Meet Akua Mansa — master weaver with 18 years at the loom

Akua Mansa started weaving at thirteen. "My mother showed me the loom — she said it was the one thing no one could take from me." Eighteen years on, she runs one of the busiest workshops in Lamashegu and has trained more than forty younger women. Her kente has been featured in a Smithsonian exhibition and ships regularly to buyers in the US, UK, and Germany. She says the hardest part of the craft isn't the weaving — it's pricing. "New weavers undersell themselves. I tell them: this pattern took your grandmother's grandmother two hundred years to perfect. Charge for it."