A White Stone at Glidji, and Togo’s Guin Community Exhales
TOGO · CULTURE
Key Facts
—The verdict: The stone lifted at Glidji this year is white, which the Guin read as peace and prosperity, Africanews reported on 6 September.
—The rite: Priests and initiates enter the sacred wood at Glidji Kpodji before dawn, find a stone believed placed there by the ancestors, and read its colour aloud to the crowd.
—The calendar: Epe Ekpe, also called Ekpessosso, marks the start of the Guin ancestral year and falls between late August and early September.
—The colours: White means peace and a good year, blue is broadly favourable, red signals blood and conflict, and black is worse still.
—The age of it: The Guin trace the taking of the stone to 1663, which makes it one of West Africa’s longest continuously observed civic rituals.
—Where it happens: Glidji sits in south-east Togo, inland from Aneho, the coastal town that anchors Guin community life.
—Why it draws crowds: The reading is public, and the diaspora returns for it, which turns a religious rite into the region’s largest annual gathering.
The Togo sacred stone taken from the wood at Glidji this weekend came out white, and for the Guin of the south-east that is the best of the four possible answers. It reads as a year of peace and prosperity.
How the Togo sacred stone is taken
Long before dawn, priests and initiates walk into the sacred wood at Glidji Kpodji. What they are looking for is a single stone, which believers hold to have been placed there by the ancestors.
When it is found it is carried out and shown to the waiting crowd, and its colour is announced. That announcement is the whole of the ceremony’s public meaning.
Africanews, reporting from the ground on 6 September, said this year’s stone was white. The reading given was a year of peace and prosperity.
What the colours mean
White is the outcome people hope for: peace, good harvests, a year without rupture. Blue is generally favourable without the same weight.
Red is the warning. It stands for blood and conflict, and a red year is one in which the community is told to be careful.
Black is worse again. The scale is not a forecast in the meteorological sense, but it does shape how a season is entered.
The reading is also a purification. The year is closed before the next one is opened, and grievances are meant to be left on the wrong side of that line.
Elders address the crowd after the colour is announced, setting out what the community should attend to. It functions as an annual address as much as an oracle.
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A rite older than the modern state
The Guin trace the taking of the stone to 1663, when the community settled in what is now southern Togo. Very few civic rituals anywhere in West Africa have been observed that continuously.
It survived the slave-trading era on this coast, German and then French colonial administration, and independence. Governments have come and gone around a ceremony that did not require their permission.
That longevity is part of why the reading carries authority. It predates every institution now listening to it.
The Guin themselves arrived on this coast from what is now Ghana, and the festival preserves that migration story. The stone is a claim to place as well as a prediction.
Neighbouring Benin holds its own Vodun calendar, and the two traditions are closely related. The Gulf of Guinea coast shares a religious grammar that national borders cut across.
Epe Ekpe as an economic event
The festival is the largest annual gathering in the Aneho area, and the diaspora returns for it from Lome, Accra, Paris and beyond. Hotels, transport and markets in the south-east work to its calendar.
Togo has been building a tourism proposition around exactly this kind of heritage, alongside its ports and its coastline. Cultural depth is one of the few assets a small country cannot have copied.
The rite is also a piece of soft power. It is one of the very few Togolese stories that reliably reaches an international audience each year.
Visitors who come for it stay in guesthouses that would otherwise be empty in early September. For Aneho, the festival is a season rather than a day.
Handled carefully, that is a durable form of tourism, because it is not built on infrastructure that has to be financed. Handled carelessly, it becomes a spectacle that the community stops recognising.
Vodun, misread abroad and ordinary at home
Foreign coverage tends to reach for the word voodoo, with everything that has accumulated around it in film and fiction. The tradition on this coast is Vodun, a structured religion with priesthoods, calendars and law.
In Togo and neighbouring Benin it is practised openly and alongside Christianity and Islam, often by the same families. Treating it as exotic misses how ordinary it is here.
For readers used to seeing African religion described only as folklore, the Glidji reading is a useful corrective. It is a civic institution that happens to be sacred.
What follows a white year
Practically, the reading opens the Guin year and the round of ceremonies, reconciliations and appointments that go with it. Disputes are expected to be settled in its light.
It arrives in a country that has spent 2026 in the news for its port, its climate advocacy and a constitutional reordering. A white stone will not change any of that.
But it sets a tone, and communities that keep a calendar of their own tend to weather the ones imposed on them rather better.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Togo sacred stone ceremony?
It is the central rite of Epe Ekpe, the Guin ancestral new year, in which priests take a stone from the sacred wood at Glidji and read its colour aloud.
What colour was the stone this year?
White, which the Guin read as a year of peace and prosperity, according to Africanews on 6 September 2026.
What do the other colours mean?
Blue is broadly favourable, red signals blood and conflict, and black is worse still.
How old is the ceremony?
The Guin trace it to 1663, making it one of the longest continuously observed civic rituals in West Africa.
Where does it take place?
At Glidji Kpodji in south-east Togo, inland from the coastal town of Aneho.
Connected Coverage
Togo’s cultural and civic reach has been unusually visible this year, from the Equal Earth map winning a United Nations vote 164 to one to the loss of Sena Alouka, who gave African youth a climate voice. The commercial side of the same small country is covered in our report on Lome becoming West Africa’s deepest container hub.
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