Were There Architects in Ghana Before the Mid-20th Century? Overlooked Histories of Architects and Architecture in the Gold Coast/ Ghana
The histories of architects and the architecture profession in Ghana and the broader West African subregion have tended to begin with the activities of European architects in the region, sometimes with 16th century colonial forts and castles but often with the mid-twentieth century British modernists.
The histories of architecture, on the other hand, acknowledge architectural production in the amorphous precolonial period with a focus on ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’ forms, but without any named architects, designers, or buildings. Yet, and it goes without saying, there was architectural production in the region long before the 1940s.
However, the questions of who made this architecture, what were their motivations, influences, and legacies remain both unasked and unanswered. This is a huge gap in our knowledge, which must be addressed to better understand the more modern histories that abound in the field due to the relative profusion of archival sources regarding those.
The reasons behind the overlooking of African architects who were practicing before the well-documented periods during which Europeans practised on the continent revolve around :
The politics of designation (who gets to be called a “qualified architect” and what counts as “architecture”
The lack and over-privileging of documentary sources; and
The disproportionate focus on European architectural activity in Africa to the detriment of the study of African architectural activity.
I am making a series of posts on this blog about overlooked African and African-descended architects and architecture before the mind-twentieth century. I focus on the geographical area that is now Ghana, but due to pre-colonial configurations I will occasionally discuss people and work in other countries.
These posts are drawn from an article in progress, which is itself drawn from my larger research project on the ‘History of the Architecture Profession in The Gold Coast and Ghana’, My project is the first to identify and construct accounts of the lives and works of African architects practicing in the area that is now Ghana from the 18th century to the early 20th century.
I am using a range of sources – including marginalia, ephemera, popular literature, orally-transmitted accounts, as well as my recently digitised endangered archive of building permit applications from 1904-1947, to reconstruct overlooked, excluded, and marginalised histories of architects, builders, and architecture in the then-Gold Coast and beyond.
I’m making the posts as shorter, public-facing, more easily digestible versions of the longer academic article. I will also plan to include more of my hunches, warm takes, and random digressions in these blog posts! I hope to link the subsequent posts in order underneath this one eventually.