On the evening of March 6, 1957, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah stepped up onto a podium to address a vast crowd gathered in central Accra, Ghana. This gathering was the culmination of an epic odyssey. To either side of Nkrumah stood men who had walked with him every hard yard of the independence journey, a generation of politicians and lawyers who had plotted and planned, fought and petitioned, brokered and campaigned for everything coming to fruition that night: the end of British Colonial rule and the birth of Ghana as a unified nation. When the apex of light caught Nkrumah on the podium, the crowd roared – a swell that filled the city of Accra and swept across the African continent, uniting worlds in celebrating the independence of the first sub-Saharan African nation to regain its political, constitutional and cultural autonomy. Nkrumah began, “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus, Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!” This was an historic moment, a time to look back and think about the sacrifices of so many, while looking forward with hope. Each of the men who shared the podium that night had played their own role in the fight for independence, and, on that night of all nights, each chose to wear traditional West African garments, fugu and agbada, in a powerful united statement about the resilient connective tissue woven into traditional cloth. They understood that these West African cloth narratives originated long before colonialism — and had now outlasted it. Cloth, long a symbol of African pride and resistance, was the perfect instantiation of Ghana’s hope and of her people’s indomitable spirit.
It is upon this strong and complex heritage of cloth narratives that the peerless art practice of El Anatsui stands. Anatsui has embraced cloth’s unique role in anchoring us and telling our story, often citing artist Sonya Clark’s notion that “Cloth is to the African what stone monuments are to Westerners.” He has recognised strength in its delicateness and durability in its suppleness. Cloth relies upon our care and depends upon our stewardship. Silks may desiccate with age, cottons fray over time, calicoes unravel in the wind — yet despite its vulnerability cloth endures; it can be patched, made stronger and reconstituted through repair. It is the perfect communal response to the assaults of time, representing resilience and the handing down of a love sustained over decades, if not centuries.
For nearly five decades, Anatsui lived and worked at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he mentored generations of students who would often assist him in his studio as well. (Today, he also works in a purpose-built facility in Tema, Ghana.) He grew up amongst an Ewe community of skilled weavers,
a cultural heritage that continues to insinuate its presence into his art. That heritage of conceptual brilliance matched with astonishing technical flair courses powerfully through Anatsui’s varied practice over time.
Anatsui’s early wooden works from the 1980s and 1990s, which draw upon narrative, memory and time, were deeply inspired by cloth, as indicated by titles such as Leopard Cloth (1993), Remnants of Grandma’s Cloth (1995) and the Ancient Cloth series. The panels, arranged vertically in rows, evoke the narrow strip-woven panels produced by Ewe and Asante weavers, which are sewn together to create larger Kente cloths. The gaps between the panels recall the long warp threads that give woven tissue its structure, while each panel is incised and scored across the entire surface to evoke the patterning of textiles. The untreated woods are also scorched in patches and daubed with a muted palette of colours, recalling old, hand-coloured sepia photographs. Evidently, these weathered objects have witnessed many things and know much. They contain history and exude gravitas. Rather than seeking to defy time, they are composed of time itself, possessing the weighty presence of ancient almanacs. And, if looked at long enough, they begin to return one’s gaze, yielding up their hidden truths couched in the poetic rhythms of deep time.
As the new century dawned, Anatsui shifted his attention from wood to metal, focussing his creative energies on crafting sculptures from salvaged liquor bottlecaps. The combined effect of vast numbers of flattened aluminium caps and rims connected with twists of copper wire is astonishingly beautiful. The first manifestations of this conceptual leap into unknown materials, Woman’s Cloth (1999-2002) and Man’s Cloth (1999-2002) confirm how — initially at least — the metal sculptures continued to draw inspiration from the traditional Kente archetype of multiple strip-woven panels combined into ever larger sheets. They are fixed to the wall in fluid configurations, bringing the vast metallic sculptures to life in a variety of possible arrangements. These ingeniously crafted metal textiles are miracles of sculptural economy, painstakingly assembled by many individual hands into strips and “blocks” that are then joined together into coherent yet mutable wholes. The entire process, united by innumerable personal ties and individual creative energies, is an apt metaphor for African community.
Similarly, in Anatsui’s wooden wall works individual panels come together to form single entities, epitomising community. Solemn Crowd at Dawn (1989), recalls that momentous day in 1957, when, as a student, the artist witnessed the transformation of a seething diversity of ethnic and political groupings into the newly independent nation of Ghana. The formal tensions between part and whole permeating this artwork allude to the social complexities of coaxing unity from diversity. Here the dialectic of separation and integration, of solemnity and celebration, is vividly expressed in both figurative and symbolic terms.
Even as Anatsui intensified his production of the bottlecap sculptures, making them increasingly ambitious in construction and scale, he never stopped working on the intimately expressive and personally significant wood reliefs. Technical and conceptual advances in one medium stimulated evolutionary development in the other. A recent work, One Teaspoon Daily (2022), with bottlecap-covered panels and lozenge-shaped wooden pieces linked by wire strands, illustrates this fruitful cross-fertilisation of materials and methods. From the outset, Anatsui proposed that the separate panels of the wooden works could be rearranged in alternative sequences, another approach to the liberating possibility of permutations he calls the “non-fixed form.” Thus, horizontally configured works such as Dakawo (2023) or Novisi (2024) open up to new rhythms, providing alternative forms and with them, novel opportunities for interpretation.
Nkrumah spoke feelingly about the corrosive power of the legacies of cultural imperialism and of the damage done to traditional African cultures. Using the Ghanaian symbol of the Sankofa — a mythical bird, with its head facing backward and feet moving forward, which “goes back to pick up” its precious egg — he sought to look back into Africa’s past to find the right path towards the future, reconnecting with African wisdom traditions, restoring precolonial epistemologies and renovating belief systems. When Nkrumah proclaimed, “We face forward,” he was appealing for wholehearted investment in a renaissance of African history. He understood African heritage to be not just a wellspring of pride, but a profound source from which to recover values left behind in the race for modernity. Today, as a generation of African leaders seek to craft a new Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah’s words and that ongoing task of nation-building he described feel ever more urgent and vital.
For El Anatsui, who came of age listening to his older peers debate the merits of modern western versus traditional artforms, these remain fundamental concerns. Nkrumah’s championing of Sankofa – returning to retrieve those forgotten truths left behind – finds echo in Anatsui’s own poem, “Old and New”1 where he acknowledges the inherent poetry of old wood while committing to the expression of new ideas in novel forms. Anatsui is both History Man and Visionary Seer and his wood sculptures act as potent talismans. His magnificent sculptures, embracing both classical African and global contemporary insights, offer a vantage point from which to orient ourselves in space, while better understanding our place in time.
Old wood is poetry itself … time having worn off the prose…1
© Gus Casely-Hayford, September 2025
