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In 50 years of travelling the world I have loved many countries – but none more than Ghana.
Its biggest attractions have always been the warmth, charm and hospitality of its people – and that’s saying something at a time when many of the world’s loveliest destinations have gone off tourists. That’s what first seduced me when I landed a Financial Times job there in 1980. And when I visited again recently, after nearly half a century, I found that gracious culture mercifully unchanged.
Of course much has improved in the urban centres since 1980: there are not as many electricity cuts, water shortages and empty shops as I remembered. In their place are art galleries and social clubs, eco-safari lodges and artist collectives. Today’s Ghana has a luxury tourism scene that is modern and unique – but remains true to a traditional landscape that explodes with colour, sound and the sheer exuberance of life. Its capital has become a hub of contemporary art; new restaurants celebrate Ghanaian food; and new fashion designers give African cultural identity a modern twist.
Ghana is still special: well off the tourist-trodden track, but with enough modern comforts for even the least adventuresome. I started my trip in crowded and chaotic Jamestown, in old Accra, to savour the living art of a Ghana street scene. I found office workers and schoolchildren dressed in traditional bold cotton prints making their way through teeming lanes fragrant with traditional street snacks. Crimson piles of fried plantain (kelewele) – the country’s favourite comfort food – transported me instantly back in time. Vast vats of fermented maize and bowls of oily shito chilli sauce invited me to my first meal of kenkey and fried fish in decades. Women bathed babies in shallow basins, tossing used water straight into open sewers. And all the while, traditional Ghanaian music blasted from speakers at no less than two open-air funerals.
In Ghana, funerals are less about private mourning and more about shared social ritual; even tourists are welcome. Often the caskets are works of art: figurative coffins the shape of everything from airplanes to Air Jordans. Billboard-sized obituary posters celebrate the life of the departed, and mourners wear clothing printed with portraits of the deceased. All of that was true back in 1980. What’s new today is the way that local artists are transforming the fabric of Ghanaian life. I went straight from the streets of Jamestown to see that life reimagined at Accra’s biggest commercial art space, Gallery 1957, where Jamestown artist Serge Attukwei Clottey was celebrating the gallery’s 10th anniversary with a vast installation made from discarded cooking-oil containers.
Gallery 1957 is named for the year Ghana gained independence from Britain and is part of a complex that also includes the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, owned by Lebanon-born Brit Marwan Zakhem, who displays numerous pieces of his personal art collection there. I particularly liked the giant hyperrealist group portrait by Ghanaian artist Jeremiah Quarshie outside the hotel restaurant.
“Something is happening in Ghana: it’s been happening for the past six or seven years, and it’s continued to grow,” says Zakhem. “The contemporary art scene in Accra has now become a leading pivot in the world, and not just for Africa.” For decades, Ghanaian artists have gone overseas to gain success; many are now returning home to work.
“The point of Gallery 1957 was to keep the talent in Accra,” says Zakhem. “Previously there just wasn’t the infrastructure. There wasn’t a gallery that was championing young contemporary artists. So when I built the hotel, I purposely put all the young artists in the public spaces.”
Gallery 1957 hosted its first Accra Culture Week in 2016: “I had to pay for people to come,” he says. The current incarnation of the event attracts hundreds of collectors, journalists and the world’s leading museums and galleries. But Ghana still lacks a culture of buying and collecting art domestically: Zakhem estimates that 90 per cent of collectors are international, with about 60 per cent Americans.
At the other end of town – and the other extreme of the Accra art scene – is Artemartis, a collective that acts as an incubator for emerging Ghanaian talent. There I met founder Selasie Gomado, who quit his engineering job to manage artists after proving he could support himself that way. “Artemartis started as an online art shop where we sold random pieces for as low as $20, even $2, $5,” he tells me. Artemartis began making money hosting local exhibitions of young artists. Many now exhibit overseas.
At Artemartis, I met Courage Hunke, a creator who takes plastic shopping bags, till receipts, order slips, invoices and the ubiquitous obituary posters and assembles them into art. “For me, these things hold a memory of who we are,” he says.
This newfound celebration of Ghanaian creativity isn’t just displayed in galleries. Front/Back Accra is a members’ club that doubles as a cultural salon. (Temporary passes are available to visitors who work in creative fields.) Founder Tarek Mouganie tells me he fashioned the front entrance from a repurposed shipping container, to mimic the form of the city’s ubiquitous shops.
Mouganie is fourth-generation Ghanaian-Lebanese: after studying overseas he returned to Accra in 2013 to launch Affinity Africa, his own digital bank, and became a Yale World Fellow in 2024. He says his “Ghanaianness” is his “superpower”, and Front/Back is about celebrating that identity. “When I came back in 2013, there were lots of returnees… but everywhere we went to have a luxury experience was (non-African) – a sushi restaurant, or French or Italian – and it was a sea of white faces.
“We came up with the concept of Front/Back as a members’ club. We wanted to curate the audience,” he says. To belong, you had to have “an interest in the arts in Africa” or the diaspora. The walls are covered in contemporary art; cocktails use local ingredients like shea butter or cocoa juice, and bar foods include (healthier) versions of street standards like kelewele and yam chips.
Nearby in the same Osu neighbourhood I met Ghanaian designer Aisha Ayensu, founder of the luxury fashion brand Christie Brown, named after her seamstress grandmother. She too was inspired by the newfound pride in Ghanaianness that I saw everywhere: even my Uber driver covered his car seats with west African wax print.
Accessory, 2025, by Serge Attukwei Clottey
Nane Bale - II, 2025, by Serge Attukwei Clottey
“When I launched the brand in 2008, it was a form of activism,” she tells me. “Our prints were shunned; you only wore it to church or wherever, and I thought, ‘Why?’” Now she uses traditional textiles or techniques “to create really interesting pieces that the modern woman would want to wear… into a boardroom, carrying a piece of her heritage. That does something for one’s confidence.”
There is a new Ghanaianness in luxury food offerings: at Buka there are traditional west African dishes; Kozo fuses African and Asian cuisines; and I returned again and again to the seductively named Rent a Wife Kitchen, where all my old favourites – pounded plantain fufu and palm nut soup, fermented maize banku and palaver sauce – taste as they should. Fans of Ghanaian “high life” music will hear plenty of it blaring from car windows, but if that’s not enough, Accra’s +233 Jazz Bar & Grill hosts live performances Tuesday to Saturday.
It’s not just the new coastal middle class that can tap into the creativity boom. A short flight to the dusty northern town of Tamale brings visitors to Red Clay Studio, the atelier and gallery of one of Ghana’s most internationally successful artists, Ibrahim Mahama, the first African to top ArtReview’s Power100 list. His giant installations use discarded items from everyday labour – cobblers’ shoeshine boxes, jute cocoa bags – to make artistic and political points about life in post-colonial Africa. In 2014 he invested the proceeds of his first international exhibition in opening art spaces in Tamale aimed at fostering education and community. He’s waging a personal campaign to persuade Ghanaian parents that their kids can make a living as creatives, pointing out that his own work can command prices in excess of €100,000.
A short drive from Tamale, I watch teenage elephants sparring for fun at Zaina Lodge, Ghana’s first luxury eco-safari camp. From the balcony of my air-conditioned tented chalet, I listened to elephants watering below, before sitting down to a superb Zaina meal. Even the coffee served on the dawn game drive was outstanding. Ghana is investing to protect its environment; something that wasn’t done in my day.
From my 20s to my 70s, Ghana has bookended my life. Much has changed – and even more has not. As the Canadian-Ghanaian owner of Rent a Wife Kitchen commented, “some countries you just don’t care about”. Ghana certainly is not one of them. I wouldn’t have missed seeing it again for the world.
Patti Waldmeir was a guest of Zaina Lodge, from $409, zainalodge-ghana.com; Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, from $370,
kempinski.com; and Front/Bank Accra, snacks from $5, cocktails from $15, frontbackaccra.
kempinski.com; and Front/Bank Accra, snacks from $5, cocktails from $15, frontbackaccra.
