rolled in from the outlying areas Friday morning, and the plan was to have the Young Women stay at the MTC, and the Young Men camp out in tents on the lawn nearby.  Nothing even close to this had happened before and excitement was high.

The first time the more than 1,000 youth had practiced together was Friday afternoon.  Trepidatious, Sister Wall, wondered how the youth could pull it off with only one practice.  The biggest hurdle was limiting each dance to three minutes so that the program wouldn’t stretch on for hours. 

An African dance lasts from twenty minutes to an hour, and though to untrained Western eyes, this might look like a relentless repetition, the Africans know that a dance is a way of telling a story and that the drum beats are a language—they are, in fact, talking drums.

“We can’t limit our dances to 3 minutes,” they lamented to Sister Wall.  She told them to pick out only the highlights of the story to share on stage—though they might enjoy learning the entire dance.

The backdrop on the stage was eight African murals painted over a 3-month period by Fortunatus Acolatse, portraying regions of Ghana as well as everyday scenes, such as the market place.  The youth were arranged by villages on the stage, clustered together in bright hues.

Click here to go to Part 5 of A Day of Celebration