Selling Healing
Creative Arts and Health Communication in Ghana

Drawing from Ghana as a case study, this book presents the central role of arts in health communication.

Ama de-Graft Aikins (Author)

9781009244435, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 November 2025

220 pages
28 x 19 x 2.1 cm, 0.472 kg

'Too often, global narratives about Africa are flattened into tales of crisis: war, famine, disease. Selling Healing challenges this, offering instead a textured portrait of Ghanaians' knowledge systems, creativity, and health practices. The result is a book that reclaims the continent's voice and presents Ghana and Africa with nuance, beauty and complexity.' Hibbah Osei-Kwasi, Senior Lecturer Nutrition and Public Health, Loughborough University, UK

The intersections between arts, creativity and health are of significant importance in the humanities and social sciences. Arts and health research, for example, suggests that the arts offer participatory and transformational alternatives to traditional health communication. However, concepts and methods are predominantly informed by Global North research, and critical insights from arts traditions elsewhere remain to be fully integrated into common models. Ghana offers a unique case study for examining local and global dynamics in arts-based health communication, because of the country's rich art traditions as well as its place in global history and in the global imagination. Healing art forms like music and sculpture have evolved through intentional cross-cultural borrowings, as well as through changes imposed through slavery, colonialism and post-colonial political systems. Selling Healing tells a polyvocal story of how Ghanaian art forms intersect with health, illness and healing, inviting a re-imagining of health communication in global health.

List of figures, tables and boxes
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: 'the gods may be considered patrons of the arts'
2. If you sell your sickness you get a cure
3. Mr wise and Mr foolish go to town
4. All die (no) be die
5. Food is medicine, food is poison
6. Out of your mind
7. We cannot eat stories
8. Colonial virus
9. Conclusions: “In Ghana here, you have to be creative to move ahead”
Appendix 1: map of Ghana, showing selected sites of arts-based health interventions
Appendix 2: interviews
Appendix 3: selected art forms: mural, songs, adverts, comedy sketches
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Clinical psychology [MMJ]