After two days of witnessing the sights, sounds and spectacles of Chale Wote, nothing will faze you. Walking through the effervescent crowds that cram the thoroughfares and ancient buildings of Jamestown – one of the most historically significant yet deprived areas of Accra – one fantastical encounter after another comes your way, from fetish priests to a 100-strong galloping cavalry on horseback, from skate boarders to stilt walkers, from tree creatures festooned in leaves to a feathered angel on a unicycle, from children boxing to graffiti artists in full flow on a mural wall. Not to mention some next level street style with everyone turning out in their most brilliant outfits, ready for some serious fun. The event is a magnificent overload of the senses that has become West Africa’s most talked about contemporary street arts festival.

Chale Wote (a common term for flip flops, which also means ‘Man, let’s go!’ in Ga) was established by entrepreneurs Mantse Aryeequaye and Sionne Neely in 2011, a year after they formed ACCRA(dot)ALT, a platform for supporting Ghana’s emerging creative industries across a range of programming and content creation. What began as a community gathering in Jamestown with a mission to encourage a sustainable creative industry via local visual arts, music, dance, film, fashion and performance, now attracts upward of 20,000 visitors for a week-long, city-wide festival.

“Over the last seven years, Chale Wote has propelled the development of an independent creative and arts economy in Accra,” says Aryeequaye in an official statement. “By engaging artists within the city, the festival is giving Accra a facelift, [and] revealing interconnected collectives working in multi-disciplinary practices that form the pulse of Chale Wote.”

This year over 200 artists and activists from Ghana and many other countries across Africa, Europe and the Americas came together to co-create around the transcendental theme ‘Para-Other’. This is defined as a radical artistic expression that rises above and beyond the shortcomings of post colonial frameworks to form a new world order. “Para-Other requires new knowledge fractals, codes, symbols and sounds that transmit our core creative intent where imperial languages fail us,” the festival release reads. “This order is an embracing of a black labyrinth and establishment of an aesthetic that captures our cessation of flight and transition to a non-contested existence."

Following four days of workshops, screenings, gigs and exhibitions at partner spaces across Accra, everyone’s energies culminated in Jamestown for the main festival weekend incorporating processions, live music, installations and interventions of every flavour, each channelling meaning into the event. At Ussher Fort, Lesley Asare presented Body Arcana, a large-scale, live drawing display exploring “the women I come from (matrilineal heritage) – the cycle of life and death”. Using her body and oil bars on paper, the British Ghanaian artist aimed to channel the healing and self-empowering act of physical art making.

At the Shika Shika art fair inside Brazil House, two of Ghana’s young photographers stood out. Josephine Ngminvielu Kuuire’s digitally manipulated, black and white portrait series ‘I Am What You See’ questioned gender norms and championed queer identities in Ghanaian society. While Hakeem Adam Mujahid used a double exposure method to create ‘Mujahid’ - saturated images with the quality of a fashion story that expressed the complicated nature of internal conflict.

And through a small door into the expanse of James Fort Prison, which opened to the public for the first time in a decade for the festival last year, crazinisT artist performed ‘AgbaWnu’ (Ewe for ‘lying in state’). His apt work asked the viewer to confront the injustice of mob lynching and state brutality in contemporary African societies. Borrowing rituals from traditional burial rites, the artist (real name Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi) lay naked and covered in mud on a bed of spikes under the baking sun for several hours, his vulnerability and endurance of pain reminding us of our own universal humanity. As indeed, does Chale Wote itself.

With thanks to British Council’s West Africa Arts programme

Read our review of last year’s Chale Wote here