Ha! Ei! Ohhhh! Mmm. Sa! / Wo ni veranda / Wo si wo bɛyɛ adui! / Obɛ veranda Neo kor balɛ monkey! Ghanaian highlife singer Samuel Owusu’s hit “Veranda” returned to FM radio in 1999, the year I moved into an Accra compound house.
A drying line shared by residents in a compound yard, 2004; Photo by Catherine McKinley
A compound house is an intergenerational, multifamily abode with interconnected units around a courtyard, where much of the living is done, mostly communally. Compound houses are owned for generations by a “family head,” who resides in the “main house” with their nuclear family and occupies a place of status related to traditional clan leadership systems and a role as a benefactor to poorer relatives who also reside there. A Ghanaian compound is, even today, much like an ancient-rooted cosmopolis. The world inside those walls is similar to a village, in size sometimes, and in governance. Each compound does not so much reflect the world, as it makes the world. One compound spreads out to another until a city is born. For centuries, the design is what shaped Accra, and the country—its rules and its voice. Below the surface of these now unremarkable twenty-first century, often declining and ugly structures, is a resilient cultural and metaphysic world that is centuries old.
When I lived there, I understood only a little of the two Ghanaian languages, Twi and Ga, combined in Owusu’s lyrically dense but seemingly banal song:
You want to have a monkey
But you don’t have a veranda!
Ghana has a linguistic culture that is rich with proverbs. How often did you see a monkey in the city? Occasionally, one might leap out suddenly as you neared a house, chained to the front posts. But monkeys were not aspirations. They were considered mildly dangerous, nuisance animals, from the realm of hunters or fetish priests.
Houses were aspirations. As the tempo of “Veranda” rose, and the music slapped and rollicked, the song lost its banality, and you soon felt all its intended evisceration, innuendo, and aspirational joy.
Kasantwi! he declares at the bridge.
Speak and let it scratch someone!
My landlord at the compound house, whom we all called Madame, would unveil the meaning of these words to me. “Kasantwi! I go talk! I go scratch you!” she declared as I passed her in the yard. “With your American shoes! I heard you coming. Slap! Slap! Slap! Like monkey on concrete! Walking gor-geous-ly! I will collect those shoes from you today like rent! You! You are three days late, walking like you yourself own the papers to this house!”
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Valerie Aboulker, A portion of the main quarters in a historic Akan family compound, Kumasi, Ghana, early 20th century (illustration 2024) ; © Valerie Aboulker 2023
Valerie Aboulker, A view from the street into an open-air kitchen in an urban family compound, Accra (illustration 2024); © Valerie Aboulker 2023
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Catherine E. McKinley