Reconsidering Performance Art: History, Tradition, and Contemporaneity at Chale Wote in Ga Mashie, Accra
by Colleen Foran
“That area looks ancient,” a cabdriver responded to my stated destination in Ga Mashie. While the neighborhood is not actually ancient, I understood the sentiment. Ga Mashie constitutes “Old Accra” and contains the Ghanaian capital’s oldest standing buildings.1 Constructed by European companies as defensive forts for trade goods, these structures date from the seventeenth century.2 The outposts later became hubs of the transatlantic slave trade (fig. 1).3 Prior to European incursion, the area was a village populated by fishermen from the Ga ethnic group. Many of the neighborhood’s current residents trace their lineage and livelihoods back to these inhabitants, even as the profession’s viability has declined due to climate change and industrial overfishing (fig. 2). Shipping and retail outposts that prospered during the colonial period have largely moved to the outer reaches of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area.4 This economic decline has been paralleled by infrastructure decay.
Ga Mashie remains a vibrant and culturally rich space. The area echoes with the cheers and jeers of its famed boxing gyms, thumping base from funerals, and dice hitting plastic Ludo boards. Every year, residents perform vital processions like the Yams Festival for Twins and Hɔmɔwɔ Festival as markers of ethnic identity and social definition.5 Hɔmɔwɔ celebrates the end of a historical famine and is the most important event on the Ga community’s calendar.6 The Chale Wote Street Art Festival has become another annual marker for Ga Mashie. Held every August since 2011, the week-long event draws crowds from around Ghana and, increasingly, the world. The festival transfigures the space of Ga Mashie. Vendors and visitors throng John Evans Atta Mills High Street, closed to traffic for Saturday and Sunday (fig. 3).7 Artwork is installed in the historic forts (fig. 4) side-by-side with live performances activating the space (figs. 5, 6).8
Figure 3. Scene from 2022’s Chale Wote Street Art Festival with the Jamestown Lighthouse in the background. John Evans Atta Mills High Street, Accra, Ghana. Photograph by the author, 2022; Figure 4. Scene from 2022’s Chale Wote Street Art Festival with mural by Nii Nortey Hamid (b. Ghana, 1987) in the background. Ussher Fort, Accra, Ghana. Photograph by the author, 2022; Figure 5. Martin Toloku (b. Ghana, 1992). EnU va DZinYE (I’m Possessed) (2022). Durational performance. Chale Wote Street Art Festival, Ussher Fort, Accra, Ghana. Photograph by the author, 2022; Figure 6. Scene from Nana Yaw Ananse’s performance Pour Pure Power Proposal for African Prosperity and Posterity Proposal (2022) with clothing vendors in the background. Chale Wote Street Art Festival, Ussher Fort, Accra, Ghana. Photograph by the author, 2022.
Chale Wote also brings out many unofficial performers who dress as outlandishly as possible to draw attention and photography fees (fig. 7). Delighted attendees can join in the fun by paying to get their faces painted or by purchasing cheap plastic masks (see fig. 8). Coming across a procession, the spectator must guess if it is art, spectacle, or something in between. Through this productive confusion, Chale Wote challenges standard expectations for performance art.
I came across a poignant example of such blurred boundaries at the 2022 festival: a wheeled cart transformed by plywood into a helicopter was decorated with hand-painted slogans like “Fear God” and accompanied by children costumed in “Police F.B.I.” uniforms with fake semi-automatics (fig. 8). For an encouraged fee, onlookers could place their own children inside the helicopter for a photograph opportunity. I was left asking—was this a comment on American imperialism? A way to draw attention, and earn cedis, the Ghanaian currency, in the thronged High Street? Or was it just plain cool, a recreation of violent Hollywood films? I argue that the blurring of lines between critical art, commerce, and popular culture is an essential feature, not a bug, of Chale Wote, one that asks big questions around the purpose of short-term art events, the spaces in which they take place, and the audiences they exist to serve.
Because of the centrality of performance art to its program, Chale Wote has been correlated with the myriad contemporary art fairs and biennials that have cropped up since the turn of the twenty-first century. Biennalization both reflects and shapes what contemporaneity under globalization looks like and who it benefits; the audiences for such events are often Western European and American visitors who drop in for singular performances.9 And yet, even as it gains international renown, Chale Wote continues to draw a local audience. Organizers have sustained this interest by tying the festival into Ga Mashie’s long-standing ritual processions. Recent program materials have explicitly listed the Yams Festival for Twins and Hɔmɔwɔ as event kick-offs.10 These religious celebrations are presented as anchors for Chale Wote’s goal of bringing contemporary art into public space.11 This year, a Beninese group performed Egungun and Zangbeto masquerades in what promoters described as “the most versatile public performance[s] of mythical imagination in West Africa.”12
Seen within the context of Chale Wote, it becomes difficult to read the above as simply “traditional” examples of African masquerade.13 These processions are an integral part of the festival’s spectacle and its substance, entertaining while also serving a crucial function for community social and spatial self-fashioning within Ga Mashie. This calls into question what we consider contemporary and what we relegate to tradition. European and American art historians have typically discussed performance art as a break with tradition.14 African art history has theorized performance differently—signified, not least, by the fact that African art’s historiography often discusses “performance” without the appellation of “art.”15 Emerging out of the discipline of anthropology and the ethos of area studies, African performance is most often discussed as an expression of static ethnic identity.16
By placing cutting-edge artists in spatial conversation with historical ritual processions, Chale Wote underscores that performance art is nothing new in African art.17 Performance art is not always a radical break from “tradition” but can also be a continuation of a rich legacy of movement through space to address social issues and contest political realities. This conceptualization explains the festival’s staying power and the role it continues to play in the Ga Mashie community. Yet multiple interviewees have told me that the festival is at a tipping point. Many believe it is at risk of becoming purely a food fair—an excuse to drink beer, do some tchotchke shopping, and dance at evening concerts. As I write from the fall of 2022, Ghana is facing rampant inflation and extreme economic strife.18 My research works to understand whether a once-a-year event can do enough to change daily life for Ga Mashie residents. Will its performance art retain the political edge necessary to trouble the status quo? Or might Chale Wote’s critical, cutting-edge art be overwritten by its own spectacle?
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Colleen Foran is a PhD candidate studying African art at Boston University. Her research focuses on contemporary West African art, particularly on public and participatory art in Ghana’s capital of Accra. Prior to coming to BU, Colleen worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.
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Footnotes
1. Abibata Shanni Mahama, Ama Twumwaa Acheampong, Oti Boateng Peprah, and Yaw Agyeman Boafo, Preliminary Report for Ga Mashie Urban Design Lab (New York: Millennium Cities Initiative, 2011), 2.
2. D. A. Tetteh and K. Y. Tuafo, James Town, British Accra: A Brief History, Luminaries & Landmarks (Accra, Ghana: African Stories Press, 2018), 9–11, 17.
3. While the forts were originally built to house material goods, the rapid growth of the slave trade meant that the buildings were repurposed to cruelly house human beings kidnapped from their communities to be transported and sold in South and North America and the Caribbean. Today, the only forts still standing in Ga Mashie are James Fort and Ussher Fort, though others are extant throughout Accra and Ghana. While these forts have been declared UNESCO World Heritage sites, their levels of preservation vary. They are often in very bad condition; UNESCO World Heritage Convention, “Forts and Castles, Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western Regions,” accessed November 10, 2022, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/34/.
4. The colonial era in Ghana ended in 1957, when it declared its independence from the United Kingdom. However, Ga Mashie’s economic decline is considered to have begun earlier. Many peg this to the 1920s, citing the 1921 construction of new market halls at Central, or Makola, Market and the 1928 opening of a deep-water port at Takoradi (as opposed to Ga Mashie’s “surf port,” which was more challenging to navigate for large vessels). Nonetheless, even if many wholesalers had left Ga Mashie by independence, the upscale department stores for which the area was known largely remained operational until moving to the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s; Iain Jackson, Sharing Stories from Jamestown: The Creation of Mercantile Accra (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool School of Architecture, 2019), 68, 91, 93; Nate Plageman, “Colonial Ambition, Common Sense Thinking, and the Making of Takoradi Harbor, Gold Coast,” History in Africa 40 (2013): 332–33.
5. For more on how processional acts serve as both spatial and political acts of boundary-marking for the Ga people, see John Kwadwo Osei-Tutu, “‘Space’, and the Marking of ‘Space’ in Ga History, Culture, and Politics,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 4/5 (2000–01): 55–81.
6. For more detail on how these events are performed and their duration, see Mariam Goshadze, “When the Deities Visit for Hɔmɔwɔ: Translating Religion in the Language of the Secular,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 1 (March 2019): 191–224, and Marion Kilson, Dancing with the Gods: Essays in Ga Ritual (Lanham, MA: University Press of America, 2013).
7. While the festival lasts for about a week, the action is concentrated on the concluding Saturday and Sunday. The workweek includes panels, talks, and screenings in the lead up, but many of these take place away from Ga Mashie in other parts of Accra.
8. Some of these are durational feats of artistic endurance, while others are fleeting (respectively, see figs. 5, 6). The latter makes it easy for the visitor to miss some of the performances.
9. For more on how the growth of biennials can be understood to reflect the conditions of globalization, as well as an optimistic read on their potential to engender resistance to the hegemonic world order, see Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
10. Uplifting Ga culture has been a part of the festival’s fabric from its beginning: An undated proposal and budget given to me by Gabriel Nii Teiko Tagoe, the executive director of the Ga Mashie Development Agency (GAMADA) department within the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), introduces “The Kpanlogo Musical Fiesta.” It suggests a festival to draw tourists to Ga Mashie for concerts of the Ga music and dance known as Kpanlogo. According to the document, this will revitalize the fading genre as a means of “bring[ing] back the social cohesion that these communities enjoyed when this music and dance form was alive.” Tagoe told me this proposal was the seed for what would become Chale Wote, although the actual origins of the event are somewhat obscure and many claim credit for its ideation; Gabriel Nii Teiko Tagoe (executive director, GAMADA), in discussion with the author, September 7, 2022, GAMADA offices, Accra, Ghana.
11. The festival has also crafted new rituals, including the Day of ReMembering, a yearly procession held since 2017 where performers move through the space of Ga Mashie to honor those ancestors forcibly marched to the slave forts along the same streets; Kwame Boafo (performance artist and 2022 organizer, Chale Wote), in discussion with the author, November 10, 2022, Zoom.
12. Chale Wote organizers often present the festival as a pan-Africanist endeavor in their online and printed materials, reinforcing the idea that their interest in and respect for historical African performance is not limited to Ghanaian processions; Chale Wote Street Art Festival, “An exploration of a visual language, for the most versatile public performance of mythical imagination in West Africa; EGUNGUN+ ZANGBETOR,” August 28, 2022, https://www.facebook.com/Chalewotefest/posts/
pfbid0izRgznjPZvm35U3TPKYfDFmCGYc3MNcTPiSuzv41yzMiaYPzTHj2sQEA8BVspWtMl.
13. In African art historiography, “masquerade” is a more encompassing term that describes not only events where participants are wearing a mask or disguising their appearance. It can also include all events that feature a performer moving through space as a means of collective cultural definition.
14. The standard Western teleological account of the development of modern and contemporary art presumes a rupture model, with innovation followed by stagnation followed by repudiation that leads to innovation. Typically, the origins of performance art are located with European Dada artists working in the interwar period. The Dadaists’ ideas came to full fruition with American Fluxus artists and theorists and with the Viennese Actionists in the 1960s as they tore down the remaining boundaries between art and life. It is important to note that this “rupture” model has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years and has long been critiqued for framing these artistic movements as a mode of radical “avant-garde” politics.
15. See, for example, Frances Harding, ed., The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2002) and Ruth M. Stone, “Performance in Contemporary African Arts: A Prologue,” Journal of Folklore Research 25, no. 1/2 (1988): 3–15.
16. Beyond the limitations placed on our understanding of African performance art, this framework also ignores the over-a-century-long interaction between classical African and modern art from Europe and the United States, as well as the robust interchange between continents that occurred for centuries outside the colonial history within which “contact” is commonly couched.
17. As scholars Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe have argued, “if any creative or critical strategy establishes a firm link between contemporary and classical African art, that strategy is conceptualism,” Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe, “Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art,” Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art (Ithaca, NY: Forum for African Arts, 2001), 10–23.
18. Over the past year, the Ghanaian cedi’s value against the American dollar has depreciated by almost fifty percent and many have begun to call for the current president Nana Akufo-Addo to resign; Thomas Naadi, “Ghana Undergoing Worst Economic Crisis – President,” BBC News, October 31, 2022, accessed November 7, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/ news/world/africa?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source
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