Kwame Akoto Bamfo is owner and founder of the Nkyinkyim Museum
His name is Kwame Akoto Bamfo and he is a Ghanaian impassioned with the African spirit.
His dream is to see Africa progress, racial injustice suppressed and the African heritage promoted.
With this dream, he established the Nkyinkyim Museum in Ada, Ghana, some eleven years ago, and with time, this space has expanded to become one of the country’s biggest outdoor museums.
As an artist, Kwame sculpts, paints, animates, and does creative directing and with these, he promotes Africanism.
His sculpting, among his many talents, has given him great exposure and put Ghana on the global map. His museum has many of them, each one with a unique story about African history and heritage.
The ancestral veneration grounds has tons of sculpted pieces made from both concrete and terracotta, which capture different emotions possibly experienced by African ancestors, to tell the story of the African heritage.
One of his newest creations – A history wall, 100 meters in length and 15 feet in height has the most intriguing wall carvings.
On this wall, he, together with other well-known personalities like Efo Sela have captured scenes of Africans protesting injustice and racism meted out against them.
Speaking to Wonder Ami Hagan on the People & Places show, Kwame Akoto Bamfo explained that the artwork seeks to unite the past and present stories of Africans.
“Over the years, there’s this part of sculpture that I feel appeals to the African story and the African people and to making the art and history more accessible,” he said.
Adding,
“I’m excited about our new history wall that we unveiled this year, that is showing the art of our generation. You will see, we just started to cover the protest in Nigeria and the protest in the US as well, considering that it is a 100 meter wall and about 15-ft high, it is still relatively small but we are excited that we are connecting the history of now to the past and people will now see the impact of the past on the present.”
Mr. Akoto is very hopeful that through his museum, many more Ghanaians and Africans on the whole, will come to experience healing from the past and assume a positive outlook about African history and heritage.
“Nkyinkyim is all over the world but that is not the impact for me, the impact is when it changes the livelihood of the African and when it is able to put pressure on racial injustice. I see it at the end of the tunnel, I see it’s a journey, because all the students and tourists we’ve had here, we’ve been able to reach people spiritually, through our various pilgrimages that are done here.
“Pilgrimages that previously, would have been done outside the continent are being done here to pay homage to our enslaved ancestral site. Our work is to change the mindset of the African and let him or her, feel the impact of the mindset that has been changed. Our work is to educate,” he noted.
Watch the full interview below: