Cartoons as Political Critique in Ghana – a Close Look at the Work of Bright Ackwerh

The lecture focuses on the activist work of Ghanaian political cartoonist Bright Ackwerh. Bright is an artist who describes himself as a “pseudo-historian,” someone who responds to the gatekeeping practices of elite-owned and state-influenced media by telling stories that media agencies are too afraid to tell.

Bright’s political cartoons bring to the surface the unspoken and unseen worlds of exploitative capitalism in Ghana, documenting the ways in which Ghana’s elite are involved in an extractive politics that include illegal gold mining, the excavation of bauxite that is specifically sold to China, and the Ghanaian government’s use of heritage tourism to extract foreign investment from the Black diaspora. I argue that Bright’s work is a form of artistic refusal and a continuation of Pan-African dialogues that alert audiences to the ongoing presence of colonial relations and racial capitalism.

Speaker: Girish Daswani, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto

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