Houston, Once Removed

Go to Accra, Ghana, and find gated communities modeled on our own hometown

A A A Comments By Josh Harkinson Thursday, Nov 20 2003

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It's Saturday morning and Ohrt's daughter is watching Tom and Jerry via satellite on the Cartoon Network. A rhino stands on the VCR, staring at abstract sculptures and glass-encased African vases. Inside a fenced-off area nearby rests a baby stroller.

Courtesy of Regimanuel Gray

Emmanuel Botchwey and William Ohrt both own stakes in Regimanuel Gray, a Ghanaian-American joint venture.

Wim Focke

The traffic in Ghana's capital, Accra, approaches Houston proportions.

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Ohrt remarried in 1996 and moved into No. 5 Regina Crescent three years later. The spacious house on a double lot is one of the nicest in Golden Gate. A maid bustles in the kitchen and a gardener hammers outside.

Ohrt appears in the living room with his Ghanaian wife and offers a tour of the colorful garden, which has a swath of grass large enough for a game of volleyball. Like most Ghanaian yards, it is surrounded -- along with the entire home -- by a substantial cement wall.

Regimanuel Gray has left an American imprint on Accra, but Ghana has much to teach Americans, especially when it comes to the architecture of protection.

The original gated communities of Ghana date to the 15th century, when the Portuguese arrived and started building slave forts. By the time slavery was outlawed, the Portuguese, Dutch and British had built 76 forts along the Ghanaian coast, an average of one every four miles.

The construction of walls around homes continued in Ghana under the colonial administration of the British, who also pioneered the widespread practice among Ghanaians of protecting one's house with hired guards.

Although it took an American intervention to popularize the idea of building a wall around an entire subdivision, even this creation also owes a debt of sorts to Ghana. As the freed slaves of the American South flocked to cities like Houston, white Americans fled to the suburbs and, fearing crime, built their new fortresses.

And one thing the residents of Accra's gated communities may grasp better than their walled-in counterparts in America is the limits to their independence. Back in Ohrt's living room, the fan whirls, the air-conditioner blows, and Tom chases Jerry. But then the power cuts out and the TV goes black. "Ahh, it's a typical Saturday," Ohrt says. "No water, no electricity." Unless Regimanuel Gray builds power plants and water utilities, Ohrt will have to rely on the caprice of his crumbling city. It's a problem his half-Ghanaian daughter accepts. She springs off the couch and out the door, in search of something better.