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.

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.

At a wedding in Accra, the invitation may boldly announce “2 p.m. sharp,” yet seasoned guests know the real action often begins hours later.

Plastic chairs remain half-empty, highlife drifts through the speakers, and no one seems particularly alarmed.

Outside Africa, this scene is usually reduced to a punchline called “African time.” But behind the joke sits a much deeper conversation about history, identity, and the meaning of time itself.

For many African societies, time was traditionally tied less to numbers and more to human activity. A gathering began when people arrived. A meeting unfolded when everyone important was present.

Life moved according to relationships, seasons, storytelling, and communal rhythm rather than the hard authority of a clock.

That worldview collided sharply with colonial systems. Mission schools, railways, factories and government offices introduced rigid schedules where lateness became linked to punishment, productivity, and discipline.

Time stopped being communal and became transactional. In many ways, modern African cities now operate inside two competing philosophies at once.

In Ghana, this tension shows up everywhere. Corporate workers rush through traffic to reach 8 a.m. meetings while family funerals comfortably stretch far beyond their printed programmes.

Musicians may arrive late to performances yet stay long after midnight, creating experiences audiences remember for years. Social life often prioritizes presence over precision.

Still, the debate around African time has become more urgent in a global economy built on deadlines and digital coordination.

Younger professionals increasingly question whether chronic lateness should continue to hide behind culture, especially when it affects business, trust, and opportunity.

Yet reducing African time to laziness misses the bigger story. It reflects a society still negotiating how to balance efficiency with humanity, structure with flexibility, and imported systems with older communal values.

The clock may measure minutes, but culture determines what those minutes mean.