Two Festivals, Two Lifecycles: Heritage and Contemporary Festivals in the Festivalisation of Accra, Ghana

Studies of festivals and urban tourism usually examine one event at a time, and most of them concern cities in Europe and North America. This article compares two festivals in Accra, Ghana, that share a city and a season but differ in origin, purpose and governance: Homowo, the long-established harvest festival of the Ga people, and the Chale Wote Street Art Festival, a contemporary arts festival founded in 2011. Using a comparative case design built on secondary data, it examines five dimensions: tourism demand and reach, economic contribution, spatial and urban effects, heritage and identity, and governance. The evidence comprises official tourism statistics, a coded corpus of 53 media and official texts, and a log of 14 governance actions dated 2014 to 2026. A companion study has shown that official data cannot isolate the tourism effects of either festival, so this article asks how the two festivals have changed rather than how much they contribute. They share the same mid-year travel season and the same concentrated tourism economy, yet they are close to opposites in representation, reach and governance. Chale Wote has moved through a recognisable event lifecycle, from an unfunded neighbourhood event to an institutionalised festival whose centre shifted to the commercial district of Osu in 2023. Homowo has begun a different trajectory: the touristification of an established sacred practice, in which state partnership and a new commercial carnival are kept apart from the rites, against a background of contested authority and violence. The article argues that festivalisation follows different paths for heritage and contemporary festivals in the same city, proposes that lifecycle models be adapted for heritage festivals, and extends the commemoration–commodification continuum to living festival heritage.