Graduate fellow brings Ghanaians’ stories into colonial-era library

When Fowota Mortoo first visited the Keta Library in Ghana in 2024, she surged with excitement. Mortoo had hoped the two-story pink building would be filled with historical material about Keta — the small coastal town where her family is from.

Instead, Mortoo found the building — and experience — to be a bit hollow.

Opened a few years after Ghana gained independence in 1957, the Keta Library is still largely stocked with books written from British colonial perspectives. The shelves lack stories, art and voices from Ghanaians themselves, including the Eʋe people of Keta.

Keta Library (Submitted photo)

After conversations with the Keta librarian, Dela Odamson and Eʋe historians, Mortoo was inspired to help rectify the imbalance. “That’s where I started thinking, ‘Oh, my graduate work could respond to this and be useful in some way,” said Mortoo, a graduate student in the UNC College of Arts and Science’s department of geography and environment.

For her master’s thesis, Mortoo proposed a collaborative redesign of the Keta Library. She spoke with Eʋe artists, poets and community members, gathered oral histories and curated historical maps, texts, photographs and more. For the outside of the library, Mortoo designed a courtyard garden that features plants indigenous to Keta.

That project, supported through a graduate fellowship program from the National Science Foundation, is just one example of why Mortoo’s graduate adviser Chérie Rivers Ndaliko calls her an “exceptional student whose accomplishments bring prestige to UNC.”

Mortoo was one of just four geography students nationwide to earn the NSF graduate fellowship. She’s been selected for high-profile international residencies in Senegal and Ghana and was selected as one of 25 under 25 Young Climate Prize Awardees globally by architecture and design nonprofit The World Around.

A double Tar Heel, Mortoo ’22, ’25 will earn her second UNC-Chapel Hill degree Dec. 14 at Carolina’s Winter Commencement.

A multidisciplinary approach

Mortoo likes to say she has three “froms” — or three places she calls home. Though her family hails from Ghana, Mortoo spent her childhood in New York and moved to North Carolina as an adolescent.

Those experiences influence the way Mortoo thinks about geography and the relationships that exist between people and places.

“A lot of my work now is around what we lose — whether it’s language or different bodies of knowledge — by moving to a new place or through historical erasures,” Mortoo said. “There’s also things that we gain, obviously, but I’m interested in what is lost, and how we find ways of sustaining it.”

Mortoo takes a multidisciplinary approach to geography, drawing on history, architecture and ecology and combining her work with visual arts, creative writing and photography. Her work in Ghana was meaningful on a personal level, allowing connection with her family’s roots. But Mortoo said Keta also serves as an important case study.

For decades, climate change has eroded the Keta shoreline, causing many residents to leave and greatly impacting the town.

“There are so many coastal communities that are facing the exact same question: What are we going to do when this land disappears?” Mortoo said. “And how do we continue to sustain our identities and knowledge systems when we’ve moved to a completely different place?”

After graduation, Mortoo intends to continue asking those big questions. She said she’s grateful for her experiences at Carolina and particularly for the mentorship she received from Rivers.

“Heading toward Commencement, I’m really moved by the amount of support that I’ve received by professors in the geography department and different peoples in Ghana who have supported the project,” Mortoo said.

“Each person has been so formative in moving this process along and providing guidance every step of the way.”