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The Nkrumah administration's response to colonial regulation was a distinctive "imagining" of architectural modernism, an imagining which allied the heroicized image of Nkrumah with a culturally homogeneous notion of the "nation."
The architecture of the capital city of Ghana in the independence era suggests an identification between architecture and a consciously managed national ideal. This article examines the history of architecture and spatial organization in Accra, focusing upon the symbiosis between British administrative and local commercial interests and on British colonial efforts to segregate and regulate architectural space. It also explores the Nkrumah administration's reconfiguration of colonial architectural objectives and argues that the administration advanced-in its embrace of architectural modernity and reconceptualization of the urban environment-a distinctive notion of the "nation. "
Introduction
In 1956, a monumental bronze statue of Nkrumah was erected in the capital city of Accra, Ghana. The statue, commissioned from Italian artist, Nicola Cataudella, state artist for the nation of Liberia, and architect, Sergio Barbeski, depicts Nkrumah stepping forward with one arm raised in salute and greeting. The tentative contraposto of the statue, so evocative of the heroicized posture of architectural monuments in Greece, represents a dramatic departure from precolonial representations of political and spiritual authority.1 On the base of the Cataudella monument, located in an open plaza in front of the Ghanaian Parliament, were inscribed three phrases attributed to Nkrumah: "We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility," "Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto it," and "To me the liberation of Ghana will be meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa."
According to the Ghanaian Minister of Works, as related by the Evening News of 12 February 1964, the Cataudella monument "serve[d] as a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of Africa and ... symbolized their faith in the ultimate achievement of their dreams." The architecture of independence-era Accra in fact suggests an identification of such architectural monuments with a consciously managed national ideal. The identification of constructed image and national ideal may be understood as characteristic of the postcolonial era: "imaginings" of the community, to employ the terminology of Benedict Anderson (1991), have depended upon the employment of abstracted and idealized culture in...