Daily life in Accra during the 1960s

A grounded look at routines in Ghana's capital after independence, shaped by compound houses, markets, schools, offices, buses, coastal trade, and expanding neighborhoods.

Accra in the 1960s was the capital of independent Ghana and a fast-growing coastal city. Independence had come in 1957, and the decade brought ministries, schools, new public buildings, consumer goods, political organizations, and expanding suburbs alongside older Ga, colonial, and migrant neighborhoods. A contemporary geographical study estimated about 390,000 residents in 1960 and roughly 500,000 by 1965, although the precise total depends on whether “Accra” means the municipality or the wider Accra-Tema urban region.[1] Daily life did not move at one pace. A civil servant near the ministries, a trader at Makola Market, a railway worker or commuter to Tema's new harbor, a seamstress in Osu, a student in uniform, a domestic worker in a better-off household, and a new migrant renting a room on the urban edge all lived in the same urban region with different resources. Ordinary routines turned on rent, water, food prices, transport, schooling, church and mosque life, kin obligations, and the search for reliable income.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing in 1960s Accra ranged from older family compounds and rented rooms to government flats, bungalows, self-built houses, and expanding suburban plots. Central neighborhoods such as Jamestown, Ussher Town, Osu, Adabraka, Asylum Down, and areas around Makola contained dense street life, courtyards, kiosks, churches, mosques, workshops, and small stores. In many compound houses, several related or unrelated households occupied separate rooms around a courtyard and shared at least some cooking, washing, bathing, or toilet facilities; the exact arrangement varied from house to house.[4] A room might hold beds, trunks, folded mats, schoolbooks, clothing, and trading stock, then shift from sleeping space to visiting or work space during the day.

The courtyard was a practical center of domestic life. Women and children often washed utensils, sorted food, cooked on charcoal stoves, watched younger children, plaited hair, sewed, and received visitors there. Verandahs, thresholds, and shaded street edges extended the home into public space, especially in hot weather. Building materials varied by income and age of the property: earth construction often called “swish” and timber survived in older houses, while cement blocks, plaster, corrugated roofing sheets, louver windows, concrete floors, wooden shutters, mosquito nets, enamel basins, and metal trunks were also present. Better-off households were more likely to have private rooms, their own piped connection, electricity, furniture, radios, and domestic help, while poorer tenants more often coped with crowding and shared services.

Rapid growth put housing and infrastructure under pressure. Later Ghana Statistical Service analysis, drawing on the 1960 and 1970 censuses, shows that both the population and housing stock rose steeply while the estimated shortfall remained large.[2] Post-independence governments extended Accra's piped-water network beyond the selectively served colonial core, aided by a 1963 water-sector plan and outside finance, but expansion was uneven.[5] A tap inside each dwelling should not be assumed: some compounds used a common connection, while other residents fetched water from a standpipe or another source and stored it in basins, buckets, or drums. Distance, pressure, and the number of people sharing a point affected how much time washing, cooking, and bathing required.

Migrants from other parts of Ghana and neighboring countries often arrived through kin or hometown networks, staying first with relatives before finding a rented room, apprenticeship, or job. Households could include nieces, nephews, apprentices, lodgers, and elderly relatives as well as parents and their children. Such arrangements could provide childcare, contacts, and emergency support, but they also placed pressure on space and household budgets. The surviving surveys and census categories record rooms, relationships, and occupations more readily than privacy or affection, so they cannot support one model of the “typical” Accra household.

Food and Daily Meals

Daily meals in 1960s Accra drew on coastal fishing, inland farming, market trade, imported goods, and household skill. Common foods included kenkey with fish and pepper, banku with soup or stew, gari, rice, plantain, yam, cocoyam, beans, groundnuts, palm oil, tomatoes, onions, garden eggs, okra, smoked fish, fresh fish, and occasional meat. Bread, tea, cocoa drinks, and tinned milk were familiar in many urban breakfasts, especially for schoolchildren and office workers when money allowed. Rice dishes, stews, and fried foods became more visible in urban eating, while older staples remained central because they were filling, portable, and suited to shared meals.

Markets shaped the food day. Makola Market and neighborhood markets supplied grain, vegetables, cloth, fish, spices, cooking utensils, and prepared food, while street sellers offered roasted plantain, groundnuts, oranges, fried dough, porridge, bread, and cooked meals to workers and students. Many households bought food in small quantities because cash might come in daily or weekly and refrigeration was limited. Preservation depended on smoking, drying, salting, careful reheating, and quick use in the heat. Meals could be served from a shared bowl or on enamel plates, but serving and eating arrangements varied with the household, the food, and whether guests were present.

Cooking required time, planning, and physical labor. Women, girls, servants, and older relatives usually carried the heaviest responsibility for buying, washing, pounding, grinding, stirring, serving, and cleaning up. Charcoal stoves, coal pots, mortars, pestles, grinding stones, enamel bowls, ladles, aluminum pots, and woven baskets were common tools. Men and boys could contribute cash income, carrying, errands, fishing, or market work, but women often bore the discipline of stretching ingredients across a household. Food in Accra therefore connected domestic care to a larger urban economy of fishermen, farmers, transporters, wholesalers, retailers, prepared-food sellers, and credit relationships. Guests, funerals, church events, and naming ceremonies could quickly turn ordinary cooking into a larger obligation.

Work and Labor

Work in 1960s Accra was varied and unequal. The city employed civil servants, teachers, clerks, nurses, police officers, soldiers, drivers, printers, construction workers, railway and transport workers, residents working at the docks in nearby Tema, mechanics, carpenters, masons, tailors, seamstresses, hairdressers, market traders, food sellers, domestic workers, apprentices, and students looking for occasional income. Government expansion after independence created office jobs and new expectations around schooling, typing, bookkeeping, English, punctuality, and formal dress.[7] At the same time, formal employment could not absorb everyone, so informal trade, repair work, family enterprises, and apprenticeships remained essential to survival.

Makola and other markets gave the city much of its working rhythm. Traders managed stock, credit, storage, transport, bargaining, and customer relationships. Claire Robertson's research on Accra market women documented long-established apprenticeship and profit-making techniques rather than an unskilled or merely improvised trade.[3] Capital and position nevertheless differed greatly: a wholesaler with storage and credit was not in the same situation as a girl or petty trader selling a small quantity of prepared food. Artisans worked from small shops, courtyards, kiosks, or roadside spaces, often training apprentices who began with errands and maintenance before taking on skilled work. Domestic workers cooked, swept, washed, ironed, cared for children, and fetched water in households wealthier than their own, sometimes living in and sometimes commuting.

Transport was part of labor itself. People walked, cycled, or used municipal buses, taxis, lorries, and privately operated trotros, with routes linking central Accra to Kaneshie, Nima, Labadi, Osu, Teshie, Achimota, and growing outskirts. A 1966 government photograph shows women climbing through the open sides of a trotro, while contemporary reports described traders trying to fit goods onto buses or carrying them with the help of children and assistants when passenger services could not accommodate their loads.[4] Much formal maritime work was now in nearby Tema: its deep-water port began regular traffic in 1962, tightening the daily economic connection between the capital and the new industrial town.[10] Fares and market calculations also changed currency twice, from Ghanaian pounds, shillings, and pence to decimal cedis and pesewas in July 1965, and then to the “new cedi” in February 1967.[9]

Social Structure

Accra's social structure in the 1960s was shaped by class, education, age, gender, religion, ethnicity, neighborhood, and migration history. Senior officials, professionals, merchants, landlords, established families, and foreign residents had better access to housing, cars, schools, medical care, imported goods, and salaried security. Working-class tenants, new migrants, domestic workers, apprentices, casual laborers, and petty traders lived with tighter margins and fewer protections against illness, rent pressure, or unstable work. Yet these groups met constantly in markets, buses, schools, churches, mosques, offices, football grounds, beaches, funerals, and family ceremonies.

Kinship and hometown ties remained practical foundations of urban life. Relatives helped newcomers find rooms, apprenticeships, school places, market contacts, marriage introductions, and meals during difficult periods. Ga families with deep roots in Accra lived alongside Akan, Ewe, northern Ghanaian, Lebanese, Syrian, Nigerian, Togolese, and other communities whose networks shaped trade, worship, and neighborhood life. Language use reflected this mixture. Ga mattered locally, Twi and Ewe were widely heard, Hausa linked some northern and Muslim trading circles, and English carried weight in schooling, government, and professional life.

Respectability was built through work, dress, worship, schooling, hospitality, and the ability to meet obligations at funerals, weddings, naming ceremonies, and church or mosque events. Gender expectations were strong but did not mean women were economically passive. Women dominated many forms of market trade and food selling, managed household budgets, organized ceremonies, and often supported children and relatives through their own earnings. Youth status also mattered. Schooling promised mobility, but young people were expected to run errands, respect elders, assist with siblings, and contribute to household reputation.

The political setting changed markedly within the decade. Nkrumah's Convention People's Party state invested in education, administration, and nation-building while also restricting opposition; Ghana formally became a one-party state in 1964, and preventive detention and press control narrowed public dissent.[6] The military and police coup of 24 February 1966 replaced that government with the National Liberation Council, and parliamentary rule returned in 1969.[11] Political ideas entered everyday life through offices, schools, youth organizations, newspapers, radio, rallies, uniforms, and public ceremonies, but residents did not respond uniformly. Scholarship based on bureaucratic files and working routines shows both participation in and tension around Nkrumahism, a useful warning against reading official pageantry as the opinion of the whole city.[7]

Tools and Technology

Technology in 1960s Accra combined state infrastructure, imported consumer goods, and durable everyday tools. Offices used typewriters, telephones, ledgers, filing cabinets, carbon paper, duplicating machines, stamps, and printed forms. Schools relied on blackboards, chalk, exercise books, pens, textbooks, desks, uniforms, and examination papers. Workshops used sewing machines, hand saws, hammers, planes, chisels, measuring tapes, soldering tools, tire pumps, jacks, welding equipment, and improvised spare parts. Markets used scales, baskets, trays, sacks, knives, enamel bowls, wooden tables, umbrellas, and cloth bundles.

Household technology depended sharply on income and neighborhood services. Radios, electric bulbs, kerosene lamps, irons, coal pots, charcoal stoves, aluminum pots, enamelware, mosquito nets, bicycles, watches, sewing machines, and metal trunks were familiar across the city, though unevenly distributed. A radio brought news, music, sermons, drama, and football into courtyards and rooms. A sewing machine could support both household repair and paid work. Refrigerators, telephones, fans, record players, gas cookers, and private cars marked greater comfort and changed shopping, visiting, and leisure. Water taps, drains, streetlights, paved roads, and bus stops were also technologies of daily life, most noticed when they were absent or unreliable. Technology mattered because it saved labor, advertised status, opened access to information, or helped a household earn money.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing in 1960s Accra reflected heat, work, schooling, worship, fashion, and social presentation. Office workers and students wore shirts, trousers, dresses, skirts, polished shoes, socks, and uniforms that signaled discipline and access to formal institutions. Market women, food sellers, and domestic workers dressed for movement, heat, washing, and long hours, often using wrappers, blouses, headscarves, sandals, and practical cloth that could be laundered and reused. Men wore shirts and trousers for town, work clothes for manual labor, cloth or smocks in some settings, and better outfits for church, mosque, funerals, weddings, and visits.

Textiles carried strong meaning. Wax prints, imported cottons, locally sewn dresses, kaba ensembles, embroidered garments, head ties, leather sandals, watches, jewelry, handbags, and carefully pressed shirts all helped express taste, age, income, and respectability. Tailors and seamstresses were important because clothing was frequently made, altered, repaired, and matched to ceremonies rather than simply bought ready-made. Laundry and ironing took real labor, especially where water was shared and charcoal or electric irons had to be managed carefully. Dress in Accra balanced comfort with dignity, showing whether a person was ready for work, school, worship, courtship, public office, or family ceremony.

Accra's better-documented designer fashion should not be mistaken for everyone's wardrobe. Newspaper archives and family interviews show that Juliana “Chez Julie” Norteye returned from training in Paris in 1961 and produced garments that combined Ghanaian cloth and dress forms with international tailoring. Her late-1960s experiments included a kente kaba and the akwadzan, made by turning a wrapped-cloth form into a sewn garment.[8] A surviving late-1960s wax-print and cotton akwadzan in the Harn Museum provides material evidence alongside the fashion pages and interviews.[12] This evidence demonstrates innovation among fashion-conscious, comparatively well-connected clients; it does not show how commonly any particular design was worn by market sellers, domestic workers, or poorer tenants. For most households, the more pervasive material history lay in choosing cloth, paying a local maker, and repeatedly washing, altering, mending, and passing garments on.

Daily life in 1960s Accra rested on the movement between compound and market, school and office, church or mosque and family ceremony, central streets and growing suburbs. Independence-era institutions changed the city's public language and opportunities, but household routines still depended on food work, rent, transport, kinship, market skill, and the careful management of respectability. Accra's everyday history lies in that combination of national capital, coastal trading city, and intensely practical household life.

References

Karmon, Yehuda. “Accra-Tema. Das Werden einer afrikanischen Großstadt.” Erdkunde 21, no. 1 (1967): 33–48. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.1967.01.04
Ghana Statistical Service. Housing in Ghana. 2014, especially tables 4.3–4.4. Ghana Statistical Service PDF.
Robertson, Claire. “Economic Woman in Africa: Profit-Making Techniques of Accra Market Women.” Journal of Modern African Studies 12, no. 4 (1974): 657–664. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X00014300
Hart, Jennifer. Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra. Indiana University Press, 2024, especially chaps. 4–5 and the conclusion. Open-access edition.
Uitermark, Justus, and Joris Tieleman. “From Fragmentation to Integration and Back Again: The Politics of Water Infrastructure in Accra's Peripheral Neighbourhoods.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46, no. 2 (2021): 347–362. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12420
Serra, Gerardo. “‘Hail the Census Night’: Trust and Political Imagination in the 1960 Population Census of Ghana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 3 (2018): 659–687. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417518000221
Ahlman, Jeffrey S. Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana. Ohio University Press, 2017. Ohio University Press record.
Richards, Christopher. “‘The Models for Africa’: Accra's Independence-Era Fashion Culture and the Creations of Chez Julie.” African Arts 49, no. 3 (2016): 8–21. https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_a_00296
Bank of Ghana. “Evolution of Currency in Ghana.” Bank of Ghana.
Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority. “Our History and Future.” Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority.
Parliament of Ghana. “History of Ghana's Parliament.” Parliament of Ghana.
Harn Museum of Art. “Akwadzan (female),” Juliana Kweifio-Okai, late 1960s, object 2016.37. Collection record.