Girlhood, Urban Migration and leisure in Ghana, 1900-1957
In colonial schools, teachers, education officers or missionaries, either British or Ghanaians, used Western sports to teach ways of behaving, moving, and curating one’s body. This paper will explore how long-lasting genealogies of racialised feminine beauty and virtue ideals were voiced and discussed in the school setting, in connection with the opposition between whiteness, slenderness and virtue on one hand, and blackness, fatness and hypersexuality on the other hand. The paper will then discuss how, during the Interwar,Ghanaian girls and young women from elite backgrounds discussed these issues in local newspapers' women’s columns, engaging with the trope of the ‘modern girl’. This paper argues that doing so, they appropriated and transformed ideas about the ‘modern female body’.
Claire Nicolas is a historian of leisure and youth, with a special focus on West Africa, and Global History. After gaining a PhD from Lausanne university and SciencesPo Paris (2019), she became a postdoctoral fellow from the Swiss National Science Foundation (2020-2014), working at King’s College, then SOAS. Her forthcoming monograph, Une si longue course (Presses universitaires de Rennes), explores the history of youth, sports and gender in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
- this seminars is free to attend but registration is required.
This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
