Hannah le Roux: Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, for which the homes of 80,000 villagers were submerged beneath 135 cubic kilometers of the Volta River’s waters, is an apt place to begin a Pan-African conversation on subsurface architectures. Like the muddy waters of the dam itself, its realization in the 1960s submerged and suspended other ontologies of building, rather than just relocating them. Yet it has still become a reservoir of creative thinking about nationhood, Black power, non-alignment, old and new materials, emergency thinking, chemical changes, and biblical beauty. True to the irony embedded in many elements of national independence, its use to power an aluminum smelter was first packaged as a business case in 1938 by a South African mining engineer.1 How did this neocolonial, but continental vision unfold in the material and conceptual narratives of African autonomy?
Workers at the Volta Dam site, 1963. Credit: World Bank Group/George Gerster.
Nana Biamah-Ofosu: Kwame Nkrumah embraced the development potential of hydropower and the localization of mineral processing. He also supported experiments in new forms of housing for the 80,000 people who would be relocated as a result of the dam’s creation—which at the time was about 1 percent of the country’s total population—with a principle that “nobody should be made worse off.”2 Nkrumah understood the fragility of political independence if it was not backed by economic independence: being free ideologically was meaningless when one’s resources and material wealth were controlled by others. The Akosombo Dam also revealed the networks of coloniality at play in Africa: its realization saw an idea of a British-Australian geologist become a speculative concession for a South African-British mining company before gaining interest from the British government, which commissioned extensive site surveys and produced a design report.3 During the postcolonial period, however, the United States government became Nkrumah’s partner of choice, who in turn brought in the American engineering conglomerate Kaiser, and a World Bank loan.4 For Ghana, a new country determined to forge its own path forward, the dam instrumentalized its landscapes for extraction. Almost seventy years after Ghana’s independence, we can still feel the reverberations of decisions made at the dawn of our country. Our landscapes and urbanisms, and to some extent, our political imaginary, are rooted in this moment as a kind of creation myth. The significance of the Akosombo Dam is undeniable. Initially designed to generate electricity for Ghana’s aluminum industry, it still provides most of Ghana’s electricity today. But what was forgotten or sacrificed? There are counter-stories—the myths not rooted in economic, political, or engineering visions, but in those drowned, sacrificed for the hopes of a nation.
HlR: Within the archive of the British Library, there are Colonial Survey maps from 1946 of the dam site on the Volta River. They were drawn from aerial photographs taken by the UK Royal Air Force’s 541 squadron at a scale of 1:5000. Seen as maps of what was to be flooded, they hold a certain potency in relating the violence of erasure and forgetting. The absence of vegetation, other ecologies, intangible cultural practices, memory, and heritage within them show what was considered dispensable. They mix the serene aesthetics of colonial mapping with pale blue rivers while rendering all but roads and rectangular physical structures completely invisible. We do not see shrines, crops, trees, fishing nets, jetties, or cattle enclosures. Yet they appeared in aerial views. What else was lost?
NBO: The surveys carried out for the dam were extensive; the flooded lake would cover a thirtieth of the surface of Ghana, spanning almost 6,000 square kilometers.5 A complex landscape of mountainous ranges, thick tropical rainforests, and swampy waters, this territory was also filled with the memories and ancestral connections of the Akwamu, Ewe, Gonja, Krachi, Krobo, and Kwahu peoples, to name a few, that lived here. The Volta River once carried enslaved people, salt, and other commodities. The omissions in the survey maps present this territory as a tame, idle landscape, one ready to be enacted upon by extractive forms. Histories, myths, and sacred beliefs held in the river are buried, placated, and washed away in the serene pale blueness of the maps. How might the river be drawn once more, this time across time, mapping its current condition? What new landscapes did the sacrifice of land and the burial of a river create? Where did the drowned go, and how do we recall their presence within this new landscape? We also need to reflect on how water bodies form new relationships, new ways of understanding places and geographies, and help us imagine new material realities. In one scene from R. Lane Clark and Stephen Miescher’s 2019 Ghana’s Electric Dreams, Raphael D. Salawu, a social welfare officer who worked on the resettlement schemes for the Volta River Authority, reflected on how villagers in Kete Krachi did not believe that their village would flood.6 They had an ancestral practice where each year, the Dente priest would pray and mark a line on the ground to tell the river gods not to cross it.7 And in every wet season, the river never crossed that line. So, the villagers thought the river would never flood across this line. But this line remains submerged now.
HlR: So power had been reversed between the living and the deities. How can that condition be represented?
NBO: Challenging the images and visual records of the dam’s creation is essential in creating new imaginaries towards future readings of it as a nation-building construct. By subverting the 1:5000 Colonial Survey map of the dam site, new questions and stories can be traced, bringing a more nuanced reading of the makings and current realities of the Akosombo Dam. These new maps might unearth hidden conditions, naming the forgotten, and envisioning new material realities. Imprinted in the current Volta River is everything that was lost, everything that was made worse off: the cocoa farms, the dense rainforests that hugged the edges of the river as it reached into the tropics east of the Volta, and the villages that were submerged to make way for power. Together, they tell a different material story and register what the colonial drawings omit: important materialities and conditions, like sacred places and inexplicable energies, like the rock associated with the deity at Kete Krachi—which could not be moved—that was relocated to a new site by a storm.
HlR: Yes, the dam and its water hold this powerful Black presence. To really stretch these analogies of water and dissolution, and the way in which boundaries disappear, we could see it as producing porous knowledge, and for a while, different humanities. Contesting the stable figure of the state with the image of the dam’s creation brings in a unit of analysis that is part of, but somewhat richer, than the nation. Water bodies have recently been described as “riverhoods,” or figures through which new genres or forms of socialization organize themselves.8 Dams were used instrumentally to create modernity while erasing farmers, ecologies, and Indigenous people. This means they have also become places for resistance. Thinking about the villages that collapsed and dissolved in the dam leads us to ask about what were they like. How did they relate to each other? Were there ferries and paths between them? Solidarities? Gains, maybe for chiefs who could consolidate villages? Millions of people globally might have won modernity, but many thousands of homes needed to be sacrificed. Was there any other way forward?
Cover design of The River That Became a Lake, a book published about the Volta dam’s construction. Creator: Susan Alhassan. Publisher: Ghana Publishing Corporation, 1979.
NBO: There are two interesting themes to be unpacked here: commonwealth and sacrifice. The theme of the commonwealth—or “common wealth”—allows us to consider land, and specifically in this context, water, as an architectural resource and cultural phenomenon.9 The paradigm of the Commonwealth of Nations still holds a powerful space in the postimperial British imaginary—countries defined and “unified” by colonial memory and nostalgia. But this “unification” also has implications in terms of material, resources, power, borders, and boundaries. The dam operates at different scales—during pre-Ghanaian independence, where it is manifested across colonial territories such as the Gold Coast, Ashanti, the Northern Territories, and British Togoland; during independence, at the scale of the nation-state, Ghana; and lastly, within a paradoxical framework of the postcolonial period—as both a resource for American capitalism and a tool towards African liberation and Black Power.10 These situations reveal the fallacy of the nation-state as a stable, solid construct. What remains, beyond all of this, is the water as a body, as a site, and as a presence. This brings me to thinking about sacrifice. What is often upheld in the national imaginary of independence and the making of statehood are often the heroic images of great men and their sacrifices. But what about the 80,000 villagers whose homes, ancestral lands, and livelihoods were submerged, lost in the muddy waters of the dam? How do we remember their sacrifice towards independence, nation-building, and Nkrumah’s vision of political independence backed by economic resilience? In an age of continuous climate upheaval and uncertainties, maintaining the status quo of comfort, and in some ways, the project of modernity, feels rooted in sacrifice. But whose sacrifice? Arundhati Roy describes dam projects as being entrenched in “fascist math,” rooted in the disenfranchisement of society’s most vulnerable. About India’s 3600 dams, she writes, “Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water to 40 million—there’s something wrong with the scale of operations here.”11 Sacrifice feels inherent to the project of modernity, but the burden of this sacrifice feels uneven.
HlR: The idea of the dam and the water as a commons, a producer of power and a water body, might be useful here. This pale blue area on colonial maps also contains what’s below the surface: mud, trees, submerged villages, gods and libations, and everything else; drowned slowly, kind of dissolved, but not gone. We should hold on to the vision of the dam as more-than-water.
NBO: There is an almost biblical quality to this: water as a presence, a force, as material sustenance. Other forms of life, other ways of living and being that the Volta River holds feel important to explore in search of a more collective, cooperative, and collaborative existence, and not just between humans but the more-than-human too. This is not just relevant to Ghana or Africa; it is a global question. Although water is valued as inherent to life, it is often also viewed with suspicion in the capitalist paradigm, where land is commodified. Dryness is considered of greater value, and wet, boggy, soggy conditions are too unstable to be instrumentalized and commodified. The saying “The Mississippi River always returns to where it belongs” is a powerful image of living with uncertainty, fluidity, and wetness; of water as an entity, a living thing.12
HlR: Nkrumah harnessed something that was free, as it were, to create electricity, and he was very straightforward about it. It was about keeping things cool and producing aluminum. But there are traces of the sacrifices involved in the dam—specifically in the flooding of the Volta River catchment—in its liquid mass. The spirit world is reached by offerings that get soaked up by the soil. The boundary between solid earth and air is breached by liquid. Modern architecture tries to avoid wetness at all costs with damp proofing, but earthen architecture with earthen floors assumes absorption. The image of the dam submerging earth buildings can be used to consider architecture differently.
NBO: Indeed, new materials and ecologies were produced by the flooding and subsequent formation of the dam. Ghostly silhouettes of tree branches jut out from the surface of the Volta, a reminder of the once tropical forests at the river’s banks. These trees are still rooted in the riverbed, preserved by the lack of oxygen in the lake’s water. Their ghostly landscapes have produced new material realities along the Volta—timber submerged in the lake such as mahogany, teak, ebony, iroko, and papao have become highly valued export commodities by foreign investments.13 Submerged timber from Volta Lake was even proposed for the reconstruction of the Notre-Dame in Paris.14 But there are also less extractive, more contextually rooted expressions of this new material reality. The Volta Pavilion (2024), for instance, which was designed by Juergen Strohmayer and Glenn DeRoché to house the artwork Papillon Hug (2023) by Amoako Boafo at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, used timber sourced from the submerged forests of the Volta River.15 In addition to the planned resettlement communities, smaller and informal settlements also formed along the lake. For these communities, submerged timber became a valuable resource for constructing their new homes. Volta’s submerged forests also provide an ecosystem for various species of birds and fish, and act as protection for the fishermen who tie their small fishing boats to the trees during large storms in the rainy season.16
HlR: The dam also created new interhuman ecologies. It seems that the dam accelerated, and even created, an idea of development planning that was tacked together between refugee housing protocols, indigenous architecture studies, and experimental live projects. The Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), which had been somewhat of a colonial school, was transformed by independence and Nkrumah’s projects like the Akosombo Dam. John Lloyd spoke about the epiphany he had when a delegation of village leaders arrived to discuss the resettlements.17 It was also unique because Nkrumah welcomed staff and visitors from across the Cold War divide.18 After the 1966 coup, the school was again transformed: Nkrumah’s protection of that tier of staff ended, but they continued to have relationships across the world. This gave the faculty an outsized influence on the notion of developmental architecture, inspiring metropolitan courses and processes. The school’s perspectives came out of the consultancy for the dam project, yet they came to inspire ways to teach development in the rest of the world. That inverts what we think of as colonial education. How is that process tracked in the documents you found at the Architecture Association’s (AA) Archives?
Bui Resettlement Area Survey carried out by out by second-year design students in July 1965 under the supervision of Patrick Wakely and Kamil Khan Mumtaz.Credit: Architectural Association Archive.
NBO: Often, we remember and highlight the expertise of others when discussing large-scale infrastructural projects on the African continent. But of course, local knowledge also shaped the project and the dam’s legacy. The contributions of KNUST’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning are documented in reports published about the dam’s construction.19 The AA’s archive also references this period of the faculty under John Lloyd’s leadership, covering the period of collaboration between the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture and KNUST’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning. It specifically documents the Bui Settlement Area Survey carried out by second-year design students in July 1965 under the supervision of Patrick Wakely and Kamil Khan Mumtaz, both graduates of the Department of Tropical Architecture program at the AA who later joined the faculty at KNUST.20 It covers research undertaken for the Ministry of Fuel and Power for the resettlement of the people of the Bui Lake area. Within the context of Nkrumah’s vision of Black Power and the new Ghana he was building, infrastructure, industry, and education were all instrumentalized.21 As you put it earlier, Nkrumah harnessed something that was free—water—and was very straightforward about its power to realize his ambitions. But he harnessed other potentialities too, like the value of the Indigenous understandings and readings of the landscape. This is evident in the surveys completed at KNUST, which took care to draw and understand collective housing systems, languages, and kinship structures of affected areas. To ensure that “nobody should be made worse off,” more than technology had to come along: people’s heritage, cultures, and beliefs had to be embedded in this new technological future.22
HlR: This mantra overlapped with the experience of Robert G. A. Jackson, a key figure on the dam relocations who worked with Kumasi staff—themselves from all over the world—who had cut his teeth as a director in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as it grappled with the post-World War II refugee settlements.23 This strand of emergency thinking got meshed with local actors, with respect for ethnographic studies of what would be lost, and somehow, all this data created a new form of design. What does that mean for the very idea of planning and architecture in the face of other emergencies and other power arrangements? What do we take from the Volta experience today?
NBO: The Volta River Project and the creation of the Akosombo dam were formations of landscapes and water bodies as sites of extraction in service of modernity and nation-building. It is a physical remnant of complex political, ideological, and economic ambitions and compromises. We need to imagine architecture and infrastructure differently, allowing other future trajectories to be realized from different stories of building the past. Thinking specifically about the Volta Lake, how do we create new urbanisms rooted in the stories of 80,000 displaced, the drowned landscapes and cultural practices, spirituality and poetics of places buried in the dam’s creation? The question of modernity in an age of multiple, simultaneous emergencies requires new paradigms and frameworks for thinking about material resources. This needs to be a more collective and collaborative approach. We need to accommodate other intelligences—cultural, mythical, spiritual, and the more-than-human. Thinking of water bodies as living, murky and uncertain allows us to absorb them.
Building on a 1915 proposal by a British surveyor, Albert. Kitson, the South African engineer Duncan Rose formed West African Aluminium Limited. See "The Volta River Project," African Affairs 55, no. 221 (1956): 287.
R. Lane Clark and Stephan F. Miescher, Ghana’s Electric Dreams, 2022. Film available online at ➝. Nkrumah thanked the people impacted by the project in his speech at the inauguration of the Akosombo Dam on 22 January 1966 saying, “I would like to pay tribute to the thousands of families who were called upon to move from their traditional homes in the interest of the nation. Today, as we inaugurate Volta power, they can share in the joys of the country, in our sense of achievement, and in our gratitude for the sacrifices which have made this project possible."
The dam was first conceived by Albert Kitson, who had an idea to harness the Volta River to process bauxite. Duncan Rose, in 1938, then built on this idea and formed a private company to secure bauxite and dam concessions. The British government commissioned surveys of the Volta River in 1948 (Gold Coast. Volta River Area. Scale 1:5000, Directorate of Colonial Surveys) and in 1956, commissioned Sir William Halcrow and Partners to produce a report. (Sir William Halcrow & Partners, “The Volta River project. {Vol. 3}, Engineering report to the Preparatory Commission, H.M.S.O. for the governments of the U.K. and the Gold Coast”). See also Stephen Miescher’s A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022).
With the British Government out of the picture, Ghana’s National Assembly passed the Volta River Development Act in 1961, which created the Volta River Authority (VRA) as a statutory public utility corporation to deliver the dam. A further study was made based on Halcrow’s report, and it was advised that the dam moves almost four kilometers downstream from Ajena to Akosombo to cut costs. Kaiser Aluminum agreed to part finance the project, provided that the use of Ghanaian bauxite was deferred in the first years of the smelter's operations with aluminum imported from the Americas. The World Bank also contributed a loan of $47 million for the project with the remaining cost met by the Ghanaian Government. $47 million loan for Volta project in Ghana, 8 February 1962, Bank press release no. 62/9, ➝.
Great Britain, Colonial Office. 1952. Volta River Aluminium Scheme. London: H.M. Stationery Office.
Clark and Miescher, Ghana’s Electric Dreams.
Dente is the god of the Krachi. The priest acts as a public intermediary for the god.
Rutgerd Boelens, Arturo Escobar, Karen Bakker, Lena Hommes et al., “Riverhood: Political Ecologies of Socionature Commoning and Translocal Struggles for Water Justice,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 50, no. 3 (2022): 1125–1156.
“Commonwealth,” Nana Biamah-Ofosu, George Massoud and Sandra Githinji. See “British Council announces team for British Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia,” British council, April 3, 2024, ➝.
Pandora's Box, episode 5, “Black Power,” by Adam Curtis, aired July 9, 1992, on BBC Two.
Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good, (Mumbai: IndiaBook, 1999).
An idiom about the presence of the Mississippi River. It is derived from Mark Twain’s Autobiography of Mark Twain where he notes, “the Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.” Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
Between 2011 and 2015, the Canadian company, Triton Logging, operating in Ghana as Clark Sustainable Resource Development (CSRD), headed by former Canadian Prime Minster, Joe Clark (1979–80) in 2007 negotiated an agreement with the government of Ghana to harvest, process, and market the trees in the Volta Lake. This is an industry worth up to $3 billion – a single tree could fetch up to $60,000. It was positioned as a sustainable development and solving a problem of the danger to the lake’s transport system and fishing industries; under the agreement 80 percent of the profits will go to CSRD while Ghana gets the remainder.
Kete Krachi Timber Recovery submitted a proposal to the French government to supply timber for the rebuilding of the Notre-Dame Cathedral after the fire in April 2019 which destroyed its spire and roof. See “Notre-Dame: How an underwater forest in Ghana could help rebuild a Paris icon,” BBC News, October 6, 2019, ➝.
“Volta Pavilion,” Juergen Strohmayer and Glenn DeRoché, n.d., ➝.
“Between Sand and Water: The Underwater Forest of Lake Volta,” a conversation between Ofoe Amegavie, a Ghanaian photographer, and Tetteh, a fisherman on Volta. Living Water by The Or Foundation, n.d., ➝.
Hannah le Roux, “Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and Nigeria,” Architectural History 47 (2004): 361–92.
Łukasz Stanek, “Post-colonial education in Kumasi,” Architectural Review 9 (2022): 88–91; Albert Brenchat-Aguilar, “Functional Environs: Austin Tetteh’s Situated World(mak)ing Planning Practice, 1950–80,” Architectural Theory Review 26 no. 3 (2022): 458–85; Kąrî'kạchä Seid'ou “‘Hand and Eye Work’ in Gold Coast Colonial Modernism: A Genealogical History of Ghana’s Fossilized Art Curriculum,” in New Horizons in Education and Social Studies Vol.2. London, ed. Vlasta Hus (West Bengal: Book Publisher International, 2020), 136–61; and Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
Robert Chambers ed., The Volta Resettlement Experience, (London: Pall Mall Press, Volta River Authority, University of Science and Technology (Ghana)-Faculty of Architecture, 1970).
Patrick Wakely, Kamil Khan Mumtaz et al., “Bui Resettlement Area Survey,” Occasional Report no.4, Faculty of Architecture, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana, (Kumasi: KNUST Press, 1966)
Pandora's Box, episode 5, “Black Power,”; “This is the New Ghana Kwame Nkrumah is Building,” Evening News, 21 May 1963.
Clark and Miescher, Ghana’s Electric Dreams.
“The Volta River Project,” Great Britain Board of Trade, London, 1956.