Supporting the Arts of Africa, Supporting Its Kids
It is the purpose and mission of the Akpe Charitable Fund to help support the programs at the Akpe Cultural Center, located in Kokrobite, Ghana, that offer free arts and cultural education, as well as meals, to local children. The cultural center is a Ghana-registered NGO associated with a newly built hotel, which will also support the cultural center as it is able to do so.
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The Akpe Cultural Center is the fruition of a dream that was born when the children of Kokrobite asked Maputo Mensah to teach them what he was teaching his American students — the cultural heritage of Africa. In recent years, knowledge of that heritage has dwindled in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa.
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Maputo is a Ghanaian artist who performs and teaches worldwide, while spending most of his time teaching African dance and drumming at the University of Colorado. Each summer, he takes students to Ghana to give them a six-week immersion in the culture and arts of Africa. For years he has done this in makeshift spaces in Kokrobite, but when the local kids approached him, he looked for a way to build his own cultural center. Learn more about Maputo here.
Thanks to the help of generous donors, and a teaching partnership with the renowned Akrowa Drum and Dance Ensemble, the Akpe Cultural Center opened its doors in July of 2023. Immediately, the local children began to come. Today the center teaches and provides nutritious meals to more than 50 children a week at no cost to their families, who are hard pressed to pay for even their children’s academic schooling. It also serves as a venue for free cultural education classes bused in from local schools.
Why is this important? The African performing arts are about far more than entertainment. They are rooted in the values of respect, personal responsibility, cooperation, and community, and to learn these arts is to learn those values. Maputo knows, from his own experience, how training in the traditional arts of Africa can alter a life path for the better, creating opportunity and possibility where little existed before. It has been his longtime dream to change the lives of children in Africa the way his own life was changed by these arts, and he is now doing so.
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At the Akpe Charitable Fund, we share Maputo's dream wholeheartedly, and we hope you will, too.