It should have been a day of celebration. Eid festivities were in full swing across Tamale on Saturday, March 21, when Ibrahim Mahama — visual artist, founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, and one of northern Ghana’s most prominent creative voices — found himself at the centre of an incident that would end with him in a hospital bed and a broken tooth.
The trouble, by his account, began in traffic. The congestion near the Mariam Hotel area had thickened to a standstill — a familiar consequence of the post-prayers rush that accompanies Eid across the city. Into that gridlock came members of the IGP’s Special Operations Team, the unit widely known on the streets as “Black Maria,” reportedly attempting to force a passage through the jam. What happened next is fiercely contested.
Mahama says he and others in the bus he was travelling in reached for their phones and began recording. That, he alleges, is when officers boarded the vehicle. What followed — again, in his telling — was a physical assault on both himself and his uncle, who was behind the wheel. He claims his phone was seized, he was compelled to unlock it, and that footage captured of the scene was deleted before the device was returned. By the time the encounter was over, he was nursing dental injuries serious enough to require hospitalisation.
The police tell a sharply different story:
The Northern Regional Command and the IGP’s Special Operations Team have flatly rejected the assault allegations, describing the episode as a routine traffic enforcement operation complicated by defiance and provocation. In their account, it was the driver of the vehicle who escalated matters — refusing lawful directives, obstructing other road users, and making inflammatory remarks that drew a hostile crowd. Officers, they insist, were the ones who brought the situation under control, not the ones who ignited it.
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As for the injuries, some police clarifications have suggested the chaos triggered by the gathering mob — not any action by officers — may be the more plausible explanation.
The Ghana Police Service has since confirmed it has opened a formal investigation into the assault allegations.
For now, the truth of what unfolded on that congested Tamale street remains unresolved — caught, like so much else that day, somewhere between two irreconcilable versions of events.