About : This is an expository essay on the evolution of leisure and space in colonial Accra. It details how the Sugar Babies, a concert party troupe formed in Nima, gained access to the Accra Town Hall for performances in colonial Accra.
It is inspired by an oral interview the author conducted in Nima, one of the earliest copies of a photo of the Accra Town Hall, and supported by archival sources from the Public Records Archive and Administrative Department PRAAD as well as secondary literature on concert parties in Ghana.
In January this year, I embarked on preliminary research on cinema in Nima and happened to speak to Mr. Abdullahi Ibrahim Baro, a year-old habitant of the town. My conversation with him dwelled generally on life in Nima than it did on the movie-going culture there since he was not an avid cinemagoer in his youth. His favourite pastime was performing in a concert party troupe. In Mr. Baro and other young men and women from Nima formed a Hausa concert party group called the Sugar Babies.
Their performances were in Hausa since their audience came from working-class people of Nima and neighbouring migrant communities. The Sugar Babies held its rehearsals in the compound of a benevolent woman in Nima, while the main performances took place in events spaces in Tudu and inside the Old Parliament House then the Town Hall.
This revelation came as a surprise to me since I was unaware that the Old Parliament house once served as an events space. Inspired by this knowledge, I set out to understand the historical workings of this space. More importantly, and as far as the focus of this essay is concerned, it also lays the foundation for investigating the process through which the Sugar Babies used the Town Hall for their shows in the colonial period.
