Curating in the Wake of the Sea: Reimagining the Keta Library in Coastal Ghana as a Site of Eʋe Cultural and Ecological Knowledge

Animated by questions of memory, erasure, and landscape that inform Black Geographies, this thesis provides a case study of the Keta Library in southeast Ghana. One of several libraries established in the 1960s during Ghana’s early independence era, the aspiration for the library remains largely unfulfilled, hampered both by the lingering influences of colonial history and intensifying coastal erosion in Keta.In the face of this dual erasure, this research examines the Keta Library’s potential as a space of sustaining collective memory and future possibility. It asks: How (and whether) to approach the practice of preservation in a place projected to disappear over the next few decades? What is necessary to reimagine or repurpose physical colonial forms into emancipatory spaces? Building on what poet Kofi Anyidoho calls “the ghosts at memory’s door,” this thesis presents a proposed redesign of the Keta Library that revitalizes Eʋe language, culture, and ecological knowledge.