The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Editorial note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Likam Kyanzaire Benin City sits at the eastern end of Nigeria, not far from its commercial capital Lagos. The site is home to the […]
Read MoreConstanze Weise Department of Social Sciences Henderson State University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Presently, I am working on two book manuscripts. I am currently finishing up the manuscript for my first book which is based on my doctoral dissertation. Tentatively titled Kingdoms of the Confluence: Ritual, Politics, and Sovereignty […]
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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 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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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 […]
Read MoreBruno Ribeiro Oliveira Ph.D. Candidate Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa @ROBruno88 Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is about the intellectual history of Kenya. More precisely, I study the works of the novelist and political thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I try to reconstruct all the intellectual […]
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It’s the final installment of Digital Summer School 2019! Wayne State’s Jennifer Hart drops us into the transit grid of Accra, Ghana as she and others working on the Accra Wala project engage the city’s public transportation system and the broader concept of automobility. For all other DSS 2019 courses scroll down to the bottom for links. Accra Wala […]
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By Lisa A. Lindsay A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill (“Church”) Vaughan set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish: that he should leave his home in South Carolina for a new life in Africa. With help from the American Colonization Society, he went first to Liberia, though he did […]
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The Metropole 