Bonwire, GHANA

Bonwire is a small town just outside Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city. It's the centre of the kente weaving industry, the rich, colourful cloths for which Ghanaians are rightly famed. Usually done by men on narrow looms, the entire town buzzes with the sight and sound of a thousand weavers, working away. Laure, one of the central characters in Bitter Chocolate, visits this fascinating place to learn more...

Extract from Bitter Chocolate:

     The hall had been divided into rows of cage-like stalls, each with a small viewing platform where the owner sat, surrounded by hundreds of neatly folded bales of material, stretching upwards into the gloom. On one side was the display rack, where selected bolts had been opened and draped, side by side, to display the full length of a single print. Laure moved amongst the first few stalls, her mouth open. Colours, the likes of which she had never seen, rose above her in dizzying, dazzling streams. Even in the poor light, the effect was mesmerising. Sharp, clean blues, smoky turquoises, dirty browns and muddy oranges; flashes of yellow-gold, deep, rich blacks... she stopped, she had never known black could hold so much variation in tone and depth.