Post-colonial education in Kumasi

In 1965, students and staff of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, produced a pamphlet showing the curriculum of the Faculty of Architecture. In an accompanying note, Dean John Lloyd argued that ‘a Faculty of Architecture in this situation, if it is to truly contribute to the future of the continent, must drastically define anew the task of an “architect”’. 

The curriculum at the KNUST school included various courses, such as the Structures and Structural Design course taught by Croatian engineer Zvonimir Žagar, which involved both modelling structures and building at full-scale

Credit: Zvonimir Žagar

This ambition to rethink the obligations and tools of Ghanaian architects had been a crucial and contested part of the faculty’s history. It was intertwined with the accelerated transition of the Gold Coast – the colonial name of Ghana – towards self-rule, followed by independence in 1957 under Prime Minister, and later President, Kwame Nkrumah. In the context of decolonisation and the Cold War, the advancement of teaching and research in Kumasi was bound up in competing visions of the future of the nation, as well as international networks of knowledge and expertise that intersected in Ghana. By the 1950s, they included the circulation of architectural and building knowledge within the British Empire as well as increasing transatlantic exchanges with the United States. Under President Nkrumah, these connections expanded towards other African countries, the socialist countries in Europe and Asia, and the Non-Aligned Movement, of which Ghana was a founding member. 

When KNUST first opened as the College of Technology in Kumasi in 1952, it did not include a school of architecture. The initial impulse to create such a school came from the UN-delivered ‘Report on Housing in the Gold Coast’ (1956). Its authors, US housing expert Charles Abrams, Russian-French architect Vladimir Bodiansky, and German architect Otto Koenigsberger, emphasised the acute shortage of architects in governmental institutions such as the Public Works Department (PWD), and in private offices and building companies, including African contractors. That shortage could not be alleviated by training abroad, and the authors urged the government to open an architecture school in the colony. Yet they argued that the British system of highly specialised professionals, among them town planners, architects, civil engineers and quantity surveyors, was a ‘luxury which no developing country can afford’. Instead, they used an analogy to medicine, and proposed to train ‘general practitioners’, or ‘community planners’, whose education would combine academic and technical knowledge with practical training.

Students at the KNUST school partake in scale model-making

Credit: Zvonimir Žagar

This proposal was challenged from political, developmentalist, professional and educational positions, thus revealing the multiple stakes in architectural education in the colony. Officials at the Colonial Office in London were concerned about diverging from British practice. Gold Coast authorities were equally sceptical, as the position of a community planner did not appear to match with various vacancies in the PWD and other institutions in charge of the development programme and striving to ‘Africanise’ their staff. The proposal was also opposed by the small group of British-educated African architects in the Gold Coast; they were competing not only with foreign architects but also with local draughtspeople and surveyors who, by the mid-1950s, were responsible for designing 90 per cent of buildings on the Gold Coast. To preserve the standing of the profession, Gold Coast architects insisted on the formal compliance of the Kumasi course with professional UK standards. 

This suggestion was endorsed by Robert Gardner-Medwin, professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool, and Louis Matheson, professor of engineering at the University of Manchester. In their report, commissioned by the government in Accra, they agreed on the need for ‘broadening the basis of training of architects, builders and town-planners’ in the country. But instead of suggesting that this be the profession of ‘community planner’, they proposed a preliminary two-year common course for all three departments of the envisaged faculty: Architecture, Building Technology, and Planning. 

Students modelling structures at the KNUST school in Kumasi, Ghana

Credit: Zvonimir Žagar

Following Gardner-Medwin and Matheson’s advice, the curriculum of the Department of Architecture in Kumasi, which admitted its first students in 1958, was based on a ‘special relationship’ with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The institute agreed to exempt Kumasi graduates from RIBA intermediate examination while accepting that the curriculum in the school needed to reflect West African conditions. In this way, the agreement addressed two key concerns expressed by Gold Coast administrators, professionals and educators about the curriculum: its compliance with UK-based standards and its adaptation to the specificity of Ghana.

After the transition of the College into a University in 1961, the ‘special relationship’ with the RIBA was often challenged as Ghanaian politicians, notably Nkrumah, urged a quicker pace of replacing Europeans with Africans in public service. When none of the students passed their intermediate examinations in June 1962 – for the second time in a row – governmental officials solicited a new report about the school. Demonstrating that the Ghanaian state was able to rely on experts beyond Europe and North America, the report was delivered by Victor Adegbite, Ghanaian architect and head designer at the Ghana National Construction Corporation in Accra, and VN Prasad, Indian planner, UN expert and head of the Department of Architecture and Regional Planning at the Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. Adegbite and Prasad advised the department to continue working with the RIBA. Following their report, an agreement was signed with the Architectural Association in London to help Kumasi raise its level of teaching. With Lloyd as the new dean, this reshuffle was considered a temporary measure, and the report speculated about ways of maintaining a high quality of research and teaching after the end of the RIBA agreement, notably by a close collaboration with other schools of architecture across the world. 

In the years following independence from British colonial rule in 1957, the architecture school at KNUST in Kumasi formulated a site-specific curriculum, set out in a leaflet from 1965

Credit: J. MAX BOND JR. PAPERS, 1955-2009, AVERY ARCHITECTURAL & FINE ARTS LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (DETAIL)

Adegbite and Prasad also reiterated the need for the curriculum to account for the specific conditions of Ghana, including local climates, building materials, technologies and daily practices of various ethnic groups in the country. While these postulates were not controversial, their consequences for curriculum-building were open for debate. A case in point was the diverging visions of the teaching of architectural history, which in the first years of the department focused on forms, typologies and structures of western buildings, both ancient and modern. While some British educators suggested an adaptation of the courses in architectural history from the UK by focusing on geographies closer to West Africa – for instance Mediterranean architecture – Adegbite and Prasad suggested instead a history of architectural adaptation, arguing that ‘the adaptations of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century European architecture to tropical conditions would be a more rewarding study’. 

By the mid-1960s, key avenues for preparing students for their work in Ghana were surveys across the country as well as ‘life projects’. Students and staff contributed to the design of new townships, low-cost housing, and self-help construction systems in the framework of the Volta River Resettlement project which rehoused 80,000 people after the construction of the Akosombo Dam. Closer to the campus, students addressed the social and spatial development of the communities neighbouring the university which confronted them with conflicts over land ownership and environmental rights. These experiences were often at odds with the modernising discourse of the Ghanaian state, and sometimes contrasted with the visions of the profession cultivated by the students. That contrast only sharpened after graduation; in particular, the first female graduates of the department recall a clash between their professional ambitions and entrenched visions of gender roles in Ghanaian society. 

A different approach for site-specific training drew on the position of Ghana as a node of competing flows of knowledge and expertise during the country’s first decade of independence. By the 1960s, educators in Kumasi included a growing group of Ghanaian architects, among them John Owusu-Addo, as well as lecturers from the UK, US, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Pakistan, Poland, West Germany and Yugoslavia. Besides contributing to the design of the modernist campus, this cosmopolitan staff brought to the department diverging experiences of practice and research, including non-western concepts of environmental control, urbanisation across rural-urban divisions, and vernacular heritage. Comparing alternative concepts and experiences was an explicit pedagogical strategy for Ghanaian sociologist and urban planner Austin Tetteh and Polish planner Wiktor Richert, who arrived at the department in the late 1960s and taught there for three years. They compared regional planning concepts from various countries ‘with different forms of government’, and tested their applicability to West Africa. Rather than adapting knowledge from hegemonic centres in Western Europe or North America, Ghanaian educators such as Tetteh, Owusu-Addo and others embraced Kumasi as a vantage point from which ideas coming from across geopolitical divisions were questioned, tested, modified and appropriated for the needs and aspirations on the ground.

Since establishing the first architecture programme in West Africa, the architecture school at KNUST continues to be accredited by the RIBA: an echo of its colonial past. The school includes around 450 students on the KNUST campus, largely designed during the 1950s and 1960s by British, Ghanaian, and Yugoslav (Croatian) architects

Credit: URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES INSTITUTE MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY MANKATO (2008)

Life projects and comparative pedagogy were two ways of training architects for their future work in Ghana beyond the colonial precedent. Such training would prepare architectural students to take up roles of ‘consolidators, innovators, propagandists, activists, as well as designers’, which was how Owusu-Addo and African American architect Max Bond envisaged the architectural profession in independent Ghana in 1966. 

In a recent seminar, taught by Ghanaian architect Ruth-Anne Richardson and me, current students at KNUST embraced Owusu-Addo and Bond’s postulate to move beyond European and American models of the architectural profession, and shared their uneasiness about the compartmentalisation of architectural knowledge between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries. They were also confronted with the huge changes in the institutionalisation of architecture in Ghana during the last 60 years, and not necessarily along the lines imagined by the first generation of Kumasi educators. While the pedagogical experiments of the 1960s faded out in the wake of the coup which toppled Nkrumah in 1966, the seminar testified that the first decade of Kumasi pedagogy is both an inspiration for a continuous rethinking of the profession, and an indicator of historical distance.