In curating the Biennale Architettura 2023 in Venice in May, Lesley Lokko is set to make history as the exhibition’s first Black architect. Lokko’s career as an architect has been eclectic but always revolving around the subject of Africa’s past, present and future.
In 1981, during the near-collapse of the Ghanaian economy, Lesley Lokko’s father, a medical doctor, was among the many middle-income-earning Ghanaians who could afford to leave Ghana with four children. Lokko, an architect and novelist whose mother was Scottish, was born in the United Kingdom but spent her childhood in Ghana. Although bi-racial, Lokko’s earliest memories were not of ‘difference’, but of being ‘at home’. Speaking to me last year, she explained, ‘Growing up, my father was very clear that we were Ghanaian and I saw myself as half-Ghanaian, half-Scottish; not half-Black, half-white.’
When global health action is urgently needed, dependency on global actors is almost often too late and too imprecise of a strategy. Take, for example, the COVAX mechanism which was supposed to ensure speedy and equitable access to vaccines. Richer countries bypassed this mechanism to secure access for their citizens first, while vaccines arrived in poorer nations months later...