Arts and GH Heritage
Ghana’s Adinkra’s Quiet Life in Concrete and Stone
There is a building in Kumasi where the gate does not just open. It speaks.
Wrought into the iron, before you even step inside, is the symbol Bi Nka Bi. It means “no one should bite the other.” You do not read it in a book. You feel it as you walk through. The building itself is telling you how to behave while you are in its presence.
This is the quiet work of Adinkra symbols in Ghana today. They are no longer just stamped on cloth for funerals and festivals. They have moved into the walls. Into the floors. Into the places where we live, work, and gather. And they are speaking to us whether we notice or not.
From Funeral Cloth to Foundation
Adinkra started somewhere else entirely. The word itself comes from di nkra, meaning to say goodbye. The stamped patterns on cloth were once messages for the departed, a way of sending loved ones off with wisdom tucked into the fabric.
But symbols that carry meaning do not stay in one place for long. Slowly, they slipped off the cloth and into the world.
Walk through almost any public building in Accra or Kumasi today and you will see them. Gye Nyame on the wall of a church, reminding everyone inside who is in charge. Sankofa carved into the entrance of a school, telling students before they even sit down that the past is not finished with them yet. Funtumfunafu Denkyemfunafu, the conjoined crocodiles, on the floor of a community hall, whispering that even in competition, we share the same stomach.
The Architects Who Listened
There was a moment, somewhere in the last twenty years, when Ghanaian architects stopped copying glass boxes from Dubai and started looking at their own feet.
They realized that a building in Ghana should not look like any other building. It should carry the weight of where it sits. So they began asking questions. What if the railings carried Nyansapo (the knot of wisdom)? What if the courtyard was laid out in the shape of Ese Ne Tekrema (the teeth and the tongue), reminding people that even when they disagree, they must live together?
The work of people like Joe Osae-Addo and others in the Ghanaian architecture scene has pushed this forward. Not by forcing tradition onto modern buildings, but by letting the symbols find their natural place. A Sankofa on a school gate is not a decoration. It is a lesson that does not need a teacher.
What the Walls Are Saying
If you pay attention, the symbols start to read like a map of Ghanaian values.
Gye Nyame appears where people need reassurance—churches, mosques, even the front of some trotro stations. Dwennimmen, the ram’s horns, show up at courts and council buildings, reminding officials to be strong but humble. Mate Masie, meaning “what I hear, I keep,” sits quietly in libraries and archives.
The buildings are not just shelters. They are philosophy made visible.
Why It Matters Now
There is a reason this is happening during Adinkra Month, and there is a reason it matters beyond our borders.
The world is hungry for meaning. Everywhere, people are tired of buildings that look like airports, that feel like nothing. When a tourist walks into a hotel in Accra and sees Akoma (the heart) woven into the terrazzo floor, they are not just seeing a pattern. They are standing in a culture that decided not to forget itself.
For Ghanaians, it is something else. It is a reminder that we do not need to import identity. It is already in the ground. In the iron. In the wall.
Next time you walk into a building, look down. Look at the gate. Look at the pillars. There is a symbol there, and it has been waiting for you to notice.
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.
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