From here, my journey takes me north to Tamale by plane. After a frenetic 10-hour layover in Accra, I arrive in the Northern Region, where heaving forests have given way to flat grassy plains with sparse trees. A burnt amber earth coats everything. In the past five years, a cultural earthquake has recast this baobab-strewn terrain. Here, the artist Ibrahim Mahama (who last year became the first African to top ArtReview magazine’s annual power list) has created the expansive galleries, archives and artist spaces of Tamale’s Red Clay studio. When not gracing the Venice or Sydney biennales, London’s White Cube or the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, his work peppers the spaces – including the rusted, decommissioned Singer and Butterfly sewing machines fixed to colonial-era wooden school desks of his iconic piece Capital Corpses. British colonial trains and Soviet aeroplanes have been repurposed as educational, library and exhibition spaces. Part of a generation of pioneering Ghanaian artists that includes Serge Attukwei Clottey, Theresah Ankomah, Amoako Boafo and Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Mahama is the first to have set up an institution like this in the north of Ghana, pinning his homeland firmly on the map. My guide, Labran, an artist who started here as an intern, points out hundreds of shea nut trees planted on the grounds that will provide shade when they mature – monuments to the shea butter that is the livelihood of many in these parts. Red Clay is inclusive: by one of the reclaimed trains, two women snap unselfconscious selfies.
The savanna and forests of the vast 1,850-square-mile Mole National Park have also pulled me here. Of Ghana’s seven national parks, Mole is the largest, with the greatest biodiversity. African savanna elephants, elusive lions and leopards, and multitudes of birds thrive here. We glide down a river in the park beneath a mesh of shea saplings, African birch, dawadawa and strangler fig trees, known as gampilaa. My guide, Musah Achintri, points out the flash of a swooping kingfisher while Soale Abdul-Rahman and Sabia Dari from the neighbouring Mognori community copy the calls of the flycatchers and shrikes.
