In 2019, the NCD Alliance – the global civil society network dedicated to noncommunicable diseases (NCD) advocacy – developed a project called Our Views, Our Voices. Training on NCD storytelling was organised in several countries, including Ghana, with the aim to “enable individuals living with NCDs to share their views to take action and drive change.” In Chapter 7, I examine the encounter between the NCD Alliance storytelling project and the local patient advocacy movement and discuss the scope and limits of storytelling for ‘taking action and driving change’ for NCD prevention and control in Ghana. I argue that the NCD Alliance project builds on a chequered history of global health storytelling, such as the HIV confessional technology (Nguyen, 2010), where cultural appropriation meets corporate branding. Narrative is central to social life, and stories of lived experiences of illness have reported benefits. However, the culture and politics of storytelling also matter: investing in narrative health at the expense of structural and political solutions to complex health problems can have harmful consequences, particularly for marginalised communities.

Arts-mediated HIV/AIDS education received significant funding from Ghana’s donor partners and global health institutions during the first two decades of the pandemic. Yet these interventions had a mixed impact. On the one hand, there was – and continues to be – near universal awareness of HIV/AIDS, including risk factors and health outcomes. On the other hand, low condom use and persistent stigma suggest that knowledge has not translated into sexual health protective behaviours and psychosocial support. In Chapter 4, I examine how the arts were incorporated into HIV/AIDS interventions, focusing on the use of mass media campaigns to raise awareness and educate, and on ‘folk media’ to educate and empower communities. I discuss a study that applied a narrative approach to examine local knowledge and lived experience, the findings of which illustrate important contrasts between community and indigenous healing system responses to HIV/AIDS and official health service responses. I will conclude with reflections on what these insights yield for developing more robust arts-based HIV interventions in the future.

I begin Chapter 3 with Mr Wise and Mr Foolish Go to Town, an ill-conceived colonial-era educational film on syphilis prevention dispatched from the Colonial Office in London to the Gold Coast Governor’s office in Accra in 1944. This project, along with other arts-based interventions, was embedded in the colonial medicine system, which, in turn, was shaped by the ‘psychic life of the colonial encounter’ (Fanon, 1963). I contrast these colonial case studies with contemporary global health cases. I argue that the psychological and political dynamics underpinning encounters between global health actors and local communities (and experts) create a “psychic life of the global health encounter”. When intervention models are imported wholesale, without cultural grounding and with unexamined prejudices, a range of problems emerge, including the imposition of methods and policies that, at best, do not work and, at worst, can cause symbolic and material harm. However, just as Ghanaian communities resisted health communication interventions linked to colonial medical violence, they continue to resist present-day global (arts-based) health interventions perceived to be harmful.

In Chapter 9, I return to the three narrative strands of Selling Healing through a synthesis of cross-cutting themes emerging from the case studies. I explore the possibilities of operationalising the Akan concept of Sankofa for indigenising health communication models. Sankofa means ‘to retrieve’. The concept is captured in the proverb: “Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri” / “It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind” (Appiah et al., 2001). It is also represented visually, in gold weights, wood sculptures and textile designs, by a bird that moves forward while turning its head back. Sankofa has become an organising interdisciplinary principle for developing a decolonial and indigenising approach to identity, agency and social change for continental and diaspora African communities. I define Sankofa from a social psychological perspective, as a creative practice of the imagination and memory.

Ghanaian artist and academic Bernard Akoi-Jackson developed and led a multi-year art therapy programme with patients at Pantang Psychiatric Hospital, one of Ghana’s three psychiatric hospitals. Chapter 6 focuses on an exhibition I co-curated with Akoi-Jackson on mental health promotion at the Nubuke Foundation, Accra, in 2009, inspired by this programme. Artwork produced by patients was exhibited alongside commissioned paintings on a pre-determined theme of ‘mental health’ from established Ghanaian contemporary artists and photographs from an anthropological study on mental healthcare in shrines and prayer camps. I detail the rationale and process of curating the exhibition and discuss visitors’ responses, which converged on two themes: the art exhibition as a viable approach for mental health promotion and arts therapies as methods of rehumanising the psychiatric space. I reflect on what the curating process revealed about the multilayered challenges faced by communities affected by severe chronic mental illness and where the arts can play a role in forging more robust collaborations between psychiatric and indigenous healing systems.

Globally and in African settings, the arts have been integrated into health promotion, disease prevention, illness management and policy development. This integration has occurred in a number of ways. The arts have been used to explore local experiences and understandings of health, to fashion health education messages, to provide therapy for a range of conditions and to evaluate, validate and disseminate health research findings.

During the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Ghana’s creative arts communities captured its complex facets through various art forms. In Chapter 8, I focus on how these spontaneous artistic responses afforded the opportunity to examine in real time how grassroots arts and bottom-up social responses to health crises influenced health communication. Artists channelled ‘creative practices of the imagination’ regarding COVID-19, highlighting a mutually constitutive relationship between lay responses to the pandemic and what artists produced. The COVID arts they produced functioned in three arts and health domains: health education and knowledge production, disease prevention, and (indirectly) contributing to COVID-19 policy development. These intersecting functions converged on the science, culture and politics of COVID-19. I outline the subtle and radical ways artists translated the science, culture and politics of the COVID-19 pandemic to Ghanaian communities at home and abroad. I reflect on the insights these new art forms present for health communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.