‘People cry, get angry’: remembering the enslaved in Ghana’s remarkable sculpture park
Kwame Akoto-Bamfo started by shaping one clay head in 2009. Now thousands are displayed at the Nykyinkyim Museum, each representing an African who was lost to slavery.
Photographs by Keelson Studio
At the end of a sandy path, lined with bamboo trees, lies a clearing with thousands of clay head sculptures. One is of a woman whose hair is half done, another shows a man blindfolded. Some heads have masks signifying royalty. In a small pond are dozens more sculptures, some with shackles round their necks.
Each head placed at the Nykyinkyim Museum in Ghana represents someone who was enslaved and taken from the continent of Africa by Europeans to face a life of struggle, brutality and death.
“It’s emotional for me, I have to control my feelings every time I come,” says Ackah Komla Swanzy , who is a a griot (a west African storyteller and educator) and an artist who makes some of the sculptures. “These are my own people. I view them as my siblings. It’s like losing your family member who you won’t see again.”
The sculptures are part of the Ancestor Project, conceived by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, an artist, educator and activist, who founded the museum in 2019. Nkyinkyim is an Akan word that means “twisting”. It is also the name of a symbol that represents the nature of life’s journey and the characteristics required to thrive in it.
Akoto-Bamfo, 42, who made the first sculpture of a head in 2009, says he was compelled to start the project after years of feeling “a very strong desire to do something”.
Growing up, he experienced the legacies of colonialism. Ghana achieved independence from the British in 1957. At school, teachers preferred people with European accents, he remembers; and a university education and spending time abroad were highly valued. “The closer you were to whiteness, the better for you in our societies. And even to a large extent, it’s the same now,” he says.
But he knew it was wrong. “There’s always something innate that draws your attention to humanity and human rights and justice … You notice something needs to be addressed and that’s what happened for me.”
He adds: “It was representation. It was telling our side of the story … I knew I wanted to address the anger and the pain and the frustrations.”
Head sculptures are a way of documenting family portraits of the dead among the Akans, the largest and most prominent ethic group in Ghana, to which Akoto-Bamfo belongs. For generations, this practice served to commemorate African ancestors until colonialism misrepresented it as linked with evil, and pushed it to the sidelines.
