Signwriters in Ghana – from Handmade to Digital

SETTING AND PROBLEM Small, colorful and frequently surrounded by paintings on plywood left leaning by the external walls with apparent negligence this is how the shops of signwriters first looked to me, at the beginning of my field research in Ghana. Also called wayside artists, signwriters are mainly painters of signboards who, for more than 50 years, have been responsible for advertising and communication in the country, playing a considerable role in shaping Ghana’s visual and cultural landscape. Their handmade artistic productions range from commercial signs for small shops to electoral posters, from photographers’ backdrops and portraits of popular footballers or Ghanaian and Nigerian actors, to paintings portraying buxom and attractive African ladies or slightly more conventional, “traditional” landscapes. In the West, these artists are mostly remembered as the makers of vibrant barbershop and beauty saloon signboards, bright decorations on public transport and trucks, and outlandish movie posters painted on sackcloth. However, today their production is rapidly changing. Painted signboards are increasingly giving way to digital versions, designed using easily accessible software in contemporary, computerised Ghana. This means the signwriters’ profession is also transforming, and in their shops one can increasingly find old computers sitting besides enamel tin cans and oil paint. In both urban and rural areas new, more “modern” and “bright” signboards are now being produced, often printed on stickers or flexy cloths (PVC flex banner) assembled on plywood or metal. These signboards propose arrangements of pictures downloaded from the Internet, made by “digitalized” signwriters or by graphic designers in the Western sense i.e., ICT professionals with no artistic background. Despite not having completely vanished from urban centers, handmade signage can now more frequently be found in the country’s more marginal areas, where buying a laptop can be difficult and affordable printing shops are too far to reach. The article is based on research in ethnology and ethno-anthropology I am conducting in La Sapienza University in Rome. It primarily focuses on artworks produced by signwriters and on the characteristics of this profession, both in the cities of Accra and Kumasi and in the more remote Nzema area (in south-west Ghana, at the border with the Ivory Coast). Comparing the urban and peripheral dimension helped highlighting the shift of Ghanaian contemporary signwriting from handmade to digital, which is particularly tangible in urban contexts. In this framework, where digital technologies are not only part of the production process but are tightly connected to the subjects transmitted, my article will firstly explore how the signwriter’s profession is being transformed, analyze “traditional” and new forms of training and apprenticeship, and investigate the boundaries between manual and digital artists, with a particular focus on professionals working in both spheres. Secondly, I will examine how the artistic and public imagery is changing and which new protocols of visual representation are being consequently created. The way signpainters see the