Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan’s solo exhibition One Must Be Seated at Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) uses video, tapestry, sculpture and photography to foreground and explore the monarchist rituals and symbols associated with the Indigenous populations of Ghana.

Centralised chieftaincies were one form of governance among the various pre-colonial groupings, such as the Akan and Ashanti, who now constitute the population of modern-day Ghana. One Must Be Seated explores the ‘enstoolment’ process that leads to such a chief or king being selected, prepared, confirmed and installed as a traditional leader.

The viewer moves between seven rooms, exploring the unfolding process (marked with the artist’s tapestries, photography and video) and objects (installations of the Kyiniye or umbrellas used by royalty, the sculptures of the gold-leaf covered totems of animals, birds and representations of mythologies that sit atop them and the revered stool for the enstoolment/ enthronement itself - again made by the artist and in the case of the umbrellas and tapestries in collaboration with Ghanaian artisans. Benissan’s work is an act of reclamation and restoration of cultural pride that dates back to at least the 17th century.

This retrieval and exaltation, one senses, is both political in its intent and personal in its pursuit. Now 29, Benissan was born in Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire but grew up in the United States, where she obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in apparel and textile design from Michigan State University and a Master of Fine Arts in photography. According to the exhibition catalogue, Ghana-based Benissan uses her grandfather, who was a chief in the Volta region - and whom she never met - as an “entry-point for the artist to reconnect with her Ghanaian heritage”.

There is a strong inclination to foreground the noble nature of formerly oppressed communities in the Global South so as to reclaim histories from colonialism. Benissan, who established the Si Hene foundation in 2020 to preserve Ghana’s traditional and chieftaincy culture and was the artistic director for the Open Society Foundations’ Restitution Conference in Accra is committed to this work. This is clear in her first solo exhibition at a major museum.

Benissan’s grounding in textile design is apparent in the gorgeous and evocative tapestries which form part of the most successful aspects of the exhibition. She has worked with local Ghanaian artisans like Mohammed Idris Tanko, who embroiders the Kyiniye for royalty in Kumasi, to create an immense, breathtaking tapestry We Process at Sunrise (2024) which appears in the fourth room of the exhibition together with seven suspended royal umbrellas, Most High (I-VII) (2024). We Process at Sunrise evokes a scene at dawn at the royal palace when the future chief is called out from his period of confined solitude to be paraded in front of the community — after the process of selection and reflection has been completed. The aesthetic intensity of the tapestry is heightened by the material used, embroidering on velvet, as people move around the palace grounds in anticipation during a shimmering, blistering daybreak.

The overall sense of immersion while viewing We Process at Sunrise is completed by the sound bleeding from the previous room where the exhibition’s eponymous two-channel film is screened. At just over seven minutes, One Must Be Seated (2024) melds documentary footage of the 25th jubilee celebrations of Asantahene Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II’s chieftainship in April 2024 with fictional scenes of a chief readying himself for enstoolment. The singing, ambient sounds of the procession and intonations rendering strength, valour and warnings to the chosen chief by the guardians of these rituals help envelop the viewer in the ceremonial and celebratory scene unfolding in We Process at Sunrise.

One Must Be Seated invites the viewer to take a seat on The Blackened Seat (2004) - a high-back black chair with silver-plated decorative elements - as one views the scenes and attempts to commune with the ancestors. The intimacy created by the proximity to the two large screens renders the viewer an active participant, a chieftain elect, almost, in the ritual. The documentary scenes are awash with Kente cloth and earnest-looking men and women going about their very serious jobs. The aerial drone shots of the jubilee procession highlight the swirling, moving Kyiniye umbrellas and together with the fictive scenes of the chief elect readying himself for enstoolment, add mesmerising poeticism to the film.

Another room includes Benissan’s photography of the Obaahemaas, “the women who give birth to the chief” and are the link between the contemporary material world and the ancestral one in rituals which continue to this day. Also included are machine-woven circular embroidering on velvet tapestries which are based on archival photographs. One tapestry, Gold has Adorned the Queens (2024) celebrates the Obaahemaas’ role as the bridge between the chief and divinity. The second piece, Listen, listen, we are listening, we are listening, we are listening (2004) highlights the role the court advisors play in ensuring open communication between the chief and the community - an important nod to make in avoiding the fetishisation of royalty to the diminishment of commoners.

The exhibition, which starts with totem sculptures, ends with a gold stool, Sit at my Right Hand (2024), which embodies not just chiefly power but anti-colonial histories, including the Ashanti uprising in 1900, which was commonly referred to as the War of the Golden Stool. 

The uprising was triggered by British colonial attempts to claim the golden stool of the Ashanti Kingdom as they viewed it as a symbol of political power, much like the Scottish Stone of Scone. According to historians such as Gaurav Desai, however, for the Ashanti, the golden stool had metaphysical and spiritual relevance as it represented the very soul of the Ashanti people. With her husband and his advisors in exile, Queen Yaa Asantewaa led the uprising which would eventually end in their defeat and the annexation of the Ashanti Kingdom by the British. She did, however, manage to ensure the stool stayed out of the clutches of the British and the Ashanti continued to self-govern, despite the annexation, for decades afterwards.

One Must be Seated focuses mainly on the rituals and histories of patriarchal royal leadership in Ghana. But, the exhibition’s acknowledgement of the roles of women and commoners in these processes suggest that, in time, these more horizontal agencies and historical nuances may be further explored in Benissan’s work - something to look forward to from an artist whose creative imagination and political inquiries are already producing such ravishing and regal pieces.

‘One Must Be Seated’ runs at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town until October 5, 2025.