Arts and GH Heritage
10 Uniquely Ghanaian Things You Propably Didn’t Know
Ghana, often called the “Gateway to Africa,” is a nation rich in history, innovation, and cultural heritage.
From pioneering infrastructure to global cultural exports, here are 10 fascinating facts that highlight what makes this West African gem truly unique—many of which might surprise even seasoned travelers.
Tema Harbour: Africa’s Largest Modern Port Expansion Led by a Visionary Leader
Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, built the country’s first major harbour at Tema. However, under President John Dramani Mahama’s first administration between 2012 and 2017, Ghana expanded the infrastructure tremendously by launching a $1.5 billion expansion drive. The epic project was completed in phases and fully commissioned in November 2025. This public-private partnership with Meridian Port Services (MPS) tripled the port’s capacity to over 3 million TEUs annually, making it West Africa’s premier trade hub. What you might not know: The project saved Ghana over $500 million through innovative financing and created thousands of jobs, positioning the country as a maritime powerhouse without direct government funding.
Jenga: The Global Game Born from Ghanaian Childhood Play
The iconic stacking game Jenga, played by millions worldwide, was invented by British designer Leslie Scott, inspired by her teenage years in Ghana during the 1970s. Using wooden blocks from a family game in Takoradi, she refined the concept into what became “Jenga”—from the Swahili word “kujenga,” meaning “to build.” Released in 1983, it has sold over 80 million sets, but its roots trace back to simple Ghanaian playtime amid limited toys, blending creativity with cultural resourcefulness.
Kente Cloth: Ghana’s Newly Protected Cultural Icon
Kente, the vibrant woven fabric synonymous with African royalty and pride, originated among. Ghana’s Ashanti and Ewe peoples centuries ago. In a landmark move in 2025, Ghana secured Geographical Indication (GI) status for Kente through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), ensuring only cloth handwoven in designated Ghanaian communities can legally bear the name. This protects against global imitations and cultural appropriation, while its UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing (2024) underscores patterns symbolizing wisdom, wealth, and history—each design telling a story passed down generations.
Lake Volta: The World’s Largest Man-Made Reservoir
Created in 1965 by the Akosombo Dam on the Volta River, Lake Volta spans 8,502 square kilometers—larger than some countries—and holds 148 cubic kilometers of water, making it the biggest artificial lake by surface area globally. Built under Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for industrialization, it generates 60% of Ghana’s electricity via hydropower and supports massive fishing industries. Lesser-known fact: Its creation displaced over 80,000 people across 700 villages, creating a complex legacy of progress and human cost.
Adinkra Symbols: Ancient Wisdom in Visual Code
Originating from the Akan people in the 19th century, Adinkra symbols are a unique Ghanaian invention—over 50 intricate designs stamped on cloth, pottery, and architecture, each conveying philosophical proverbs like “Sankofa” (learn from the past) or “Gye Nyame” (except for God). Used in funerals, ceremonies, and modern fashion, they represent one of Africa’s oldest visual communication systems, blending art with moral teachings and now influencing global tattoos and designs.
Fantasy Coffins: Celebrating Life Through Artful Death
A tradition among the Ga people in Greater Accra, fantasy coffins (or “abebuu adekai”) are custom-built caskets shaped like everyday objects—fish for fishermen, cars for drivers, or even Coca-Cola bottles—to symbolize the deceased’s life or profession. Invented in the 1950s by artisan Seth Kane Kwei, this quirky cultural practice has gained international fame, with pieces in museums worldwide, turning funerals into vibrant tributes to individuality.
Highlife Music: The Birthplace of Afro-Fusion Sounds
Ghana pioneered Highlife in the 1920s, a genre blending traditional Akan rhythms with Western jazz, calypso, and brass bands, evolving into modern Afrobeats influences. Icons like E.T. Mensah popularized it across Africa, and today, artists like Sarkodie fuse it with hip-hop. Fun fact: It emerged from coastal elites (“high life”) but became a Pan-African staple, symbolizing post-colonial joy and resilience.
Below is a video of an old highlife tune:
Cocoa Dominance: Sweet Secrets of the World’s Second-Largest Producer
Ghana produces over 800,000 tons of cocoa annually, second only to Côte d’Ivoire, fueling 20% of global chocolate. Introduced by Tetteh Quarshie in 1879 after smuggling beans from Fernando Po, it’s now a $2 billion industry. Unique twist: Ghana’s premium beans are fermented longer for richer flavor, and the country pioneered fair-trade certifications to combat child labor—yet most Ghanaians have never tasted finished chocolate.
Kakum Canopy Walkway: Africa’s Thrilling Treetop Adventure
Suspended 30 meters above the rainforest floor, Kakum National Park’s 350-meter canopy walkway—built in 1995—is Africa’s first and longest, offering views of rare wildlife like forest elephants and monkeys. What you didn’t know: Constructed with help from Canadian volunteers using local materials, it draws 200,000 visitors yearly, boosting eco-tourism while preserving one of West Africa’s last primary rainforests.
Pan-African Legacy: Cradle of Modern African Independence
Ghana became the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah, who coined “neo-colonialism” and hosted the All-African Peoples’ Conference, inspiring liberation movements continent-wide. Intriguing detail: Nkrumah’s vision led to the Organization of African Unity (now AU) in 1963, and Ghana’s Black Star Gate symbolizes this—yet his overthrow in 1966 highlights the fragile balance between idealism and power.
“A curated space where art meets conversation.”
That single line, tucked quietly beneath the description of Tiga African Art Gallery in Cantonments, says something larger about the direction of Ghana’s contemporary art scene. In Accra today, galleries are no longer simply rooms for displaying paintings.
Increasingly, they are becoming places where stories are exchanged, identities negotiated, and younger generations invited into creative life without intimidation.
Inside Tiga African Art Gallery, the atmosphere resists the stiffness that often shadows fine art spaces. Visitors arrive by appointment, not into silence, but into discussion. Paintings lean into conversations about memory, heritage, urban life, and African self-expression.
Children cut shapes for collage workshops while emerging artists search for visibility in a competitive cultural economy. The gallery functions less like a showroom and more like a living studio woven into the rhythm of the city.
That shift matters in Ghana, where artistic traditions have long existed beyond formal institutions. From Adinkra symbolism to Asafo flags and hand-painted cinema posters, Ghanaian art has historically lived in marketplaces, compounds, festivals, and everyday public life.
Contemporary galleries such as Tiga are rediscovering that social dimension, creating spaces where art feels participatory rather than distant.
Perhaps most striking is the gallery’s investment in children through drawing, painting, and summer programmes. In a country where creative education is often treated as secondary to more “practical” disciplines, these workshops quietly challenge old assumptions.
They suggest that art is not a luxury, but a language through which young people learn confidence, observation, and cultural belonging.
For visitors to Accra, Tiga offers more than an exhibition stop. It offers entry into a wider cultural conversation unfolding across the city — one where African art is not waiting for validation abroad, but confidently shaping its own audience at home.
“Imagine catching a lion every year.”
That sentence alone changes the way many people understand Ghana’s famous Aboakyer Festival. Behind the colourful processions, dancing Asafo companies, and crowds lining the streets of Winneba lies a much older story — one shaped by fear, negotiation, survival, and faith.
For the Effutu people of Ghana’s Central Region, Aboakyer is not simply a cultural performance staged for tourists with cameras.
It is the memory of a difficult migration carried across generations. Oral history says their ancestors, struggling with hardship and death after settling along the coast, turned to their deity, Penkye Otu, for protection. The answer came with terrifying demands.
First, human sacrifice. Later, a live wildcat — described in some accounts as a lion, in others a leopard. But hunting such creatures reportedly claimed even more lives. Eventually, after repeated pleas for mercy, the sacrifice changed once again: a live antelope.
That compromise survives today in one of Ghana’s most visually striking festivals.
Every first Saturday in May, Winneba erupts with drumming, chanting, and fierce community pride as the Asafo companies Tuafo No. 1 and Dentsifo No. 2 race into the forest in search of a live antelope.
The competition feels festive, but beneath the celebration sits something deeper: a centuries-old covenant remembered through ritual.
The Asafo groups themselves were once military organisations formed to defend the Effutu state. Though warfare faded long ago, the companies remain powerful custodians of identity and tradition, especially for younger generations growing up between modern life and ancestral history.
What makes Aboakyer remarkable is not only the spectacle of the hunt, but what it represents — a people who refused to surrender to suffering without seeking another path.
The festival stands as proof that traditions can evolve while still holding tightly to memory, spirituality, and communal pride.
In Eric Gyamfi’s latest exhibition in Accra, the camera behaves less like an eye and more like a restless spirit.
Mirrors split bodies into fragments, corridors fold endlessly into themselves, and shadows interrupt the frame with the uncertainty of memory.
Standing before these photographs, viewers are not asked to simply look; they are asked to linger, doubt, and listen.
Hosted at the Foundation for Contemporary Art in Accra, “Stomata: Dr. Mahashe’s Open Frames” arrives at a moment when photography has become almost frictionless.
Millions of images pass across screens every minute, consumed and forgotten with alarming speed.
Gyamfi pushes in the opposite direction. His photographs resist immediacy. They slow the viewer down.
The exhibition’s most arresting works are built through deliberate interference. In Mirrored Interior – 9, reflected passageways collapse into one another like a maze without an exit, creating the sensation of walking through architecture shaped by memory rather than concrete.
Elsewhere, layered exposures produce ghostlike figures that appear trapped between disappearance and return.
What makes the exhibition resonate beyond technical experimentation is its grounding in process.
Purpose-built pinhole cameras, handwritten annotations, and production notes sit alongside the final images, exposing photography not as polished perfection but as an act of searching.
In Ghana, where contemporary photography has increasingly become a tool for documenting identity, politics, and social change, Gyamfi’s work shifts the conversation toward interiority and perception itself.
The result is deeply meditative. “Stomata” reminds audiences that images can still carry mystery, even in an age oversaturated with visibility.
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