Tamale, Ghana—In mid-April I paid a visit to Ibrahim Mahama, one of the most daring and ambitious artists to emerge from Africa in the past decade.
Mahama, 38, is attempting something scarcely contemplated anywhere by anyone— effectively transform the whole of Tamale (with a population of 750 000) into one gigantic art installation and a permanent exhibition. He is taking art back from galleries and museums and reconfiguring it for community, as work that lives in a place among the locals.
We extended an invitation to Mahama to speak at this year’s Africa In the World ideas festival, taking place from October 22-25 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. I undertook that once he confirmed his participation I would visit him and his wife, Khadija Iddi Yussif, in Ghana. Khadija, a chef reinterpreting the cuisine of the Sahel, promised to make an elaborate dinner during my visit.
Mahama was born in this town, and though all his education was further south, in Accra and Kumasi (where he obtained degrees in painting and sculpture from the famous art school at Kwame Nkrumah University), he was always set on returning to Tamale to fully immerse himself in his home and to try to alter how we perceive art.
He does his work from the industrial-scale Red Clay Studio on the outskirts of town. Red Clay is best seen as a series of warehouse-size work and exhibition spaces that serve as home for his monumental installations. Many of his best-known works have been exhibited all over the world, usually in downscaled form. But here, ‘The Parliament of Ghosts’ is at the scale of a real parliamentary chamber. Two towering versions of the ‘Non-Orientable Nkansa’—stacks and stacks of long-discarded shoeshine boxes and other everyday utensils of working people—occupy a massive exhibition hall. Another hall is taken entirely by the ‘Capital Corpses’ installation, some 120 old sewing machines set atop colonial-era school desks.
Perhaps few things illustrate Mahama’s towering ambition more than the ghostly presence of several long-decommissioned train cars abandoned by the old Gold Coast Railways. Mahama negotiated with the government to acquire them, and then went to extraordinary lengths to have the cars hauled on flatbed trucks 250 miles from Accra to Tamale. The strange sight of the ghost trains caused quite a stir in this town, where generations had grown up never seeing an actual train.
And then there are the six Soviet-era aircraft stationed on the grounds, awaiting new lives as installation art. Piles of objects long discarded lay about—thousands of unused bottles from a shuttered soft drinks factory, dozens of power transformers and hundreds of clay pots. In the open field, lying on its side, is an industrial tank that Mahama salvaged from a shuttered factory in Wilmington, South Carolina, which he had repurposed for his ‘57 Forms of Liberty’ installation commissioned for the High Line in New York City. Here, it awaits a new life.
But why?
Mahama believes that embedded within all our discarded objects are imprints or intimations of a future foretold. The sweat of the cobbler is part of the assembled toolbox. The blood of the soldier is imprinted on the stretchers that form the installation called ‘A Grain of Wheat’. Mahama seems fond of naming many of his colossal creations after books by African authors, referencing Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Abayomi Adebayo.
In this way, the abandoned ghost trains of Ghana are a representation of the calamitous post-colonial failures of many African countries, but also the possibility of future progress.
My weekend in Tamale gave hints of the potential of a more harmonious and inclusive future. Red Clay is always open and free to any visitor. During my visit I saw a group of local high school students turn up to celebrate their graduation in the ‘Parliament of Ghosts.’ Families brought children to visit the trains and the airplanes and to take selfies. In this way the installation revealed itself not as a museum piece but art made for a community. It was not hard to imagine a full integration with the whole town over time. Mahama has already crept into the heart of town, with the Sahel Center for Contemporary Art in downtown, as well as an old, abandoned grain silo being repurposed as an art education and cultural event center, called Nkrumah Volini.
One afternoon Mahama took me to visit his father, a notable of the town who held court on his front porch as various folk came to seek advice or chat about goings on. Watching the old man in his Yoruba cap, I am reminded of my own father from a different but not dissimilar era in my home town in western Nigeria. In fact, a Nigerian would feel very much at home here in Tamale. Many people speak Hausa, and the gravitational pull of Kano as the unofficial capital of the Sahel, borders be damned, is everywhere noticeable.
Later that evening, Khadija treated us to a five-course dinner, a culinary excursion staged in collaboration with the pastry chef Kobby Brown, who had flown in from Accra for the occasion. The stars came out that night across the firmament, and for a moment it was possible to believe that the world is a kind and beautiful place.
And so we are agreed: Ibrahim Mahama will speak at this year’s Africa In the World festival: ‘Home Is Where the Art Is.’
