Were There Architects in Ghana Before the Mid-20th Century? Overlooked Histories of Architects and Architecture in the Gold Coast/ Ghana (Part 2)
Part of my series titled “Were There Architects in Ghana Before the Mid-20th Century? Overlooked Histories of Architects and Architecture in the Gold Coast/ Ghana”
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Scholars have tended to focus on a small number of UK- and US-trained architects as the first Ghanaian architects. Theodore Shealtiel (T.S.) Clerk (1909 – 1965) is considered as the first “formally trained”, “qualified” and “professionally certified” architect in Ghana.[1]
Clerk became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1941, and returned to take up a post in the Accra Town and Country Planning Department in 1946.[2] In that same year (1946), D.W.K Dawson became an associate member of RIBA returned to the Gold Coast to Work in the Public Works Department.[3][4]
Clerk is also described as the “only qualified African architect” in Ghana in 1952 by Iain Jackson (2022a, 2023, p. 661). Samuel Opare Larbi, eminent Ghanaian architect and educator, includes Clerk as one of the “pre-independence indigenous architects” in a list that also names “Peter Turkson, [D.W.K.] Dawson, Victor Adegbite, John Owusu Addo, W. S. Asamoah, Amate (A.K Amartey), O. T. Agyemang, [Colonel Courage] Togobo and [A. or E.K.] Asuako”(Larbi, 2013). Intsiful (2016) names the aforementioned men and adds “Martin Adu Donkor, Martin Adu Bedu, K. Kyei” to his list of “British-trained” and “American-trained… early Ghanaian architects”. In my own previous writing, I have reproduced versions of these lists of first “qualified” architects(K. Manful, 2015).
But should the claim that there were “no formally qualified West African architects… available” (Turner, 2024) in the country be taken at face value, be accepted uncritically, and be repeated? And what does this claim reveal about which building professionals were considered to be architects and which had their knowledge and skills erased by the focus on “formal” qualifications?
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.
[1] (Anderson, 2021; Wikipedia, 2025)
[2] (Dictionary of Scottish Architects, 2017)
[3] The Architects’ Journal for June 1946. p. 440
[4] (Unknown Author, 2009)