01 A city without display cases
It is worth saying first what this trip is not. Accra has no monumental ensemble, no restored old town and no museum network to fill the days. The city is three former towns beside three forts that grew until they met, and what survives of that is heavily altered.
That difference between workshop and display case is exactly the point of the trip. In a museum you see the result; here you see the process, with the noise, the sawdust, the paint tins and the half-finished commission leaning against the wall. For anyone who travels for craft, that is worth more than any collection.
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02 The narrow-strip loom
Kente is not woven the way almost all the world's cloth is woven. It is made on a loom that produces narrow strips, about ten centimetres wide, with the warp stretched along the ground for several metres and held by a weight at the far end. The weaver works seated, advancing section by section.
Strips ten centimetres wide, woven one at a time and sewn side by side afterwards. A large kente cloth is hours at the loom multiplied by twenty.
The strips are then sewn side by side until they form the complete piece. That is where the characteristic look of offset blocks and bands comes from, and where the price comes from too: a large cloth is not an afternoon's work but weeks of it, and every combination of colours and patterns has its own name and its own reading.
03 The street is a workshop too
Outside the workshops, the city keeps producing in plain sight. The old districts — Jamestown, Usshertown — are full of painted walls, hand-made shop signs and a street graphic scene that has been drawing photographers and designers for years. You do not have to look for it: it is on the way.
And there is the market, which is the other half of the argument. Accra's trade takes over the pavement, the roadway and anything else it finds, and in it you see the material before it becomes an object: cloth by the metre, timber, tools, paint. For anyone travelling for craft, a big market explains more than a craft shop.
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04 How the trip is put together
Five or six days is the sensible measure, and the key is not to stack more than two stops a day. Greater Accra has 5.46 million people spread over 3,245 square kilometres, and the traffic turns any journey into a long hour. One morning in a workshop beats three half-visits.
Everything is arranged by asking, and in English, which is an official language. There is no set circuit and no published timetable: the workshops are businesses and they work when they work. Arranging a visit in advance, even the day before, transforms what you see and avoids turning up at a bad moment.
The month has a clear answer: November to February, with between 12 and 37 millimetres of rain and up to 245 hours of sunshine. May and June, at 151 and 190 millimetres with sunshine at its low, complicate movement around a city where half an hour of rain is enough to block the traffic.
And the warning that decides it. If your way of travelling is to walk into a building, look at a collection and leave, Accra will strike you as a city with nothing in it. If your thing is walking into a workplace, asking permission, staying to watch something being made and leaving with dirty hands, this is one of the most interesting capitals on the continent, and hardly anyone comes for that.
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