This bead market in Ghana has been taking place every Thursday since 1928

Like most beads here, they are handmade from beginning to end when they are cut and hand-painted; making each bead as unique as a fingerprint.Like most beads here, they are handmade from beginning to end when they are cut and hand-painted; making each bead as unique as a fingerprint.

Dawn is magic hour in Koforidua, Ghana.

I’m standing at an empty parking lot, watching as dark human figures cart trolleys from the market across the street. Some people take boxes out of cars and taxis. When light falls on the town, the parking lot is filled with stalls and tables barely able to contain the weight of the one item everyone sells here: beads. Next to some tables are grass mats with piles of beads in strings and bundles or loose pieces. Groups of women sit together stringing the beads.

“Welcome to history,” a merchant says. His name is Kwame. He sells glass and ceramic beads. Like most beads here, they are handmade from the beginning to the end when they are cut and hand-painted, making each bead as unique as a fingerprint.

Kwame’s table also has a string of beads from Mauritania, each the size of a baby’s fist, there’s an ivory-coloured necklace from Mali, Maasai beadwork from East Africa and cowrie shells.

There are beads from every part of Ghana and other parts of West Africa, sold by merchants from all around West Africa.

The sheer variety of the wares are astounding, some look like spikes, others like discs and shells. There are oval and rectangular beads; wooden beads carved like traditional masks. The variety of textures, shapes, and colours is astounding. At one stall, when I ask about how much large brass bangles cost I am told, “You can’t afford them.” They date back to the days of the Songhai and Ghana empires and belonged to royalty.

They have been in the merchant’s family for centuries, passed down from generation to generation.

“They are only for exhibition,” he says.

This is what makes this market a great experience. People are not just here shopping or selling beads, we are upholding tradition. Bead merchants and buyers from around the region have been meeting in this town where signs are hand-painted, and markets play music at an ear-splitting volume every Thursday since 1928.

I have travelled around 23 African countries, each as obsessed with beads as the next. People wear beads on wrists, necks, waists, heads, and ankles. Beads are also inherited from grandparents or received as presents from friends and lovers.

Nowhere are they celebrated as much as in Koforidua, at a parking lot that’s one of Africa’s most unlikely heritage sites.