Healing the Colonial Wound: Decolonising Ghanaian Art Education through Reparative Art Praxis

Abstract

In this study, I demonstrate how the Ghanaian educational system has marginalised Ghanaian art and knowledge through the logics of British coloniality. Coloniality has had a pervasive influence on Ghanaian art education, both in the national systems in which teachers are trained and teach, as well as the popular international school systems. These colonial legacies have enforced an epistemic alignment in Ghanaian education to Eurocentricity, Western aesthetics, and colonial logics. These legacies have thereby limited the epistemic agency and imaginations of Ghanaians. However, decolonial methods and thinking have not yet been applied to art education in Ghana. To address this gap in knowledge, I propose a novel methodology that works towards epistemic repair and healing for Ghanaian art educators. This methodology has three levels of analysis: (1) deconstruction; (2) decentring; and (3) healing. First, this study deconstructs the foundations of national and international curricula used in Ghana and contextualises the problem further through reflections on my personal teaching experiences as a visual art teacher in Ghana. I provide a critical reflection on my classroom and how its curriculum, as well as student engagement in it, have been shaped by colonial history. Through this curricular and historical deconstruction, I draw out the ways Eurocentric knowledge is privileged, universalised, and imbricated in the Ghanaian art curriculum. Second and third, I focus on decentring the valorisation of Western knowledge, and healing the educator emotionally, through art-making and analysis of African contemporary art. In this dissertation, I present three artworks that I completed as exercises in decentring and healing. The first artwork addresses the chemical and symbolic denaturation of Afro-textured hair. The second artwork examines the Door of No Return as a weighty historical and metaphorical place of transition and transformation. The third artwork employs braiding as a means to counter forgetting (as a colonial strategy) with re-membering (as a decolonial artistic strategy). Through these artistic interventions, the dissertation seeks to imagine decolonial futures in Ghanaian education without forgetting and sanitising historical trauma. Its aim is to support educators toward explorations that can be useful in furthering decolonial art curricula and pedagogy in Ghana and beyond.