Ghanaians have just entered another election year resigned to the choice between two dominant parties that repeatedly promise a brand-new economic paradigm yet deliver very little in practice.
In Tamale, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region, an innovative exhibition of film, art and photography titled Routes of Rebellion teases the mind and stirs the political imagination. The exhibition is a collaboration between Nuku Studio, founded by Ghanaian photographer and artist Nii Obodai, and Red Clay, the exhibition ground of Ghanaian artist and philanthropist Ibrahim Mahama whose monumental artworks are gaining attention internationally.
Routes of Rebellion is a collection of 15 films – many of them experimental – by Jesse Weaver Shipley, a professor of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth University in the US who has spent 20 years researching Ghana’s political history and cultural movements.
The films represent snatches of Ghana’s political history and contemporary cultural developments, while exploring universal values. Ranging from just under five minutes to 109 minutes long, they explore the relationship between art and global power. Shipley is the author of books on ‘hiplife music’ and ‘trickster theatre’, among others.
The films are presented alongside photographic mounts and artworks by Obodai, whose lesser-known full name is Francis Nii Obodai Provencal, and Ghanaian-based Slovenian artist, Tjaša Rener. The exhibition is curated by Robin Riskin and Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah.
From Nkrumah to Rawlings
Influenced by avant-garde Ghanaian playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah and Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Shipley is gripped by the idea of art as a tool for reimagining society in times of political oppression.
Of the 15 films in the exhibition, all but two run concurrently on a loop in adjoining exhibition spaces at Nuku Studio in downtown Tamale. The studio, housed in a long, narrow building once used as a printing press, was established by Obodai in 2018. Also a gallery, art residency and centre for photographic research and practice, the studio projects photography as a ‘catalyst for social change’.
Pride of place at the Nuku Studio exhibition is given to a 19-minute 2023 film Anatomy of a Revolution. This anchor piece opens with Abdallah in his library reading the announcement by Flt-Lt JJ Rawlings of his 4 June 1979 revolution in Ghana. It then pans to a scene of Abdallah sitting at a 1980s typewriter in his garden.
![IMG_5694 © Mohammed Ben Abdallah at his 1980s typewriter in the film ‘Anatomy of a Revolution’. Photo courtesy of Nuku Studio](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/img_5694.jpeg)
As Abdallah begins to reminisce about Kwame Nkrumah’s independence speech of 6 March 1957, his words are dramatised by a dancer who moves through Ussher Fort in iconic Jamestown in Accra, expressing in dance the trials of Ghana’s political history: from slavery to liberation, from colonialism to independence; stagnation and the dashed hopes of revolutionary renewal. Elsewhere a woman reads extracts from Achebe’s A Man of the People.
During the 1980s, Abdallah served as secretary of education and culture under Rawlings. A story is told of how the then-revolutionary leader once watched an Abdallah play, Land of a Million Magicians, that parodied the hardships faced by Ghanaians under his leadership and laughed heartily at the playwright’s irreverence.
First-hand accounts
In Burnt Images: Photography and its Afterlife, another film dealing with the Rawlings era, Gerald Annan-Forson shows us the conundrum facing a photographer with 50 years of work experience. Should he sell his images, store them or torch them?
As he is filmed sorting through his collection of 200,000 images and negatives, Annan-Forson tells a story about growing up in a mixed-parentage family in the UK, how racial prejudice shaped his interest in photography and how he became a photographer for his former classmate, Rawlings, suddenly a political icon.
Parallel to this personal narrative, the filming of Annan-Forson’s images allows us to, as the exhibition brochure states, ‘glimpse inside a radical government through the lens of one of its photographers’.
![IMG_3601 © Photographer Gerald Annan-Forson examines negatives from his collection of 200,000 images.](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/img_3601.jpeg)
Decades later, with no one willing to pay for the images and no place to store them, Shipley prevented Annan-Forson from torching the entire collection and donated it to the University of Ghana archives instead.
Popular uprising
Other aspects of the Rawlings era are explored in two films installed alongside each other at Red Clay. The first, Routes of Rebellion, is a compilation of sound tapes from the 19 June 1983 coup attempt. This was the most successful of the repeated coup attempts between 1982 and 1983 in which Corporal Carlos Halidu Gyiwah captured Ghana Broadcasting House and announced that Rawlings had been overthrown.
Accra was thrown into a state of confusion until Captain Courage Quashigah landed a helicopter on Broadcasting House and announced the reversal of the coup. The second film, Last Rites of Gyiwah, records the October 2022 burial of Gyiwah by his family, 38 years after he was captured and killed.
The theme of rebellion in history and politics is blended with a look at artistry in sports, popular culture and the rise of hiplife in Ghana, the story of a painter-musician living with Parkinson’s and an exploratory piece about a world in which two people meeting on a bridge are presumed to be spies or dissidents up to no good.
The opening of the Routes of Rebellion exhibition in November drew a diverse gathering of artists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, directors of cultural institutions and archivists, including some featured in the exhibition.
Facing ghosts of the past
The presence of rap legend Reggie Ossei Rockstone and his wife Dr Zilla Limann created a strong sense of occasion, while musician, filmmaker and activist Wanlov the Kubolor, with his characteristic bare feet, short wrapper and koshka percussion instrument strung around his neck, seemed to blend into every part of the exhibition.
![IMG_3595 © Reggie Rockstone and wife Zilla Limann examine photos of the rap legend during the launch of the Routes to Rebellion exhibition. By fusing American hiphop beats with Ghanaian highlife music, Rockstone pioneered Ghana’s hiplife movement in the 1990s. Photos by Dede Amanor-Wilks](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/img_3595.jpeg)
In contrast to his more usual urban rebel persona, the Kubolor – a Ga word often understood as ‘wanderer’ or ‘vagabond’ although he prefers to define it as ‘decolonialist’ – features with W. Awuni Michell in a Shipley film inspired by playwright and novelist Ama Ata Aidoo’s Dilemma of a Ghost.
In two versions of the film, two ghosts meet on a shipping pier in Jamestown in the near future and in 1836, when the slave trade had been abolished but not yet ended. They drink tea and get to know fragments of each other’s stories in a succession of languages, English, Ewe, Twi, Pidgin and Romanian.
Rockstone pioneered Ghana’s hiplife movement in the 1990s
The Kubolor, whose off-stage name is Emmanuel Owusu Bonsu, was born in Romania to a Romanian mother and Ghanaian father. He moved to Ghana as an infant and soaked up several languages as he grew up, including his father’s Twi language, as well as Ga and Pidgin.
Hip-hop meets highlife
In the film, the Kubolor is in early-19th century period dress waist up, while Michell’s kaba (African print blouse) and long skirt seem to make a statement about the colonial origins of Ghana’s national dress. Beyond these two five-minute film sketches, the Kubolor’s presence was felt in his spontaneous koshka-playing and singing at both exhibition sites.
![IMG_3704 © Musician, filmmaker and activist Wanlov the Kubolor, with his characteristic bare feet, short wrapper and koshka, being photographed at the entrance to Red Clay. The artiste seemed to blend into every part of the exhibition. Photo by Dede Amanor-Wilks](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/19/img_3704.jpeg)
Rockstone, known as the godfather of hiplife music, features in two of the longest and weightiest films in the exhibition, Living the Hiplife and Tales of an African Superstar in New York. These films document the birth of hiplife and capture the mood of the times and the outlook of Rockstone and the people around him. By fusing American hip-hop beats with Ghanaian highlife music and Twi raps, Rockstone pioneered Ghana’s hiplife movement in the 1990s.
During one fly-on-the-wall moment in Tales of an African Superstar in New York, Rockstone bemoans the eagerness of young Ghanaian musicians to leave Ghana for greener pastures. He points out that contrary to popular misconception, even in New York his earnings as a musician never allowed him to lead a flamboyant lifestyle, despite his African superstar status.
So is there any space for artists in Ghana to impact the policies on these trends? For Obodai, the migration of young Ghanaian talent is a matter of great concern and the role of the arts in politics is crucial.
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