The presidential chair
Inspired by Akan stools and chiefs' chairs: a throne for a republic, telling Ghanaians their president sat where their kings had sat. See stools and palanquins.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Arts & Music · Accra · 1922–1964
A new country needs more than a flag. It needs a chair for its president to sit on, a mace for its Parliament, a sword for its oaths, stamps, murals, a whole visual language that says: this is not Britain any more. In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah gave that job to one man. Kofi Antubam carved and painted the look of the First Republic, built it from the stools, swords and adinkra symbols of Akan tradition, and wrote a book arguing that Ghana's own culture was the foundation of its modern art. The book was printed in Leipzig. He died in 1964, aged 42.
Kofi Antubam was born in 1922 in the Gold Coast, to Maame and Nana Mensah. He studied at Achimota, the college founded with Aggrey's help, where his art teacher was the Russian-born sculptor H. V. Meyerowitz. Meyerowitz told his students not to copy European paintings but to look at the life around them: the markets, the stools, the cloths, the carvings of the villages. Antubam took that lesson for the rest of his life.
From 1948 to 1950 he studied on a scholarship at Goldsmiths College in London, and in 1950 he had an exhibition of drawings and paintings from the Gold Coast in Paris. He came home as one of the best-known African artists of his generation.
At independence Kwame Nkrumah appointed Antubam as the official state artist. His task was to give the new state its own symbols and furnishings, drawn from Ghanaian rather than British tradition. He designed regalia, carved relief murals for public buildings, designed postage stamps, and taught at Achimota. He was the founding president of the Ghana Society of Artists and a member of the Arts Council of Ghana.
Art and power: Antubam's work served Nkrumah's vision of an "African personality" and of a state rooted in African tradition. It was also, inevitably, art for a government that was becoming a one-party state. He made the symbols of power; he did not choose who held it.
Inspired by Akan stools and chiefs' chairs: a throne for a republic, telling Ghanaians their president sat where their kings had sat. See stools and palanquins.
The symbol of Parliament's authority, reimagined in Ghanaian form. See the Parliament of Ghana.
Modelled on the Akan state swords on which chiefs swear, like the Asante sword Mpɔnpɔnsɔn.
Postage stamps and carved relief murals for the new public buildings of Accra.
A symbol set: with Theodosia Okoh's flag and the coat of arms, Antubam's regalia completed the visual identity of the new state. See Ghana's national symbols.
Antubam was a pioneer in using adinkra symbols, the stamped designs of Akan mourning cloth, each carrying a proverb, as the vocabulary of modern Ghanaian painting and design. Before him they belonged to cloth-printers in villages like Ntonso; after him they appeared on buildings, logos, stamps and canvases. Today adinkra symbols are everywhere in Ghana, and his work helped put them there.
With the sculptor Vincent Kofi and the painter Grace Kwami he is counted among the founders of the Sankofa movement in Ghanaian art: go back and fetch what was left behind, and build the future with it.
In 1963 Antubam published Ghana's Heritage of Culture, a richly illustrated book on Ghana's arts and crafts, from gold weights and linguists' staffs to stools, umbrellas and cloths, arguing that these were a national heritage and the foundation of a national art. It was printed by the publishers Koehler & Amelang in Leipzig, in the German Democratic Republic.
A German connection: in the Cold War, Nkrumah's Ghana drew closer to the Eastern bloc, and Antubam's work travelled with it. In 1961 the German-African Society of the GDR showed an exhibition of his art in East Berlin, "Kunst aus Ghana". Few Ghanaians or Germans today know that the manifesto of Ghana's national art was printed in Saxony.
Kofi Antubam died in 1964, aged only 42, two years before the coup that ended the government he had given its symbols. His works are held in the national collections of Ghana, South Africa and the United Kingdom, and scholars now treat him as the bridge between colonial-era art teaching and the modern Ghanaian art of El Anatsui and his generation.
Holds works by Antubam. Our photo archive from before the exhibition was thinned: nationalmuseum.ghana-net.com.
Where the mace tradition continues. Public access is by arrangement.
The First Republic's chamber, and Jubilee House, the seat of the presidency.
Kofi Antubam gave independent Ghana its look. The chair, the mace, the sword and the carved walls said that the new state belonged to an African tradition, not a borrowed one, and his book made the case in print. He was a state artist in the service of a government that grew authoritarian, and his symbols were meant to glorify its power. But the idea behind them, that Ghana's own crafts and symbols were worthy of a modern nation, outlived both him and Nkrumah. Every adinkra symbol on a Ghanaian building today owes him something.
Verified: 29 September 2026. His dates (1922–1964), his study at Achimota under H. V. Meyerowitz and at Goldsmiths College (1948–50), the 1950 Paris exhibition, his appointment as state artist, his design of the presidential chair, mace and state sword, his stamps and murals, the Ghana Society of Artists, the 1961 East Berlin exhibition and the publication of Ghana's Heritage of Culture in Leipzig in 1963 follow Atta Kwami's chapter in A Companion to Modern African Art (Wiley), Wikipedia and published sources. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.