The Nubuke Foundation

My visit to Legon had been to a new art gallery, the Nubuke Foundation. (‘Nubuke’ means ‘a new dawn has broken’ in one of the local languages). The walk to the gallery from the Koforidua tro took me through one of Accra’s more affluent suburbs, complete with upmarket hotels, coffee shops and vast imposing, gated, guarded and barb-wire enclosed residences. The Foundation compound greets you with a huge, joyful, rainbow-coloured, wall-filling mural. Created by Bernard Akoi-Jackson, the intricate, Kente cloth inspired design hides a variety of indigenous creatures – from a crocodile to mice.

I had come to see an exhibition of black and white photographs of Accra’s architectural heritage (in part, to see if it would convince me to change the views I expressed in May). There was a sequence of rooms with views of Achimota School, Korle Bu Hospital, the main Post Office and an extraordinary number of government bungalows. I was particularly taken with a selection of interpretations of the prints in oil paint by S C Decker. The use of colour, to lift otherwise very one dimensional images, was imaginative. The Foundation newspaper noted that many of these structures are under threat from developers and that, therefore, this photographic record was important. I was disappointed, however, that the pictures were new. It would have been good to see archive images of the buildings in their heyday. Unfortunately they all look rather scruffy, worn and neglected now.

Nevertheless, I was inspired. On Republic Day this week, I cycled round the centre of Koforidua. Within an hour I had collected a series of images of the town’s colonial past. I had easily found classical pillars, elegant balustrades, graceful arches, colonnades and even a set of caryatides. Many of these buildings could rival anything Accra has to offer.