Arts and GH Heritage
Why the Way You Fold Your Fugu Hat Sends a Powerful Message
In Ghana’s Upper East Region, a seemingly simple fold of fabric can speak louder than words. Wear your fugu hat the wrong way, and you might just find yourself paying a fine — in goats, sheep, or even a cow.
The fugu, also known as batakari, is a handwoven smock beloved across Ghana. But it’s the matching hat — soft, flexible, and worn like a beanie — that carries a traditional code many outsiders overlook.
Depending on how you fold its topmost part, you could be signalling loyalty to a chief, declaring friendship with all, or, dangerously, claiming spiritual power you don’t possess.
Isaaka Munkaila, a smock dealer with 25 years of experience in Bolgatanga’s fugu market, knows the rules well. He demonstrates the styles one by one.
First, fold the hat’s tip to the back. “That is how chiefs wear it,” he says. “It says: ‘I have many followers. I am a head of community.’” An ordinary person wearing it that way in a chief’s palace risks being seen as a rival. The penalty? Depending on the traditional area, a goat, sheep, or cow.
But not all chiefs are quick to punish. Naab Sierig Soore Sobil IV, divisional chief of Pelungu in the Nabdam district, says ignorance can be a defence.
“If someone from the south comes to my palace wearing it like that, I will correct him and teach him. But if a local does it, the elders will demand a fine — to deter others.”
Fold the tip to point skyward, and you’re safe. That’s the everyday style for ordinary people. “It simply acknowledges God’s presence everywhere,” Munkaila says. Fold it to the left or right, and you’re saying: “I belong with everyone — young and old.”
The most dangerous fold? Flat onto the forehead. That style is reserved for spiritually powerful individuals — those with “juju.”
Wear it without the backing of traditional spiritual strength, Munkaila warns, and someone stronger might test you. “You don’t wear it that way if you don’t have the powers.”
While no recorded harm has come from a wrong fold, chiefs have scolded and sanctioned offenders. In the Upper East Region, fines remain small, chiefs acknowledging poverty and changing times. Further north, in the Northern Region, customs are stricter.
For most Ghanaians who grow up with these traditions, the code is second nature. But for visitors, the fugu hat is a quiet reminder: in the north, fashion carries meaning — and sometimes consequences.
Every memorable art gallery begins with someone who believes a painting deserves more than a wall—it deserves an audience.
In Accra, that belief has shaped Berj Art Gallery into one of Ghana’s enduring champions of West African art.
Founded in 1996 by collector Joyce Quarshie, Berj emerged at a time when many Ghanaian artists were still searching for spaces that could connect their work with wider audiences.
More than three decades later, Quarshie’s commitment has grown into a gallery that celebrates both established masters and emerging voices under one roof.
A Living Story of West African Art
Walking through Berj feels less like entering a showroom and more like stepping into a conversation across generations.
Bold paintings share space with finely carved wooden sculptures, bronze works catch the light from different angles, and photographs add contemporary perspectives to centuries-old artistic traditions.
The gallery’s strength lies in that balance. Acclaimed painters stand alongside rising talents, creating a rare opportunity for visitors to see Ghana’s artistic evolution unfolding in real time.
It is a reminder that culture is not frozen in history; it continues to grow with every new brushstroke and every fresh creative voice.
More Than a Gallery
For international visitors exploring Accra, Berj offers something deeper than a sightseeing stop. It opens a window into Ghana’s creative identity, where craftsmanship, storytelling and heritage intersect.
As the gallery continues hosting exhibitions that bring together local and international artistic influences, it reinforces a simple but powerful truth: preserving culture is not only about protecting the past.
It is about creating spaces where the next generation of artists can imagine—and exhibit—the future.
A family photograph resting on a shelf may look like decoration. A half-finished piece of woven cloth may seem incomplete. A living room may simply be a place to sit.
At Nubuke Foundation in Accra, however, these familiar things are being asked to tell deeper stories.
Weight of the Ordinary, a group exhibition featuring Josiah Tsibu Manu, Priscilla Agbeti, Blanche Boni-Mississo, King David Osabutey (Kakalicka) and Sena Burgundy Appau, turns its attention to the overlooked details of daily life—and finds history hiding there.
Manu’s domestic interiors are particularly evocative. Furniture, photographs and household details become unofficial archives, recalling how Ghanaian homes often carry memories that never enter formal histories.
In Agbeti’s unfinished woven works, meanwhile, labour refuses to disappear behind polished craftsmanship.
The incomplete becomes deliberate, leaving viewers to consider the economic and social histories carried by textiles.
Elsewhere, Boni-Mississo examines how spaces determine who can move freely and who is kept at the margins. Kakalicka draws on Akan cosmology through his Ɔhɔhoɔ, or stranger, connecting questions of displacement and belonging with indigenous ideas.
Appau’s monumental blue figures turn inward, contemplating the uncertainty and possibility of becoming.
Together, the artists suggest that the everyday is not neutral. It is where memory is stored, identities are formed and social boundaries are experienced.
For audiences in Ghana and abroad, the exhibition offers an invitation to look again at what familiarity can conceal. Sometimes, the objects closest to us have the most to say.
Sometimes history survives not in monuments, but in memory. In Ghana, the beat of the atumpan once carried messages across kingdoms.
In Jamaica’s mist-covered Blue Mountains, that same language of rhythm became a weapon of survival.
Queen Nanny’s story begins in oral tradition, which holds that she was born among the Akan people before being captured during the transatlantic slave trade and forced to Jamaica.
What followed transformed her into one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated freedom fighters.
When the drum became a battlefield language
Leading the Windward Maroons, Nanny turned the rugged mountains into a fortress. British troops struggled against hidden trails, surprise attacks and a commander who understood that knowledge of the landscape could outweigh military strength.
Just as remarkable was her reported use of the atumpan, the Akan talking drum. What colonial forces dismissed as eerie sounds echoing through the hills became a coded communication system that helped coordinate resistance.
Years of failed campaigns eventually forced Britain to negotiate. The 1739 peace agreement with the Maroons remains one of the most striking acknowledgements that enslaved Africans had built a resistance too formidable to erase.
A bridge between Ghana and Jamaica
Today, Queen Nanny is Jamaica’s only female National Hero, and her portrait appears on the Jamaican $500 banknote.
Her legacy also reaches back across the Atlantic, reminding Ghanaians that culture can outlive displacement.
The rhythms that once echoed through Akan communities did not disappear at the coast.
They crossed an ocean, climbed a mountain, and became part of one of history’s most remarkable stories of resistance.
-
Ghana News1 day agoTop Headlines From Ghanaian Newspapers: Monday, Sept. 7, 2026
-
Festivals & Events2 days agoDzawuwu: The Volta Festival That Celebrates Agave Bravery
-
Ghana News11 hours agoHow Ghana’s Government Pressured MTN, Telecel, and AirtelTigo to Cut Data Prices
-
Sights and Sounds2 days agoTrade Accra’s Traffic for Treetops at Legon Botanical Gardens
-
Ghana News13 hours agoTop Headlines From Ghanaian Newspapers: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026
-
Health & Wellness2 days agoWhy 500 Sit-Ups a Day Won’t Reveal Your Abs
-
Ghana News1 day agoGhanaian Vaccine and Medicine Manufacturers Get Ready Market After NVI Clinches Historic Deal to Sell to Africa’s Bulk Buying Group
-
Taste GH1 day agoTubaani Beans: Northern Ghana’s Hearty Answer to Rice and Beans