Ending Well, Making the Harvest-Paths of Our Values

Abstract

Any single story shrinks all others. In a place historically cultivated for the cocoa cash crop, this thesis proposes reorienting architectural practice towards a plural valuing of land and its constituent spirits. The journey begins in 2022 with my acquisition of a 99-year lease for a 5-acre land in Ghana. Prior to the conception of an academic proposal, this was to preserve and grow ecological and financial value through time. Located on a hill-cluster in the Eastern Region, this place is crucial as the birthplace of Ghana’s cocoa industry, which became the world’s largest exporter by 1911. Spurred by economic and colonial incentives, farmer-settlers acquired and cultivated forest land including the one I presently steward. They forged communities that live on despite a subsequent decline of cocoa production in the region. Five centuries of colonial influence in West Africa reduced a plural landscape into singular extractive narratives, creating place-names like the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana after independence. The capitalist framework of monocultural extraction, one reliant on a colonial government and its land survey department, continues under contemporary African states. Architecture and planning—a practice historically tied to power and capital—remains instrumental in this system, often overlooking other ways of valuing land. This thesis confronts the dispositions of an inherited profession by foregrounding the practices and materials of a socio-cultural paradigm. It is epitomized by the tree called Newbouldia laevis (African boundary tree) and its plural meanings in West Africa. It follows a cocoa harvest-path from a community named after a farmer-settler, Yaa-Aso, and ascends the hills, crossing the land limits of 7 farmers. It ends on the land I hold, with a lease ending in CE 2122. In July 2024, I led a convocation of the farmers along the path in the defunct cocoa distribution building, toward framing futures based on other values apart from capital. 3 languages were spoken in that gathering - Twi, Anlo-Eʋe and English. It resulted in a 7-foot expansion of the path, and the pacification of a seasonal spirit-stream that crosses it. They set the context for imagining a series of 5 moments, herein recorded, that explore a value system of things spiritual and communal, offered by the transgressions of a widened path and the land I hold at its end.