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Dikan Library and Archives

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The official Instagram page of the @dikancenter Library & Archives
📍 Third Kaadjano Street, Accra.

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Discover the Dikan Library
A home for Africa’s visual stories, art, and ideas.
Our doors are open to everyone — no membership needed, just curiosity. Step inside and explore one of Africa’s most remarkable collections of visual books, rare archives, and cultural history.

Whether you’re a researcher, student, artist, or wanderer, the Dikan Library welcomes you to read, reflect, and be inspired.

✨ Walk in, discover, and belong.
#Dikan #DikanLibrary #VisualEducation #ArtAndCulture #Archives #Ghana #LibraryLife #WalkInAndRead by @dikanlibraries

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a year ago

James Barnor opened Ever Young studio in Accra in the early 1950s and promised his sitters they would look ever young — his retouching was that good. He photographed a country becoming itself, then moved to London and photographed Black Britain for Drum through the 1960s. The same eye on both ends of the same story.

James Barnor: Accra / London — A Retrospective @james_barnor_archives, published for the retrospective at Serpentine @serpentineuk, with contributions from David Adjaye @adjaye_visual_sketchbook and Hans Ulrich Obrist @hansulrichobrist.@octobergallerylondon. @clementinedelaferonniere

Free to read at Dikan Library and Archives, Accra. No appointment needed. 
#JamesBarnor #EverYoung #Jamestown #Accra #GhanaianPhotography DikanLibrary taken in South La Estate, Accra by @dikanlibraries

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Twelve objects. Not twelve labels — twelve case histories, built from memory, interview and oral narrative rather than from the museum’s own filing system.
Pamela McClusky and Robert Farris Thompson take the Seattle Art Museum’s @seattleartmuseum African collection and ask what each object was for, who made it, and what the people it came from say about it. Thompson spent a career arguing that African art carries philosophy, not decoration. This is that argument applied object by object.

Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back, Pamela McClusky and Robert Farris Thompson (Princeton University Press @princetonupress, 2002).
Free to read at Dikan Library and Archives, Accra. Open [Tuesday - Saturday, 9am-6pm]. No appointment needed.
 Address and directions in our bio.
#ArtFromAfrica #RobertFarrisThompson #AfricanArt #YorubaArt #DikanLibrary Accra taken in South La Estate, Accra by @dikanlibraries

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Fifty years of African photography, from independence to 2010, gathered by thirty-four photographers: Samuel Fosso, Malick Sidibé, David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Ricardo Rangel, Bob Gosani, Pierrot Men, Eileen Perrier, James Depara and others.

The title is Simon Njami’s. The dream is useful because it does work — photography in the postcolonial period was not only recording history but taking back the picturing of Africa from those who had been doing it from outside.
A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960–2010, introduction by Simon Njami, text by Frank Vanhaecke (BOZAR Expo, Brussels / Silvana Editoriale, 2010).

In the reference collection at Dikan Library and Archives, Accra.
#AUsefulDream #SimonNjami #AfricanPhotography #SamuelFosso #MalickSidibe DavidGoldblatt HistoryOfPhotography DikanLibrar taken in South La Estate, Accra by @dikanlibraries

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Chief S.O. Alonge (1911–1994) was the first official photographer to the royal court of the Kingdom of Benin. He held the post for more than fifty years, recording the rituals, regalia and pageantry of the court from inside the household he was documenting — not as a visitor granted access, but as a member of it.

Published by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, @smithsonian_africanart with essays by Nigerian scholars, photographers and artists.

Amy J. Staples, Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan and Bryna Freyer (Giles, 2017). In the reference collection at Dikan Library and Archives, Accra.

#SOAlonge #BeninKingdom #NigerianPhotography #CourtPhotography #HistoryOfAfricanPhotography DikanLibrary taken in South La Estate, Accra by @dikanlibraries

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a month ago

The oldest surviving daguerreotype from West Africa was made in Senegal in the 1840s. At that time the French presence was a few trading posts on the coast; local kingdoms still held the interior. The camera arrived into that world, not the colonial one that came later.

Over the next century Senegalese photographers made the medium their own. Mama Casset’s studio portraits in Dakar. Oumar Ka’s photographs of village life. Macky Kane, whose name was lost until recently. Glass painters and lithographers reworking photographs into other images entirely. Giulia Paoletti traces this history from the 1840s to independence in 1960, with many images published for the first time.

Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840–1960, Giulia Paoletti (Princeton University Press, 2024).

In the reference collection at Dikan Library and Archives, Accra.

#PortraitAndPlace #SenegalesePhotography #MamaCasset #OumarKa #Daguerreotype HistoryOfAfricanPhotography Dakar by @dikanlibraries

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What are you doing this Sunday?

For our first programme in Accra, Ghana 🇬🇭, we’re delighted to be collaborating with @dikanlibraries to bring the second edition of A Lazy Sunday to life.

As always, this programme is an immersive and entirely communal style of interacting with music off the frame of the mainstream.

The evening will be guided by a communal playlist, filled with songs selected by everyone in the room. The genre for this edition is focused on highlife, funk and disco (from Ebo Taylor to Nana Acheampong and the Lijadu Sisters).

Hosted inside the main Dikan Photo Library, we’ll be surrounded by timeless collection of books that everyone is encouraged to read from throughout the programme.

Attendance if free but limited. RSVP via link in bio and to select your songs for the playlist.

We cannot wait to share space with you. by @dikanlibraries

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3 months ago

Ghana, college students walking through campus of University of Ghana in Accra

Date of Photograph ca. June 1960s by @dikanlibraries

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4 months ago

Staff and pupils of the Ewe Mission School in Woe, 21st December 1925. Keta, Ghana. by @dikanlibraries

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4 months ago

Group portrait of staff and students, Mfantsipim School, Ghana, ca. 1902

Mfantsipim School is an all-boys day and boarding secondary school in Cape Coast, Ghana, established by the Methodist Church in 1876 to foster intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth in the then Gold Coast by @dikanlibraries

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4 months ago

Dikan Shelf Selections | Playtime in Africa — Text by Efua Sutherland and Photographs by Willis E. Bell

First published in the early years after independence, this photobook emerges from a Ghana imagining new futures for its children. Across compounds, streets, and schoolyards, it traces how play holds memory, indigenous games, communal rhythms, and the quiet adaptations of a rapidly urbanising society.

Find it on the Black Room shelves at the library.

#bookstagram #ghana #library #africanliterature by @dikanlibraries

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4 months ago

One year after the OAU was founded, Africa gathered again — this time in Cairo.

In July 1964, leaders including Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Ben Bella and others met to discuss the future of the continent. One major decision from that summit still matters today: African states agreed to respect the borders they inherited at independence, even though many were drawn by colonial powers. Africa Day is a reminder that unity has always required courage, debate, and difficult choices.

What does African unity mean to us today?

Images from Dikan Library & Archives/Nkrumah Collection by @dikanlibraries

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5 months ago