Edinburgh art festival review – haunting return of the railway that robbed Africa

For British profit … 24 Tons of Silence, part of Songs of Roses by Ibrahim Mahama at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Photograph: © Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Photo: Theo Christelis

Time is a return ticket in Ibrahim Mahama’s Songs About Roses, which is on display at the Fruitmarket Gallery, far and away the best show in this year’s Edinburgh art festival. Mahama draws young men lugging rails in detailed yet suggestively poetic charcoal, but are they laying tracks for the British empire’s Gold Coast railway – or removing them?

My attention was grabbed the moment I stuck my head through the gallery door. For this Ghanaian artist has produced a show as extraordinary as a great magic-realist novel on a theme such a novel might address: the rise and fall of the railway the British government built between 1898 and 1923 in its Gold Coast colony. It would win independence and become Ghana in 1957.