CITY LIFE ACCRA

Ghana's beachside capital has become one of the most exciting places in Africa for artists and grassroot creative enterprises, with studios and galleries filling the gaps between raucous clubs and bustling markets

- ELLEN HIMELFARB

The road past Makola Market is swarming with hawkers. Pavements are littered with leather goods. Women wrapped in hand-loomed fabrics step into the street, balancing giant tubs of kpakpo shito peppers on their heads. Hip-hop blasts from a distant speaker. A preacher delivers a sermon into a megaphone.

Beside me, in the driver’s seat, Selasie Gomado is inching along to the petrol station. An hour ago, he picked me up for a visit to Artemartis, the artists’ collective he runs west of the city centre, but in that time we’ve progressed barely a mile. After damaging a tyre on a pothole, Selasie flagged down a guy on the roadside to repair it. A policeman stopped us at a barricade for a routine check of the boot. Then, as we crawled down a narrow residential street, a cyclist in a long, white, embroidered boubou teetered into the bumper and toppled in dramatic fashion, prompting a brief detour to the hospital. He was fine; Selasie was frazzled.

More than four million people live in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, and life here serves up daily obstacles, which is what makes Selasie’s business such a feat. The bluepainted breezeblock cottage is part-workshop, part-gallery and part-crash-pad, providing emerging artists with studio space, supplies, management, hype and, crucially, time to experiment with mediums and concepts. Canvases thick with saturated colour and emotion hang from the walls in various stages of completion, echoing the chaos outside.