Ghanaian Historian Kwabena Agyare Yeboah Takes African Heritage Online

A Ghanaian historian and curator whose work spans museums, archives and digital platforms is drawing attention for his efforts to make African history easier for the public to find and use, as first reported by Citi News.

Kwabena Agyare Yeboah describes himself through several roles, including historian, curator, writer and cultural researcher. According to the report, a central concern runs through his work: how African knowledge is recorded, interpreted, preserved and shared with the public.

Before starting doctoral studies in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2022, Yeboah had already built a public-facing practice in Ghana. His early output included literary and cultural criticism and research-based writing on African intellectual, scientific and artistic histories.

In 2016, Bravearts Magazine profiled him as a poet, writer and cultural critic. The same year, his essay on Dr Cicely Delphin Williams was named First Runner-Up in the GhScientific Writing Competition.

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He later wrote about prominent Ghanaian artists, including contributing an essay to the Documenta 14 catalogue of Ibrahim Mahama, the artist known for large installations made from jute sacks. He has also written on photographer Felicia Abban, flag designer Theodosia Salome Okoh, Ablade Glover and Galle Winston Kofi Dawson. An article he wrote for African Arguments examined Ghana's Year of Return and what he described as its politics of exclusion.

In 2019, Yeboah worked on the Evolution of Science exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra. The show combined scientific and medical history, biographies of Ghanaian scientists and health workers, visual art, photography and poetry.

He went on to work at Nubuke Foundation, where he served as Centre Manager of the Nubuke Centre for Textiles and Clay. His duties covered exhibitions, publishing, cultural programmes and community engagement.

During this period, Nubuke Foundation became the first Ghanaian institution to partner with Google Arts & Culture, according to the report, with other bodies such as Nuku Studio joining later. Projects featured sites and histories including Wa Naa's Palace, Dondoli Mosque and the story of Ghana's independence. Yeboah is credited as curator of '5 Ways to Celebrate Ghana's Independence' on the platform.

His digital humanities project, Relational Beings: Mapping Ghanaian Poetry as an Ecological Archive, won the African Poetry Digital Humanities Grant. It approaches Ghanaian poetry as a store of ecological, historical and cultural knowledge.

He also carried out research on Theodosia Salome Okoh for AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, work the report says was later used by an art curator.

His current PhD dissertation at UCSB, titled Relational Beings: A More-than-human History of West African Rivers, uses archival, material and oral-history methods. It looks at the relationships between communities, rivers, the environment, non-human beings, objects and historical memory.

Citi News reported that his honours include the UCSB Chancellor's Fellowship, the Christine Adams Research Accelerator Award, a Linda Hall Library fellowship and the LOATAD Black Atlantic Residency.