Theresien Remix Video featuring Accra street scenes

Whenever I see pictures of Ghana street scenes I am hit by a sweet melancholy feeling. A longing much deeper than ‘Oh, I should go there on day’.

I was born in Akwatia, a small town of 20.000 being the main center of diamond extraction in Ghana. We soon moved to Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region. Supply got very scarce by the end of the 70s. One day my mother saw street vendors burst out in a physical fight over a small tin of evaporated milk and decided it was time to move back to Germany. By then I was still a little toddler, so no vivid memory for me here. But whenever I am visiting I can feel that my body knows it has been there before.

When I heard Royal Dust’s remix of Theresien, the vibe had a strong and lasting impression on me. So with the release coming closer the idea popped up to feature street scenes of a busy Accra market day. I felt that would be one of the rare chances when you don’t have to explain too much, the emotion should come across clear and quickly.

I am lucky to have an old friend in Accra, besides an amazingly huge batch of family. I met him in the early 2000s. My brother and I were visiting our dad for his 65th birthday. We enjoyed driving around the city with his old Ford, he had brought with him resettling in Ghana. One day we got terribly lost, that was way before google maps, and even satnav was not that common – at least in Ghana. We asked two teenagers for directions, they hopped in and led us to the next main street. This is how I met Eric Dadzie. We kept in touch and I gladly helped him to enroll in a multimedia course. So when pondering the question how I could get Ghana footage he quickly came to my mind. He jumped right on in, rented a camera and searched the streets for scenes depicting everyday life.

Take this little journey with me. And if you want to broaden your picture of Accra, start here: a post about Accras vibrant gallery & art scene.