What equipment do you need for a traditional ceremony?

A Togolese traditional ceremony is prepared differently from a seated dinner. The guest count is more elastic, the proceedings longer, and the way people are distributed in the space follows rules that are not those of a table plan.

What follows applies to the dowry, the customary nuptial blessing and end-of-mourning ceremonies.

The guest count is a range, not a number

That is the first difference, and it drives everything else. At a customary ceremony, attendance is often decided on the day: people come because they live nearby, because they heard, because they are accompanying someone.

Plan the top of the range for seating, the bottom of the range for tableware. An unoccupied chair costs almost nothing; two hundred covers laid for nobody does.

In practice: seating sized on the high estimate plus 10 %, service calculated on the median estimate, with a top-up that can be mobilised within the day.

Two spaces, not one

Protocol generally separates the families' space — where the exchanges, introductions and presentations take place — from that of the guests.

That translates into equipment:

• A space of honour: armchairs or distinct seating, carpet, sometimes a low platform. It must be visible to everyone and reachable without crossing the crowd.
• A general space: chairs in rows rather than round tables. Rows seat more people on the same area and follow the proceedings, which face one direction.

The round table of ten, the standard of a seated dinner, is often counter-productive here: it turns half the audience away during the speeches.

Ground and shade before decoration

These ceremonies frequently take place in a courtyard, on unprepared ground, and last several hours in broad daylight.

Shade is the first item, before furniture. A marquee open at the sides, sized on the high end of the range: 0.9 m² per standing person, 1.3 m² seated.

The ground next. Bare earth becomes dusty underfoot and muddy at the first rain. A carpet of honour at minimum, decking over the protocol area.

Sound matters more than elsewhere

The proceedings are spoken: introductions, speeches, exchanges between families, words from the elders. If the back of the gathering cannot hear, the ceremony exists only for the first three rows.

Two microphones minimum — one for the speaker, one for the replies — and distributed output rather than one powerful system facing forward. Beyond five hundred people, two output points.

Plan for a technician on site, not just installed equipment: speakers follow one another with no written running order, and someone has to keep up.

Duration changes the quantities

A ceremony that starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. consumes differently:

• Glassware: count generously, people drink throughout. Three and a half glasses per person is not excessive.
• Water: the most underestimated item at a daytime ceremony.
• Service: several waves rather than a single service, which calls for more trays and side tables than cutlery.

What we advise settling early

Three decisions must be taken two weeks ahead, because they govern the whole set-up:

1. Where the space of honour sits — it fixes the orientation of everything else, the sound system included.
2. The covered area — it has to be booked, especially in the dry season.
3. The attendance range, discussed frankly with the family elders. It is the hardest figure to obtain, and the most useful.

We equip these ceremonies all year round, from two hundred to over a thousand people. The equipment is the same as for a modern reception; it is the layout, and the reasoning that produces it, that differ.