Traditions of Modernity: Currents in Architectural Expression in Kumasi

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 155 TRADITIONS OF MODERNITY Currents in Architectural Expression in Kumasi1 KEVIN D. DUMOUCHELLE “Sɛ wo werɛ fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.” —There is nothing wrong with learning from hindsight. (Asante proverb) An interpretative gap persists between the art-historical study of the African past and the present—between disciplines classically labeled “traditional” and “contemporary” African art (Nooter 2005). Moreover, the habitus of each distances its respective practitioners. Early twentiethcentury African cities lay in the particular blind spots of both, given the largely rural and pre-colonial focus of the former, and the new, often diasporic , orientation of the latter. Yet, as even the relatively extreme case of Kumasi—effectively razed at the beginning of the twentieth century— demonstrates, there is a case to be made for continuities between the two discursive positions as well. Such an investigation requires a broad disciplinary and epistemological sweep, beyond the study of African aesthetic and material culture, to say nothing of African or colonial architecture.2 Cities like Kumasi were incubators for a productive tension between tradition and modernity. Indeed, in colonial Africa such settings were the stage on which the distinction was written and performed. Kumasi suggests the historical durée of this distinction. Kumasi has always been modern. Founded in the early eighteenth century , Kumasi served as the political, cultural, administrative, religious, and 1. This paper grows from a larger research project on the architectural and urban history of Kumasi. In that venture, I am indebted to Frank Adams, David Anderson, Kwame Arhin, John Darwin, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Phyllis Ferguson, Paul Ocobock, Graham Tipple, and Susan Vogel. 2. This is in keeping with the rich and self-contained historiographic sweep of Asante studies itself; see McCaskie 2007. Moreover, as Richard Rathbone (2002) suggests, “if the meanings of modernity are to be regarded solely as synonyms for the history of the industrializing West and its eventual hegemony, we tend to deny the entire thrust of precolonial African history” (21). 156 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 economic capital of the ascendant Asante empire. The development of such a center, at the heart of an expanding political enterprise, was in itself an administrative and cultural innovation. It would remain the primary Asante site for such novelty for most of its history. The city thus played both a practical and symbolic role in an Asante sense of self, either through engagement or at a remove. Razed by the British in 1901, the city nevertheless soon regained its role as economic entrepôt, as cultural symbol, and as the site of colonial and post-colonial political struggles over history and identity in an emerging nation-state. Studies of the architecture and history of urban Africa often place undue stress on this colonial rupture—framed in terms of “tradition” and “modernity”—as if African agency (once so vibrant as to elicit wonder from outside travelers) suddenly melted away in the face of European rule. Rather, as this brief survey (limited here to museums and educational institutions in Kumasi) suggests, there are intriguing continuities in Asante practices and modes of adaptation. Modernity, the changes in selfunderstanding that accompany an increasingly wider engagement with an expanding world economy, pre-dates the British in Asante. The following snapshots over time into Asante architectural self-representations in museum and education practice suggest that architectural history in Kumasi remains an ongoing conversation about the discursive bounds and uses of history and identity. The ideological justifications that underwrote many of the colonial-era distinctions between “traditional” Africa and “modernity” were rooted in a fundamental anxiety about the city—African, or otherwise. While the continent’s cities have long persisted as backdrops within the larger body of African social science writing, they have remained merely sites of opportunity for illustrating prevailing academic approaches (nationalist, liberal, functional-anthropological, modernizing, under-development, Marxist, etc.). Africa’s cities remained vanguards of “detribalization,” national development , market integration, world-economic exploitation, and class Dumouchelle • Traditions of Modernity 157 struggle—yet the cities’ investigators overlooked their fundamental historicity . Lacking thorough historical contextualization, many early writers on...