The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Victoria Okoye As a Nigerian-American, Accra’s connections to Nigeria stand out to me as insights into the deeply inter-regional character of the city. When I first came to Accra a decade ago, I identified the present, perhaps most obvious, traces of these connections: the Nigerians, like my uncle-in-law, moving through and living in the […]
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By Ethan Scott Barnett The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) would have achieved little without their Friends. In 1960, lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides placed SNCC in the national spotlight. By 1963, regional offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Washington, DC represented the organization’s growth and maturity. College students returning from Freedom Summer—a national […]
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By Jennifer Hart The British colonial government moved their administration from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877 – a date which often marks the beginning of British consolidation of colonial rule in the Gold Coast. The motivations for the move were multiple. Protests over the imposition of new taxes and discontent over the abolition of […]
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By Sarah Balakrishnan In present-day Kaneshie, in the centre of the sprawling seaside city of Accra, lies a cemetery known as Awudome. It is a massive plot of land. Once it had been the private estate of the mantse (chief) of Otublohum, gifted by the wulomo (priest) of Korle for acts of bravery during the […]
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By Hermann W. von Hesse In the summer of 2017, I returned from Madison, Wisconsin to Accra – my hometown and Ghana’s capital since 1877 – to do my pre-dissertation research. Besides my main dissertation interests, I had since childhood been interested in the music and religion of Accra’s Afro-Brazilian descended community. Though not of […]
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The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. Kara M. Schlichting. New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore. University of Chicago Press, 2019. By Kara M. Schlichting New York Recentered offers a new model […]
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By Deborah Pellow In January 1982, I arrived in Accra for six months of research. Two weeks earlier, on December 31, Flight Lt Jerry Rawlings had led a successful coup. He was a junior officer in the Air Force. Two years earlier, he had led the June 4 coup; during his brief stint as head […]
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Editor’s note: In honor of Columbia historian Kenneth Jackson’s retirement, Columbia is holding a two-day conference called “An Urban World: The Changing Landscape of Suburbs and Cities.” Timothy Gilfoyle, interviewed here, will be among the numerous distinguished urban historians participating in the event. It is free and open to the public. See here for details. […]
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By Kuukuwa Manful It is commonly thought that Accra, like many other African cities, has an architectural “identity crisis”[1] because “if you look at the city, there’s nothing that tells you where we were, where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.”[2] This view, echoed in both academic and popular discourse, is held […]
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Movement, both unfettered and brutally curtailed, has long been central to Accra’s urban culture. From its days as a slave entrepot, through its decades as a colonial possession, well into its car-driven post-independence boom years, Accra has always been defined by movement–of the enslaved, by colonial administrators, of goods, and of postcolonial citizens. Take for […]
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