“When you speak to a Ghanaian artist, they’ll spend half the time talking about other Ghanaian artists,” Richmond Orlando Mensah tells us of his time interviewing artists for the book Voices. Since 2015, Richmond has been the founder and artistic director of Manju Journal, a platform born out of a desire to spotlight and celebrate creativity throughout Ghana and the continent at large and its diaspora. With an educational background in linguistics and French, Richmond hasn’t always worked directly with the creative industry, but has all the passion needed to tell its unique stories. “I have always loved creativity throughout the arts, photography, fashion and music. I started Manju Journal to give us the space to tell our own stories and truly celebrate all that makes us African,” he adds. And since then, it has become a portal into the creativity of the past and present, and an incubator for the next generation of artists.
With a rise in books on African art by big publishers, galleries and the like, Richmond saw that there was something missing – the artist’s perspective. “Usually with a group book about art, you don’t need permission to feature an artist. You simply hire an art journalist, editor or curator to write third person profiles. But we wanted to document the country’s art scene properly, so we interviewed each artist in person or online. Our book is all first person accounts, with no outsider gaze or viewpoint,” he tells us. 80 interviews paint a broad picture of Ghana as a longstanding home of creativity and craft, each peeping into the past and present. “The way we weave is art, the way we express ourselves is art. If you learn about Adinkra symbols and the language we created – that’s art too. The only difference now is that Ghana has moved towards the contemporary arts, whilst keeping its heritage intact and that’s why as a country now it is our time to voice our ideas globally,” he adds.
