Fauziyatu Moro

Some three miles north of Accra’s central business district sits Nima, the city’s largest migrant enclave and home to transnational migrants from various African countries. In the nine decades of the town’s existence, its residents have embodied a distinct Afro-cosmopolitan identity that has gone unnoticed by scholars of African urban history, migration, and the African diaspora. “Strangers at Play: Migrant Urban Leisure and Social Life in the Making of Twentieth-Century Accra” and the open-access digital archive emerging out of it, theorizes Nima as an internal African diaspora and an unprecedented site of pan-African consciousness in Accra facilitated by migrants’ urban leisure which spoke to an ethos of global Black solidarity. Employing a multi-disciplinary methodology, this dissertation project centers migrants’ narratives, social imaginations, and visual and material culture in a retelling of the history of Accra– one of Africa’s foremost Afro-cosmopolitan cities.