The “Gift” of Higher Education in Ghana
Kuukuwa Manful
For a long time, the histories of higher education (historically referring to secondary school and above) in Ghana have been framed around the activities of European
Christian Missions and the colonial state. One common, reductionist, and one-sided motif in these stories is of valiant missionaries braving the odds to educate Africans in
the Gold Coast. But a close examination of archival records, church histories, orally-transmitted accounts, memoirs of leading Africans, and architectural remnants reveals
a different story.
Drawn from an upcoming book about The Architecture of Education in Ghana, this presentation reconstructs the histories of the establishment and expansion of higher education institutions in the then Gold Coast. It demonstrates that, contrary to dominant narratives, throughout the country’s history Africans actively founded schools, contributed to the construction of schools, and advocated for the building of schools. Through acts ranging from the formation of educational organisations and communal construction projects through to the gifting of land, buildings, resources, and labour, I argue that the post-colonial rapid expansion of higher education in Ghana is
owed to the efforts of Africans striving to make places for their communities in rapidly changing sociopolitical dispensations of European conquest, colonization and Ghanaian nationhood.
Bio:
Kuukuwa Manful is a trained architect and researcher who creates, studies and documents architecture in Africa. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. Her current projects include a book about The Architecture of Education in Ghana and a study of the Formalisation and Unformalisation of Architecture in West Africa using a collection of endangered archives that she has recently digitised. She was previously a visiting post-doctoral scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a post-doctoral researcher on the African State Architecture Project at SOAS, University of London. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and Masters and BSc Architecture degrees from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Her academic publications, creative writing, and public scholarship have appeared in African Affairs, Al Jazeera, Aperture, Curator: The Museum Journal, and Tampered Press. She has exhibited at and curated several art and architecture exhibitions around the world including recently in Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana and the United Kingdom. Her most recent publications include the co-edited book Building African Futures: 10 Manifestos for Transformative Architecture and Urbanism, published by Iwalewa books; and “Building Classes: Secondary Schools and Sociopolitical Stratification in Ghana” which was awarded the 2023 ASA Graduate Student Paper Prize.
Through her Accra Archive project, funded by an award from British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, she has digitised a collection of endangered historical architectural material pertaining to architecture, construction, and urban regulation in Ghana. She curates adansisɛm – an architecture collective that documents Ghanaian architecture theory, research and practice; co-founded and runs sociarchi – a social architectural enterprise that advocates for and provides architectural services to people who ordinarily cannot afford architects; and serves as president of the Docomomo Accra Chapter.