Akwasi was born in South London, the eldest of four boys he soon became his mother’s sous chef helping to prepare anything from Christmas sprouts to traditional Ghanaian foods using a wooden grinder in the clay asanka. Now a chef and having opened his debut restaurant, Tatale in London’s African Center, Akwasi has curated a Pan-African menu that seeks to celebrate blackness in all its diversity drawing on both heritage and modernity. Using traditional kente wax material from Ghana but with modern print combined with wearing brands of designers with African heritage, this portrait of Akwasi illustrates the coming together of these intentions; the wooden grinder sitting almost like a chess piece in the foreground, abstracted but tethering the modern to the cultural anchor that tells Akwasi’s story.