Accra has been Ghana's primate city since the British moved their administrative headquarters there in 1877. The city took shape under British site planning and like many colonial cities, it developed a spatial layout that distinguished different neighborhoods, such as the old core, the European section, and the Muslim zongo or stranger area. Accra's Sabon Zongo (”new zongo”) was founded in the first decade of the 20th century, as a refuge for migrant Hausa who had been living in the original zongo in the city's core. House ownership continues to confer status in the community but there is little room left for building. Hausa transmigrants from Sabon Zongo have been going abroad and remitting money back home, largely to build homes in the new peri‐urban margins of Accra. This paper focuses upon the latter phenomenon – the new styles of houses they are building, the process this involves, and how these styles may accommodate worldview, lifestyle and behaviors different from those with which these men were raised in Sabon Zongo. [transmigration, housing, Ghana]

In this article, I expand on Coquery‐Vidrovitch's observation (1991) that to understand each African urban milieu, we must view it as more than a fusion of European, American, or traditional culture. Rather, we must see each African city as unique, that is, in fact, internally differentiated, containing a multitude of enclaves that vary one from another in their respective social, physical, and architectural spatial forms. I focus on one community in Accra known as Sabon Zongo. Founded by migrant Hausa from northern Nigeria almost a century ago, it is neither typically southern Ghanaian nor Hausa, having adapted to a mixed cultural milieu. Laid out by the British as part of their town plan, its manner of growth has blurred the original scheme. I examine a number of components that define the uniqueness of this particular urban community, including physical delineations (within Sabon Zongo and between it and the city at large), local knowledge, the landscape, the infrastructure, market and street trade, and centripetal socio‐spatial structures such as the family compound. [Ghana, zongo, social‐spatial linkage]

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This is a study of feuding and conciliation, fissioning and fusing, among the constituent segments of Accra's Muslim community. It articulates the argument of legitimacy – to build a new mosque, to choose a new leader, in effect, to direct the group – and in so doing, politically delineates the principle that by excluding rivals it is feasible to gainsay power for one's own group.

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