One Year On: Why Threads of Identity Was Ahead of Its Time
Trying to understand how Ghanaian Traditional Costume have evolved globally in the most unplanned way over the last 365 days, I chanced on a cultural project executed on 19th April 2025 in Halifax as part of the CultureDale Yorkshire's 2025 programming. What makes it interesting is its uniqueness in selling Ghanaian Culture in places most have not yet experienced.
Looking closely and learning more about it, there is something quietly radical about the project, ‘Threads of Identity’. Curated and produced by Bradford-based arts and cultural practitioner Carl Dovi and presented at Halifax Unity as part of CultureDale Yorkshire's 2025 programme, this combined arts event did something that few cultural projects in the UK manage: it brought Ghana into the room, fully, honestly, and with joy.
The event was built around Nana Hagan, a respected figure in the Bradford community whose pride in her African heritage is well known to those around her. Under Dovi's creative direction, her story became a living exhibition. Exhibitors choreographed their way through the space wearing kente, adinkra, fugu, and the full breadth of Ghanaian print fabrics, with each cloth narrated by a dedicated voice explaining its patterns, meanings, and origins. Folktales rooted in Ghanaian oral tradition were told aloud. Live music filled the room. Dance moved through it. Hairclasss, themselves an expression of African identity, were showcased alongside the garments.
But perhaps the most striking creative decision was this: the exhibitors did not simply model the fabrics. They performed them. Each took on a dramatic role, embodying a person from the specific region of Ghana from which their garment originated, giving voice, movement, and character to the cloth they wore. Alongside the narrator, they performed the origins of each fabric, its cultural meaning, and the community it came from. It was theatre and heritage simultaneously. The audience did not just learn where kente comes from; they met, however briefly, the people who have carried it across generations. This fusion of drama, costume, narration, and movement is what elevated Threads of Identity from cultural showcase to genuine combined arts production. It was not an exhibition you watched. It was one you experienced.
What has happened in the twelve months since makes that curatorial vision look not merely thoughtful, but prescient.
Why Does This Matter in the UK?
Britain is home to one of the largest Ghanaian diaspora communities in Europe, and yet authentic, multidisciplinary celebrations of Ghanaian cultural heritage remain rare outside London. Research consistently shows that cultural disconnection, the gradual erosion of roots across generations of migration, has real consequences for identity, mental well-being, and community cohesion. Threads of Identity addressed that gap not with a lecture, but with a lived experience. Young British Ghanaians did not read about their heritage. They watched it move, heard it spoken, and felt it in a room.
For non-Ghanaian audiences, the impact was equally significant. A community in Halifax, drawn from different backgrounds and generations, left with an understanding they may not have known before, that their neighbours carry centuries of history, craft, and philosophy in the fabric they wear. That understanding is not trivial. It is the foundation of a genuinely cohesive society.
Why Does It Matter to Ghana?
Ghana's fashion sector has been widely praised for preserving cultural authenticity while appealing to international markets, and Accra Fashion Week continues to cement the country's reputation as a fashion innovator, blending heritage and modernity, amid record growth in Ghana's fashion sector. Kente and ankara fabrics remain central to Ghanaian fashion, with designers reimagining them for modern aesthetics, and UNESCO's recognition of kente as intangible cultural heritage in 2024 further elevated its global appeal.
Threads of Identity is part of that same global movement, except it happened not on a runway in Accra but in a community hall in West Yorkshire. Where Accra Fashion Week reaches designers, buyers, and industry, Dovi's project reached neighbours, families, and communities who would never board a plane to Ghana, but who now carry a piece of it within them. The two are not in competition. They are complementary chapters of the same story, Ghana's culture travelling outward, finding new audiences, and taking root.
What makes Threads of Identity distinctive, even by Ghanaian standards, is its dramaturgical depth. Ghana's fashion parades and cultural festivals celebrate the fabric. Dovi's production went further; it explained it, performed it, and gave it a human face. That is a uniquely powerful approach, and one that has no real equivalent in the UK cultural calendar.
Then Came Zambia
In February 2026, President Mahama's state visit to Zambia ignited a continent-wide reckoning when his delegation arrived in fugu, sparking debate that led to Zambia removing import duties on the garment, Ghana declaring an official Fugu Wednesday, and ECOWAS foreign ministers requesting custom smocks in their national colours. What began as online mockery swiftly matured into a serious reckoning with African identity, cultural pride, and Pan-African solidarity, turning a piece of cloth into a diplomatic instrument.
Carl understood that power a full year earlier. From the look of things, Threads of Identity was built on exactly that conviction that Ghanaian fabric, worn openly, explained carefully, and performed truthfully, changes rooms. When the world caught up in 2026, Carl Dovi was already there in 2025.
Its Significance to Calderdale
For Calderdale, this project is not merely an addition to a cultural programme; it is a demonstration of what that programme can be. As Ghana's Ambassador to Zambia observed, culture is a powerful instrument that brings people together beyond formal agreements, expressed through creativity and the shared identity that unites us. Carl Dovi brought that principle to Halifax, and CultureDale Yorkshire was wise enough to platform it.
A district that makes space for this kind of work is a district that takes diversity seriously, not as a box to tick, but as a resource to celebrate.
Threads of Identity is the kind of project that Ghana should know about, that Yorkshire should be proud of, and that the UK arts sector should study closely. It is a combined arts practice at its most purposeful, and Carl Dovi at his most essential. With this creative curation and production expertise, I look forward with great anticipation to his forthcoming immersive multidisciplinary production Pit to Palace at Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, which promises to be as bold and necessary as everything that came before it, and which marks the bold launch of his new cultural organisation dedicated to establishing Bradford as the UK's premier hub for African diasporan culture.
Emmanuel Jewel Peprah Mensah is a writer, creative arts director, researcher, and critic. He serves as Head of Performance and Artistic Director with the Centre for National Culture, Kumasi, and is a member of the Royal Society of Asante, History and Culture.