Every first Saturday of May, in Winneba, Ghana, two Asafo companies race barehanded into the forest to capture a live antelope. It’s the Aboakyer, the ritual the Effutu people have passed down for centuries to honor the god Penkye Otu. Capturing it through his lens is photographer Max Andoh, whose project “Aboakyer” turns the festival into a visual story: the procession, the painted bodies, the faces of those who carry the festival literally on their skin.

It’s not pure reportage, nor textbook anthropology, it’s closer to a visual logbook, something that’s now gone out of fashion, giving way to bare Instagram carousels. 

Andoh opts for vivid color or its total absence, direct light, close framing, choices that all convey the ritual’s collective energy without slipping into postcard exoticism.

The Aboakyer, it’s worth remembering, isn’t just a hunt, it’s a memory of the Effutu’s migration from western Sudan, a competition between the Tuafo and Dentsifo companies, a community that recognizes itself in an identical gesture repeated every year. Max Andoh’s project captures exactly this, managing to go beyond the event itself and tell the story of the collective body that sustains it.