There was a time when a Ghanaian proverb could determine whether you went home with a television set, a fan, or simply the pride of knowing your roots.

On Saturday evenings, families gathered around their television sets as actor and broadcaster David Dontoh stepped onto the stage of Agoro.

Before the questions began, viewers already knew what was coming: laughter, suspense, and a celebration of Ghanaian knowledge that felt both ordinary and extraordinary.

The genius of Agoro was not its prizes. It was its premise.

At a time when game shows across the world rewarded trivia about celebrities, sports, or popular culture, Agoro challenged contestants to navigate the vast landscape of Ghanaian history, folklore, customs, and proverbs.

The questions drew from knowledge often passed down around dinner tables, in marketplaces, and under the shade of family compounds.

A Classroom Disguised as Entertainment

What made the programme remarkable was its ability to teach without appearing educational. Viewers tuned in for entertainment but left with lessons about heritage.

Behind the scenes, journalist Charles Amankwa Ampofo provided much of the research that gave the show its intellectual depth.

Combined with Dontoh’s charisma and quick wit, the result was a programme that transformed cultural literacy into a national pastime.

Contestants who stumbled over a proverb often became the subject of gentle teasing. The audience laughed. The contestants laughed. Yet many viewers silently tested themselves from home, hoping they would have fared better.

What Have We Lost?

The fading of Agoro raises a larger question about cultural transmission in the digital age.

Today, many young Ghanaians can identify international television characters, viral internet trends, and foreign theme songs with ease.

Yet fewer can explain the symbolism behind an Adinkra motif or complete a proverb once commonly heard across generations.

The issue is not nostalgia for a television programme. It is the shrinking number of spaces where cultural knowledge is celebrated publicly and collectively.

Agoro proved that heritage did not have to compete with entertainment. It could be the entertainment.

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Perhaps that is the programme’s enduring lesson. Culture survives not only in museums, textbooks, and festivals.

Sometimes, it survives in a game show where knowing the next line of a proverb was enough to make a nation watch.

Long before streaming platforms and multiplex cinemas reached African audiences, films arrived in many Ghanaian towns by pickup truck. A television is balanced in the back. A VCR carefully wrapped in cloth.

A noisy generator rattling beside plastic chairs under the night sky.

This was Ghana’s mobile cinema era — a travelling film culture that transformed football parks, community centres, and roadside spaces into makeshift movie theatres throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.

But perhaps the most enduring legacy of that era was not the movies themselves. It was the posters.

The Art of Imagining a Film You’ve Never Seen

Hand-painted on flour sacks and recycled canvases, Ghana’s bootleg movie posters became legendary for their wild creativity. Arnold Schwarzenegger might appear with glowing red eyes. Vampires grew extra limbs. Martial arts heroes carried impossible weapons. Horror films looked even more terrifying than the originals.

The reason was simple: many of the artists had never actually watched the films they were hired to promote.

Instead, painters relied on fragments — a title, a short description, sometimes a blurry cassette cover — before filling the gaps with their own imagination. Accuracy mattered less than attention. The posters needed to stop people in their tracks and convince an entire village that tonight’s screening was worth attending.

In the process, Ghanaian artists unknowingly created one of the most distinctive forms of pop art in modern African history.

From Village Walls to Global Galleries

Though mobile cinema faded with the spread of television, DVDs, and digital media, the posters survived.

Collectors around the world began treating them as valuable artworks rather than disposable advertisements.

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Today, galleries such as the Chicago-based Deadly Prey Gallery work with original Ghanaian artists and younger painters to preserve the tradition for a growing international audience.

What makes the posters remarkable is not just their humour or exaggeration. They capture a specific Ghanaian moment — a time when cinema was communal, improvised, and deeply local.

Hollywood stories arrived in rural Ghana, but they were reinterpreted through the brushstrokes, humour, fears, and imagination of Ghanaian artists.

The result was not imitation. It was cultural translation — loud, inventive, and impossible to forget.

There is a moment in many artists’ lives when experimentation gives way to certainty — when years of searching suddenly settle into clarity.

For British artist Helen Annobil, that moment appears to have arrived not in London or Manchester, but in Accra.

Her inaugural exhibition, Terra Firma, currently showing at Annobil Contemporary Gallery, feels less like a debut and more like an arrival.

After decades spent balancing nursing with artistic practice in England, Annobil’s work now carries the confidence of someone who has finally located the emotional and cultural terrain that speaks fluently to her imagination.

The title, Latin for “firm ground,” is more than poetic framing. It reflects the artist’s deepening relationship with Ghana after three years of living and working in the country.

In her paintings, fishing communities dissolve into restless skies, still-life compositions pulse with unexpected movement, and landscapes stretch beyond realism into emotional memory. Ghana does not simply appear in the work as scenery; it reshapes the rhythm of the paintings themselves.

There are traces of European art history woven into the canvases — Turner’s atmosphere, Monet’s sensitivity to light, Kandinsky’s emotional abstraction — yet the works resist imitation.

Instead, Annobil filters those traditions through the intensity of Ghana’s colors, textures, and daily encounters. The result is art that feels instinctive rather than academically constructed.

Curated by celebrated Ghanaian artist Kofi Setordji, the exhibition also speaks to a broader shift within Ghana’s contemporary art scene. Increasingly, Accra is becoming a place where international artists come not merely to exhibit, but to rethink their practice altogether.

That ambition is echoed in the vision behind Annobil Contemporary Gallery itself. Founded by Ishmael Fiifi Annobil, the space rejects the long-standing notion of Africa as only a source of artistic inspiration for foreign institutions.

Instead, it positions Ghana as a center of global artistic exchange — a place where creative identities can be unsettled, rebuilt, and newly understood.

In Terra Firma, Helen Annobil offers paintings shaped by migration, observation, and reinvention. But perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling statement is quieter than that: sometimes artistic belonging is discovered far from where the journey began.