Uganda, May 22 -- Recently in Accra, Ghana, as I waited for my driver, I milled around the arrivals terminal doing what bored newspaper columnists are inherently wired to do: observe.

There are billboards advertising Samsung mobile phones, Guinness and Heineken beer, and the omnipresent mobile telephone networks.

However, there is nothing - neither advert nor shopfront - to draw one's attention to chocolate, gold, or kente, the colourful hand-woven textile made of woven strips of silk and cotton. To understand why this is a problem, some context is important. Ghana and its Ashanti kingdom are so synonymous with the precious metal that the country's name, pre-independence, was the Gold Coast. Together with Ivory Coast (which retained its...