A storied artistic movement with only a handful of artists to lay claim to it is somewhat of an anomaly today, a time when creativity is branded, promoted, and the artist and the artwork are inextricably linked—whether they like it or not. But anonymity is the case for the 400-year-old Asafo flag craft of central Ghana’s Fante group on the Gold Coast. As part of one of West Africa’s most important art movements, the people of Fanteland have been creating the large, three-by-five-foot flags that depict culture and society in workshops and cooperatives since the late 1600s. The resulting works offer a rare example of the power of collective textile-making, where the aim is for the workshop to triumph over individualism.
Over the last ten years, a new audience has emerged for Asafo flags, with people discovering their decorative power for the home and fascinated that this vital art movement has gone under the radar for such a long time. In a recent Architectural Digest home tour with actor and founder of Gurls Talk Adwoah Aboah, she pointed out an Asafo flag mounted in the hallway, a purchase from a family trip to Ghana with her parents.
These dynamic flags are largely uncredited not because they were created by particularly private artists or under enforced anonymity, but because they weren’t necessarily crafted as art to be associated with any one individual. The flags were made for special ceremonies and funerals to represent legends, human relationships, and contemporary culture. The name Asafo represented the Fante army that resisted the colonizing forces from Europe that invaded Ghana in the late 19th century.
The first Asafo flags depicted business, companies, and social culture, and were painted on reeds and raffia. By the 20th century, they were created prolifically with textiles, reflecting the innovation in cotton textile production during the decades before and after Ghana’s independence in 1957. As a large, hand-stitched composition, a typical Asafo flag might portray a community claiming an animal as part of their business or involved in a local conflict, in broad primary colors and a minimalist approach. Evoking scenes of family life, war, dance, and hunting, the flags offer a rare insight into history as well as an exciting sign of how powerful textiles are when they aren’t created as art, but as part of a group craft practice.
In Accra, Ghana, the Artist Alliance Gallery holds one of the biggest collections of Asafo flags in the world, available and ready for any visitor to discover for themselves. Founded in 1989 by the Ghanaian artist Ablade Glover, Artist Alliance Gallery is the first location on the Gold Coast that centralized and built a community around Ghanaian art. Glover has carefully selected artists, such as Seth Clottey and Yomi Momoh, to display and sell their work in the space, which has panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is fitting that an artist with such a rich connection to the Gold Coast would be in possession of one of the largest Asafo flag collections. As museums and smaller institutions across the world start to spotlight these flags, that Glover still holds the biggest collection helps connect the work to the area it was created in.
Asafo flags were largely made in collectives such as the Kormantse and Saltpond workshops, named after villages on the Gold Coast. Some of the craftspeople can be identified, but many of the flags have no traceable maker. By the late 20th century, although artists such as Kweku Kakanu and Nana McCarthy continued to make flags, the flag-making trade was dying out. But in the 1990s a small group of people began to reinstate the industry, including Kobina Badowah and Baba Issaka. To revive the practice, these artists make flags to commission, positioning Asafo flags as a contemporary art movement in the sweet spot between textiles and art.
For researchers, art lovers, and academics, a visit to the Artists Alliance Gallery is essential for discovering the rich legacy of Asafo flags in the area. One flag at the gallery features a design from the 1910s with a scene where a young villager and chief are looking at a map from the small village Berman Asankran in the direction of another town, Egyaa in southern Ghana. Most flags are adorned with either a Ghanaian or a British flag, signifying whether they were made before Ghana’s 1957 independence from Britain or after; this design is appliqued with a British flag.
Like many textiles, from tapestry to curtains, the act of being created as a practical object lends a certain poignance and interest to the material piece when it is reconsidered as an art object years later. There are Asafo flags hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, but there’s something about Glover’s collection—where you can physically touch hundreds of flags—that creates a fresh new relationship between the viewer and maker. There are images of conflict, happiness, and challenge ready to browse; many of the flags are fraying at the edges and are torn from use at festivals and funerals. Seeing them in person makes it clear that these are pieces to live a life with and to have in the home, not just to keep behind a pane of glass in a museum—whether the artist is known or not.
Grace Banks is a London-based journalist and editor. She is the author of Play with Me: Dolls - Women - Art.
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