Arts and GH Heritage
The 1957 Vault: Why Ghana’s National Museum is the Continent’s Living Diary
It is the only place on earth where you can watch 10,000 years of African history shake hands with the year 1957.
There is a specific kind of silence found inside the National Museum of Ghana in Accra. It isn’t the dusty, forgotten silence of a graveyard. It is the heavy, expectant quiet of a powerhouse.
When Ghana lowered the Union Jack and raised the Red, Gold, and Green in 1957, the nation didn’t just want a new flag; it wanted its memory back.
The National Museum was the first architectural brick laid in that quest. It wasn’t built to store “relics”; it was built to house a declaration: Our story matters, and we are finally the ones telling it.
Walking through the doors today—freshly reopened and reimagined since 2022—feels less like a history lesson and more like a family reunion.
You aren’t just looking at “centuries-old pottery.” You are standing before the very vessels that held the water and wine of ancestors who dreamed you into existence.
The collection is a masterclass in the “Language of Gold.” The tiny, intricate brass goldweights on display were once the pulse of the trans-Saharan trade, but they were also art.
Each curve and geometric pattern held a proverb, a law, or a bit of Han-based wit. Beside them, the Kente cloths aren’t just fabric; they are woven manuscripts. To the untrained eye, they are vibrant silk; to the Ghanaian, they are a visual vocabulary of royalty and resistance.
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But the real magic happens when you step into the garden. Here, the icons of Ghana’s past stand in permanent conversation. These aren’t cold bronze statues; they are the architects of the modern African identity.
Since the 2022 renovation, over 160,000 people have walked these grounds in a single year. They aren’t just tourists. They are people from the diaspora and local students alike, all looking for a piece of themselves that they didn’t know was missing.
If you want to understand why Ghana is often called the “Black Star” of the continent, don’t look at a map. Walk into the National Museum.
Listen to the drums that once signaled the end of an empire, and run your eyes over the regalia of chiefs who refused to bow.
The museum is a reminder that while history is what happened to us, heritage is what we choose to keep.
A constellation is never just about the stars. It is about the lines we imagine between them.
That idea sits quietly at the heart of Nsoromma, a group exhibition at The Mix Art Gallery bringing together five participants from the Rising Star 2026 cohort: Albert Nii Nortey Dowuona, Baaba Sarpong, Christabel Dzandu, Paul Leslie Ahadji and Emmanuel Tetteh.
Named after the Akan word for “children of the stars,” Nsoromma takes celestial imagery beyond decoration.
Here, the night sky becomes a way of asking an older Ghanaian question: where do we come from, and what parts of that inheritance continue to shape who we become?
The exhibition’s significance lies partly in how these emerging artists approach cultural memory. Tradition does not appear as a sealed archive or an untouched inheritance.
It is something negotiated—carried through families, altered by migration, questioned through personal experience and reinterpreted by each generation.
Across painting, installation and mixed media, the artists explore ritual, spirituality, belonging and self-discovery.
Their works occupy the space between what is inherited and what is invented, reflecting a generation increasingly comfortable moving between Ghanaian cultural references and contemporary artistic languages.
That makes the constellation metaphor especially fitting. A single star can be striking, but its meaning changes when placed among others.
So it is with these five artistic voices: distinct in approach, yet connected by questions of identity and place.
Rather than offering definitive answers, Nsoromma asks visitors to “find their own cosmologies”—to look, interpret and perhaps recognise something of themselves in the spaces between the stars.
Presented as part of Accra Art Week, the exhibition runs until September 2, 2026.
Before privacy became a prized feature of modern housing, Ghanaian compounds offered something harder to design: a built-in community.
You did not need a WhatsApp group to know what was happening in a Ghanaian compound. You simply opened your door.
Someone was pounding fufu. Children were chasing a football between rooms. An auntie was calling a neighbour’s child by name. From somewhere above, a radio played highlife while a grandmother sat outside, watching the afternoon unfold.
The compound house was more than a place to live. It was an informal social network long before the phrase existed.
Where Everyone Looked Out for Everyone
Children often grew up surrounded not only by parents and siblings but by cousins, grandparents, tenants and neighbours who could all exercise a little authority. If you climbed a mango tree too high, an older person passing by could order you down—and that instruction carried weight. By the time you reached home, your parents probably already knew.
There was irritation, certainly. Privacy was limited, and family disagreements could become everyone’s business.
Yet the same closeness created a powerful safety net. A child always had another adult to turn to. Food could be shared. News travelled quickly. Births, funerals, festivals and everyday celebrations became collective experiences.
Modern housing has changed that rhythm. Gated communities, apartments and detached homes offer security, privacy and independence, but they can also create physical distance between households. Even families living under one roof may spend much of their day communicating through phones rather than across a shared courtyard.
What We Lost Along the Way
The compound house was never perfect, but it embodied an important Ghanaian idea: community was something you lived, not something you scheduled.
Perhaps the challenge today is not to recreate the old compound house exactly, but to recover its spirit—neighbours who know one another, children who can play together, and communities where someone notices when you have not been seen.
That may be a form of heritage worth preserving.
Arts and GH Heritage
When Football Becomes Heritage: Shutabug’s Bold Reimagining of African Identity
A football jersey can tell you which country a player represents. In the hands of Nigerian artist Mayowa “Shutabug” Alabi, it can tell you something much bigger: where that country comes from.
His striking digital artworks transform African football nations into regal cultural figures, replacing the familiar language of sports illustration with one shaped by fashion, heritage and visual storytelling.
The result is football imagery that feels as comfortable on a gallery wall as it does on a stadium poster.
When Sport Carries Memory
Shutabug’s figures are deliberately stylised. Elongated bodies, dramatic facial structures, deep ebony skin and oversized traditional headwear give his subjects an almost ceremonial presence.
Football shirts become starting points rather than finished designs, merging with indigenous textiles, patterns and national symbols.
Ghana’s Black Star, for instance, becomes part of a contemporary football look framed by an elegant headwrap. Elsewhere, Cameroon’s cultural identity is amplified through dramatic headwear, while DR Congo’s diagonal sash and Senegal’s understated traditional styling become visual markers of national character.
The approach is significant because African football has long been more than competition. National teams can become vessels for pride, history and belonging, particularly when players step onto an international stage carrying colours and symbols recognised far beyond their borders.
A New Archive of African Football
Shutabug’s practice places that emotional connection into a contemporary visual language.
His textured digital surfaces retain an intentionally imperfect quality, giving technologically produced images the warmth of something handmade.
Since his breakthrough in 2017, when he won the European Union/UN Women “Picture It” competition, his multidisciplinary career has expanded across digital painting, photography, animation and graphic design.
His football works now offer another possibility: an African sporting archive built not only from match results and trophies, but from clothing, symbols, faces and cultural memory.
In Shutabug’s world, the pitch becomes a canvas—and African identity gets to take centre stage.
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