Growing Up in Nima Meant Hiding Where You Came From - Moh Awudu

There was a time when the journey home began with a lie.

If Moh Awudu climbed into a taxi after a day at the beach in Labadi, he knew better than to mention his destination. Saying “Nima” was often enough for a driver to shake his head and speed away.

“So we told them we were going to Kanda,” he says with a laugh that barely disguisines the memory. “If they heard Nima, they wouldn’t come.”

It wasn’t only taxi drivers.

Clients who hired him as a young artist would refuse to pay an advance once they discovered where he lived. Instead, they insisted he finish the work first, as though his address made him less trustworthy.

Growing up in Nima, Moh learned early that sometimes the hardest thing about the neighbourhood wasn’t living there—it was carrying its reputation.

For decades, Nima has occupied a peculiar place in Ghana’s imagination. It is one of Accra’s oldest and most vibrant communities, yet conversations about it have too often been dominated by crime, poverty and violence. For many who have never walked its streets, the name itself became shorthand for danger.

Moh watched that narrative unfold from inside the community.

“People wrote a lot of negative stories about Nima,” he says. “As I became an artist, I felt it was my responsibility.”

That responsibility eventually became Reimagine Nima, a project that has consumed much of his artistic career.

Long before the paintings gained international attention, however, the movement began with something much simpler: T-shirts.

Moh designed shirts celebrating Nima at a time when many residents were reluctant to publicly identify with the community. The designs carried messages of pride rather than apology. Popular musicians, including members of VIP, wore them on stage, turning what seemed like ordinary clothing into quiet acts of resistance.

“It wasn’t just a design,” he explains. “I wanted people to believe in where they came from and be proud of it.”

Around 2009, that idea grew into a larger artistic mission.

Instead of painting the stories outsiders expected to see, Moh painted the ones they rarely noticed: children playing in narrow alleys, neighbours sharing conversations, moments of joy, colour and humanity that existed beyond newspaper headlines.

His canvases became invitations to look again.

Students began visiting Nima to understand the community through his work. Researchers came. International audiences followed. The BBC eventually featured his project, introducing a different image of Nima to viewers around the world.

Yet Moh believes the real audience has always been Ghanaians.

“Nima is just like every place in the world, there are good and bad things,” he says. “But people project the negative more than the positive.”

The consequences of those perceptions, he says, run deeper than most people realise.

Children grow up feeling they have something to prove simply because of where they were born. Respect becomes something they believe they must fight for before they have even introduced themselves.

“So when people look down on them outside, they get angry,” he says. “You need to experience the people first before you judge.”

Then comes the statement that almost always surprises people.

“Nima is the most secure place in Ghana, security-wise.”

He isn’t being provocative. He is describing the neighbourhood he knows.

“In Nima, everybody knows everybody,” he says. “People don’t sleep at night. They look out for each other.”

To outsiders, the community may appear intimidating. To residents, it is home. A place where neighbours know each other’s families, where children grow up together and where the streets tell stories that cameras rarely capture.

Moh’s paintings are not an attempt to erase Nima’s challenges. He knows they exist. His frustration is that they have become the only stories many people are willing to tell.

His art asks a simple question: What happens when a community is judged by its headlines instead of its people?

For Moh, every brushstroke is an answer.

Each painting pushes back against decades of assumptions. Each exhibition invites strangers to see Nima through the eyes of someone who never stopped believing in it.

And perhaps that is the quiet revolution behind Reimagine Nima, not changing the community itself, but changing the way the rest of Ghana chooses to look at it.

Because no child should have to hide where they come from just to be accepted.