Lesley Lokko Prepares for Venice

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.

Written by Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Mar 9, 2023

Photography by Murdo Mcleod / La Biennale Architettura 2021

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.’

Lokko arrived in the UK, in 1981, as a 17-year- old teenager and her world as she knew it changed. ‘I arrived in the UK and was suddenly told I was “Black”, not Ghanaian,” she said. ‘It didn’t make sense to me.’ When Lokko tells this part of her story, she speaks with a very fierce facial expression: ‘It wasn’t how I would have described myself. In Ghana, no one is simply Black because everyone is Black. Suddenly, I had a new identity that was not of my own making.’

Lokko spent the next 40 years of her life trying to understand what it meant to be Black, both as an academic and a novelist. According to her, ‘What bothered me most was the sense that being Black simply meant not being white. That’s not deep or rich enough to satisfy anyone.’

Her academic path was long and varied. After leaving Ghana, Lokko took her A-levels at Malvern St. James, an English boarding school. She later gained admission to study Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University but left the university shortly afterwards for a degree in Sociology in Los Angeles. Twenty-nine, and unhappy with the identity politics she encountered in the US, she returned to the UK. ‘In America,’ she told me, ‘it was actually worse, because the Americans were much more ignorant about identity than in England.’ In contrast to the popular view of America as the land of opportunity, Lokko found America ruthless in terms of class and race. The American system’s brutality, according to Lokko in a 2008 interview with the UK’s Independent, is a ‘vicious social Darwinism’. America, she added, ‘was made by immigrants but their attitudes towards contemporary immigrants shocked me.’

One day, while working as an office manager in Los Angeles, Lokko had a conversation with her manager that changed the direction of her life. He had asked her to help him choose some countertops for a venture he was starting and showed her a sketch. Since her mother had been an art teacher, Lokko knew how to draw a perspective and she made one for him. After reviewing her drawing, he said, ‘You ought to be an architect.’ I asked her, ‘So the discussion that made you decide to become an architect was totally unplanned?’ And she replied, ‘Totally unplanned.’

Following the discussion with manager, Lokko enrolled at University College, London’s Bartlett School of Architecture, where she completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. By the time she graduated, she found that, contrary to her initial belief, there was still so much more to be discovered. Recalling that moment, she explained:

I wanted to understand it and be a better student at it than I was in my undergraduate days. And then I discovered that architecture was not something that you could ever know in its entirety. I found that most architects spent too much time arguing about what was and what was not architecture. I left university knowing far less than I knew when I came in. But that desire to understand it differently lasted for the rest of my career.

Although Lokko found architecture frustrating, she also excelled at it, gaining a doctorate in the field in 2007. But at the same time, Lokko began looking for creative outlets beyond architecture; during the search, she came across a Time Out article on how to write a blockbuster, and in 2004, she published her first novel, Sundowners. Since then, Lokko has published twelve novels and is set to deliver another one after curating La Biennale di Venezia later this year, beginning from May 20th.

Though Lokko regards her novels as commercial works produced for money, the roots of her writing are not trivial. She had, after all, been a lifelong reader and had drunk from the gourds of renowned literary influences such as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer and David Malouf. As such, her works, which began on a commercial note, went on to tackle much serious topics like race, immigration and the identity politics of America and Europe.

Subscribe to our free newsletter.

What’s your e-mail?

You’re in — welcome to The Republic

Complete your onboarding

Read

Connect

Apps

More

Read

Connect

Apps

More

Lesley Lokko Prepares for Venice

You’ve Reached Your Limit of Free Reading.

Ad-Free Reading Experience

Unlimited Access to Exclusive Archives

In-Depth Deep-dive Reporting

You’ve Reached Your Limit of Free Reading.

Ad-Free Reading Experience

Unlimited Access to Exclusive Archives

In-Depth Deep-dive Reporting

Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

Comments

SHOP THE REPUBLIC

Related Stories

The ‘Electronic Imam’ Who Rewrote Nigerian Islam

A Bird in Flight

Good News

Reclamation Across the Atlantic

Osaze Amadasun’s ‘Ladi Kwali’