By: Ashad Hajela and Ashna Mehta
15th June 2017 Accra, Ghana.
The sky and the sea share a brilliant bright-blue, shining like a turquoise gemstone, but right next to the blue, Jamestown is an amalgamation of colors varying from the dullest gray to the brightest red. Davido’s music blasts from exhausted industry-grade speakers on Prof. Atta Mills High Street and can be heard from kilometers away. Walls are splashed with paint both systematically and haphazardly. Jamestown is inundated with colors and art, yet Chale Wote has not even started yet.
Chale Wote is an annual street art festival in Accra. This year, it will be held during August 14-20th. The festival has a different theme every year, but this year, the theme is wata-mata, or water and matter. This is an endless space of form-making (ghana.web). This festival brings an already-tight community even closer together. A Jamestown local guide and street artist can attest to that.
Emmanuel Markhansen goes by Samuah. When he is not showing tourists around, he tends to his artwork, which has featured in the Chale Wote festival. He smiles and waves at most of the people he sees and they return the greeting. Several others rush up to snap-shake fingers with him. He walks into the Dutch House, which functions as both a school and an artwork archive and takes out what at first, looks like a polychromatic rug. “It is flip-flops stitched together” he said. He made it in preparation for the Chale Wote festival this August and took some help along the way.
The town has a communal feel. Businesses are inter-dependent like the hands of a clock. Leading down to the beach on a haphazard colonial staircase rests James Botchway’s rubber flip-flop stall, which adopts the variety of colors of Jamestown. “The main customers are locals, mostly fishermen” says Botchway.
At the top of the stairs lies a brightly painted canary-yellow shack with ice-skates hanging in its window. “The skates are for marketing,” said the owner of the shack, Okane Rasta. He is the one and only cobbler of Jamestown. Rasta fixes the fishermen’s flip-flops – the ones sold by Botchway.
Rasta generates as much waste as he does business. Samuah takes advantage of this by cutting squares out of the wasted soles of shoes and flip flops and stitching them together. Samuah collects Botchway’s flip-flops, which are lost by fishermen at sea and washed up on the shore. Samuah collects these to cut squares from, thus making a piece of art representing not only himself, but the Jamestown community as whole. “We are already prepared for Chale Wote,” said Samuah.
Sources:
Emmanuel Markhansen (Samuah): 0279334036
James Botchy: 0576392451
Okane Rasta: 0573278341
Research:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/entertainment/Entries-open-for-7th-annual-CHALE-WOTE-street-art-festival-528353
