Accra Becoming: a Documentary

Nine creatives. Eight years. Unreleased footage. Coming soon.

The Archive on My Hard Drive

In 2018, I put a camera in front of nine young Ghanaian creatives and asked them a series of questions about money, family, community, and identity. I asked whether Accra’s creative scene functioned as a community; what they believed their art was actually for; what its single biggest challenge was; and how they thought their work contributed to the articulation of a Ghanaian identity.

Then I sat on the footage for eight years.

Life happens.

Everything changed last year when I saw that Africa No Filter had put out a call for journalists, podcasters, and content creators to tell stories about the future of work in Africa, covering things like the rise of remote work and freelancing, and the low wages, insecurity, and exploitation that all too often come with them.

I thought back to the footage languishing on my hard drive and an idea started to form: what if I could revisit the same nine creatives eight years later and ask them the exact same questions?

The Importance of Pop Academia

As someone who is simultaneously a lecturer, a doctoral researcher, and a DJ, I think a lot about the gap between academic knowledge and popular understanding. There is so much that I see people argue and speculate about (on social media and in comment sections especially) that has already been researched and written up.

The problem is that the academy tends to produce work for other academics, so that research sits in the (appropriately named) ivory tower instead of being translated into forms accessible to the people it most concerns. This is especially worse at a time when more people watch things than read them.

You would think it is the job of the press to do this translation, but I have been a journalist before and I cannot think of many times I was assigned to dig into academic research as part of gathering news. Besides, our traditional press only tends to profile our most successful artists, which tells us almost nothing about the conditions facing everyone else.

I once gave a talk at the Nubuke Foundation about the need for recognized non-academic voices who popularize knowledge (at the time, I mentioned the likes of Ama Asantewa Diaka, Akosua Hanson, and Lydia Forson) and use their platforms to inform and broaden imaginations in the tradition of the griots of old.

As a cultural researcher, one of my favourite forms of research is longitudinal: following the same people across time and tracking what changes and what doesn’t. I rarely see this approach applied to Ghana’s cultural scene.

People like me, I have come to believe, have a particular duty to change that.

Why This Work is Important

Once upon a time, I had the privilege of asking then-Deputy Minister Abla Dzifa Gomashie at a panel what happens when matters of arts and culture are raised at cabinet level. I wrote about her answer in an earlier piece, but the short version is this: unlike tourism (the other part of her ministry) the creative arts arrives at cabinet without data and statistics, and - worse - without legislation. And without those, it is hard to fight for a share of a small pot.

She is now, of course, the Honourable Minister for Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts: an appointment I have expressed cautious optimism over. I caught her again at the launch last year of Dikan’s Ahenfie where she admitted that the situation has not changed much, and expressed the hope that more Ghanaian creatives will actively push for the passing of the national Cultural Policy, first drafted as far back as 2004.

Catching the Vibe Before the Vibe

I conducted the 2018 interviews as an act of public academia, with hopes of making a video and a paper of it; something I plan on doing with my PhD research too.

It was also an act of something I have named early communing. There may be other more academic terms for it, but if I were to define it, early communing is being devotedly inside a cultural movement before it has consolidated. Sometimes, before it even has a name.

It is different from trend-spotting, which observes from a distance, and from the way corporate companies latch onto anything cool after its become cool, only ever interested in extracting value before leaving. Early communing means being changed by what you are present to, and I genuinely believe that it changes the quality of what you know.

There are various points in my life as a culture geek where I have found myself doing this before I had a name for it. In the early 2000s, my crew Amplified were the first to seriously push neo-soul in London. We also spun African street sounds long before anyone gathered them under the Afrobeats label. I look back at old issues of DUST Magazine- which I cofounded and edited after moving to Ghana - and see how clearly we captured the emergence of today’s Accra simply by documenting emerging culture as we saw and felt it and connecting it to what came before.

I remember some of the alternative spaces back then. Rema’s Bar in the back ends of a pre-Republic Osu. Bless the Mic (PY Addo-Boateng’s monthly showcase) where Stonebwoy and Sarkodie were still underground artists lining up to perform. Vibe FM’s studio, where I joined Kweku Ananse once a week to host The Soul Explosion, dropping J Dilla next to Gyedu Blay Ambolley.

I remember a group of us including PY, Kweku Ananse, Ms. Naa and Nokus of YFM, the Accra[Dot]Alt team, and a host of other friends, sitting around a long table one evening, discussing the possibility of a radio station dedicated to all the alternative music commercial radio wouldn’t let us play. But online radio wasn’t yet a thing, and none of us had the money for a broadcasting license. I remember weeping actual tears of joy the first time I listened to Oroko Radio when it launched in 2021.

These days I hear labels like alté (borrowed from Lagos) but back then, we were feeling our way through things that had no name. There were so few events back then that we consulted each other to make sure we didn’t overlap and risk splitting our already-tiny audiences.

Out of that scarcity however, something formed. The AccraDotAlt Talk Parties evolved into the Chalewote Street Arts Festival - for example - after the same small community asked itself: enough with the talking - what can we actually do?

By 2018, what many of us had been living inside for years was starting to be seen from the outside. Ghanaian visual art was finding international collectors. (First Azonto and then) Afrobeats started crossing continents. After Black Panther, the global spotlight fully fell on African creativity. I still enjoy ribbing my friends in STEM by reminding them that no one is visiting Ghana for its scientific or mathematical prowess: they visit for its creativity and culture. That of our ancestors (heritage) and our youth (popular culture) alike.

Since then, successive governments have done a better job of reshaping Ghana’s image on the international stage. But the young people doing the actual daily work - without institutional backing or policy protection - are rarely documented anywhere.

Early communing begins with a feeling or sense that something is happening. With a little intentionality, it can end with evidence that it was.

By the time I picked up a camera in 2018, I had watched enough moments disappear to understand that nobody was going to record this one while it was still here unless I did. Its that same conviction that made me go back in 2026.

A Documentary By the Culture, For the Culture

Accra Becoming is a record of what it meant to build a creative career in Accra across one of the most transformative decades in our history. Its nine subjects are:

• The writer, Ama Asantewa Diaka (whom some still know as Poetra Asantewa)

• Joey Chase of Accra We Dey

• Benewah Boateng of Harmattan Rain

• The illustrator and “designer of graphics” Hanson Akatti

• Multihyphenate creative, Elisabeth Efua Sutherland of Terra Alta

• Ato Annan of the Foundation for Contemporary Art

• Sway Kidd of CulArt Blog

• Hassan Salih: architect and convener of the MESH Creative Confab

• … and Keyzuz: the DJ who left, but in whose footsteps everyone in our alternative scene treads, whether they remember her or not.

Some of them you know. Some you don’t. That too is part of the story the film is telling.

The documentary combines the 2018 archival interviews with new footage filmed this year, following the same nine subjects and asking the same questions. Its structure is simple and deliberate: the first half belongs to the archive, the second to the present.

It was created with the help of a small, dedicated team: Charles Lawson, who filmed the original 2018 interviews and returned for the 2026 footage; Abena Awuku, who handled research and pre-production; EDWVN, who composed the score; and Park Cultural Production who stitched it all together. And - of course - it all came together with a little assistance from Africa No Filter.

Out of the Tower, Into the Streets

To my fellow academics, please study our creative scenes, our music, our art, our cities. If you already are (like my brilliant colleagues on the ACIG project), please know that what you are doing matters enormously.

But such work will matter far more if it escapes our journals, wai. As academics, we must all find ways to translate what we know into knowledge for general audiences. The people we are writing about deserve to read what we find.

I’ve personally found that our creative community is full of curious, critically minded creatives who will engage seriously with research if it is offered to them in accessible form. In that spirit, I want to shout out Palm Moments and their Knowledge on the Rocks format (as well as Accra After Class who I see doing similar work). If you are a researcher whose findings are solid enough for a lecture and bold enough for a bar, register your interest here.

Following in My Cultural Footsteps

But the people I really want to speak to are the young cultural practitioners already inside all the new movements forming in our city, living and feeling its textures from the inside.

Please, please document what you are feeling.

Film. Photograph. Write. Record voice notes and conversations (with permission please). Do what you can with what you have, as the saying goes. No: it may not make you famous. But do it because you are the only ones who truly can.

The quality of witness that comes from early communing cannot be replicated after the fact. Once a moment consolidates - once it has a Wikipedia page and a branded hashtag - something essential about it has already been lost. All that rawness and uncertainty; the specific feeling of building something with no guarantee it will amount to anything… these can only be captured while it is still alive. The small, consistent act of paying attention and putting it somewhere is important, especially for we whose histories have long been suppressed and erased and especially in an era where it is so much easier to share whatever you create.

The cultural historians of the next generation will need to know what was made in this era, how it felt to make it, and who was in the room, so what we leave behind - and how we leave it - matters.

I want to see more of us write about such things from the inside. Those of us who have been around for a while can offer advice and perspective, but we do not have your proximity. We cannot early-commune on your behalf.

Only you can do that.

Accra Becoming was made possible through the support of Africa No Filter. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of Africa No Filter.