Anyako
On the Keta Lagoon, about 3½ hours east of Accra, reached by causeway. Birds, fishing canoes and old Ewe shrines.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Arts & Music · Anyako, Nsukka & Tema · born 1944
Up close they are rubbish: thousands of flattened aluminium tops from bottles of gin, whisky and schnapps, the brands still printed on them, joined with copper wire. From across the room they are cloth, shimmering gold, red and silver, falling in folds like kente, hanging from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim. El Anatsui, a kente weaver's son from an island in the Keta Lagoon, spent forty years teaching sculpture in a Nigerian university town and became one of the most celebrated living artists in the world. In 2023 his metal cloths filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.
El Anatsui was born on 4 February 1944 at Anyako, an Ewe town on an island in the Keta Lagoon in today's Volta Region, not far from where Annie Jiagge grew up in Keta. His father was a master weaver of Ewe kente. Decades later, when the world saw his metal hangings, critics saw kente in them at once. He has said it was never deliberate, but the loom and its strips were the first art he knew.
He grew up in the last years of the Gold Coast. Later he would recall that the sugar in every colonial kitchen was Tate & Lyle, a detail that would come back when Tate invited him to London.
He studied at the College of Art of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in the 1960s, where the teaching still followed British academic models. It was the school that Vincent Kofi would head from 1969. Looking for something more African than the curriculum offered, the young Anatsui turned to the adinkra symbols and the crafts around him, the same sources Kofi Antubam had championed.
In 1975 he moved to Nigeria to teach at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in the Igbo country of the south-east, where he stayed for more than four decades and became professor of sculpture. There he joined the circle of artists known as the Nsukka group, who drew on Igbo uli designs and local traditions.
For twenty years he worked mainly in wood, cutting and scorching panels with a chainsaw and blowtorch, and in clay, making broken pots that spoke of history and loss. His work was admired in African art circles, but hardly known elsewhere. An art critic later said that William Kentridge had made his reputation from Johannesburg, while El Anatsui conquered the world from a university town in Nigeria.
In the late 1990s he came across a bag of discarded aluminium screw-tops from liquor bottles near his studio. He began to cut, flatten, fold and crush them, and to stitch them together with copper wire into sheets. The sheets turned out to be light, flexible and endlessly variable in colour. They could be hung, draped, folded and rearranged each time they were shown, so that no installation looks the same twice.
How they are made: the works are made by a large team of studio assistants, first in Nsukka and later also in Ghana, who prepare and join thousands of caps by hand to his designs. The caps are bought from local recycling stations, so each hanging carries the names of the drinks West Africa actually buys.
The caps look like recycling, but they carry history. Liquor came to West Africa with the European traders: schnapps and rum were among the goods exchanged for gold and for enslaved people on this coast, and spirits still carry weight in libations and ceremonies. Sugar, rum and the slave trade are one story.
Behind the Red Moon: at Tate, whose fortune came from Tate & Lyle sugar, he hung three vast metal sails that told the story of the Atlantic crossing: a red moon over a ship's sail, the wave of the sea, the earth and the wall. From a boy in Anyako with Tate & Lyle on the kitchen shelf to the Turbine Hall is a full circle. See our pages on the end of Britain's slave empire and the forts and castles.
Here is the honest part. El Anatsui is one of the most famous Ghanaians alive, but his great works hang in London, New York, Paris and Doha. In Ghana you can see very little of his art in public, and the country's museums, some of them shrinking their displays, have no gallery that shows what its most successful artist has made. Most of his career was also spent in Nigeria, which claims him as part of its own art history. He now lives and works between Nsukka and Tema, and a Ghanaian national collection of his work would be long overdue.
On the Keta Lagoon, about 3½ hours east of Accra, reached by causeway. Birds, fishing canoes and old Ewe shrines.
Fort Prinzenstein, the lagoon and Hogbetsotso at Anloga.
His father's craft. Weavers still work in the Volta towns; see Ho and HoInGhana.com.
KNUST's College of Art, where he trained.
El Anatsui made the world look again at what Africa throws away. From discarded bottle tops he made cloths as grand as any royal kente, and inside them he folded the history of gin, sugar, trade and the Atlantic. He did it without moving to New York or London, from a university town in Nigeria, which says as much about the talent in Africa's own institutions as it does about him. Ghana can be proud that he is Ghanaian. It would be prouder if a Ghanaian could walk into a museum at home and see one of his great metal cloths.
Verified: 30 September 2026. His birth at Anyako on 4 February 1944, his father's kente weaving, his study at KNUST, his move to Nsukka in 1975 and four decades as professor there, the bottle-cap works from the late 1990s, the 2015 Golden Lion, the 2017 Praemium Imperiale, the 2019 Haus der Kunst survey, Behind the Red Moon at Tate Modern (October 2023 – April 2024), the 2026 Seoul exhibition, and his living and working between Nsukka and Tema follow Tate, Britannica, White Cube, Goodman Gallery and The Art Newspaper. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.