National Cathedral of Ghana

In 2017, shortly after taking office, President Nana Akufo-Addo announced that Ghana would build a National Cathedral in Accra, describing the project publicly as the fulfilment of a personal vow he had made before his election. The site chosen sat near the seat of government, land previously occupied by judges' official residences that were cleared to make way for the complex, and the commission went to David Adjaye, a Ghanaian British architect known internationally for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

The design called for far more than a single sanctuary. Plans described a cathedral hall seating several thousand, alongside a Bible museum, a chapel, a choir school and a banqueting hall, conceived as a national religious and civic complex rather than a parish church for one congregation. Its interdenominational character was deliberate, intended to represent Ghanaian Christianity broadly rather than any single church body.

That scale is also what made the project politically contentious almost from the start. Ghana's constitution commits the state to no religion, and funding a national cathedral partly from public money drew sustained criticism from secularists, from Ghana's Muslim and traditionalist minorities, and from citizens who argued public funds were better spent elsewhere. Cost estimates rose repeatedly past their original figures, and construction slowed well behind schedule amid audits and public argument over how much had been spent.

Whatever its eventual completion date, the National Cathedral has already become a live test of what a religiously plural, constitutionally secular state is reasonably asked to build in its own name, argued out in public rather than settled quietly.

Where the National Cathedral's first article follows the project's funding and politics, David Adjaye's actual design answers a different question entirely: what a building meant to represent an entire nation's Christianity should look like. Adjaye drew his central forms from Akan symbols of authority rather than from any established church architecture, most directly the stool, an Akan emblem of leadership believed in traditional practice to hold the spirit of the person who sits on it. His design lifts that private symbol of individual power and rebuilds it at cathedral scale as a shared national space, alongside references to a ceremonial canopy, called the Boaman, and to the Tabernacle of Hebrew scripture, layering indigenous and biblical symbolism rather than choosing between them.

Color carries its own deliberate reading throughout the complex. Adjaye's design uses red, black and white, the same three colors that appear across Ghanaian textile and regalia traditions, and assigns them a double meaning: read as Christian symbolism they reference the Trinity, and read through Ghanaian tradition they stand for the blood, the spirit and heart, and the power of the Ghanaian people respectively, a single palette meant to speak in both vocabularies simultaneously.

Adjaye described the whole complex as intended to embody unity, harmony and spirituality for people of every faith, not solely for the Christian congregations it will formally serve, extending an argument the building's political critics have disputed on entirely different grounds: whether a constitutionally secular state should be building a monument to any single faith's symbolism at all, however broadly that symbolism is drawn.