This edited collection of essays and image-driven pieces by anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, and historians examines the legacies of African architecture from around the time of independence through examples from different countries. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and careful observation of buildings, remains, and people, the case studies seek to connect the colonial and postcolonial origins of modernist architecture, the historical processes they underwent, and their present use and habitation, adaptation, and decay.
Deriving from a workshop in connection with the 2015 exhibition “Forms of Freedom” at the National Museum in Oslo and the Venice Biennale, the volume combines recent developments in architectural history, the anthropology of modernism and of material culture, and contemporary archaeology to move beyond the admiration or preservation of prized architectural “heritage” and to complicate the contemplation—or critique—of “ruins” and “ruination.”
On an escarpment, 250m above the city of Freetown, is the small settlement of Hill Station. This was an exclusive resort built for the British colonial administrators and staff between 1902 and 1904. Modelled on the Indian hill stations (such as Simla) and the sanatorium at Aburi, Ghana, it aimed to provide cooler, more healthier abodes for the Colonists. Ronald Ross’s recent discoveries on mosquitoes and malaria also prompted the move away from the city, and the increasing desire for racially segregated housing and cordon sanitaires.
Bungalow at Hill Station
The houses were exported as kits from the UK ready to be assembled and clad on site. Hefty concrete bases are topped with steel frames that provide living accommodation at first floor level . Access is via a perpendicular staircase leading to a verandah. The raised bungalows catch the breeze and offer far reaching views over the forest, city, and ocean below. A club offered the only source of entertainment for the residents of this leafy, isolated, community.
Covered staircase entrance
How to access the Hill Station was solved by building a narrow gauge railway line from the city. It operated to suit the office hours of the government officials, and ran from 1904 until 1929 when it was replaced by road and bus service. Each day the officials would commute into town and return at the end of the day to their verandah’s and billiards at the Club House. It was an elaborate and hugely expensive experiment that benefited just a few dozen individuals. To build and maintain a railway through this challenging terrain was an immense task.
New build on left with origin Hill Station residence on rightView from Hill station over FreetownHill StationOne of the surviving 12 original Hill Station houses – with modifications to base
Today, just 12 of the original 24 two-storey houses survive, still occupied by civil servants and their families (and still without a piped water supply). Many of the houses are being modified and extended, and the large plots split-up and sold to facilitate new development.
The Architectural History and Urbanism Research centre for Western Africa, AHUWA, was launched on Tuesday 13th December at the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. The launch involved a presentation of the research centre by the co-directors Professors Iain Jackson and Ola Uduku, about the key research themes, aims and ambitions of the AHUWA research centre followed by a short networking session over refreshments during the event. In attendance were invited members of the Liverpool university faculty and departments who had interests or links to West African Architecture and Urbanism history research, members of the local Liverpool community with African links, and a number of Architecture staff and post-graduate students. We were also pleased to welcome a representative from the Andrew Walls Centre from Liverpool Hope University and a host of academics who logged in online from the UK, West Africa, the USA and farther afield.
The key themes which AHUWA will focus on are:
Architectural and Urban History
West African Coastal Heritage
Sustainable and Healthy Cities [SDGs 11 and
Research outreach and collaboration via
Trans-national university collaborations
Writing workshops
Public outreach and engagement activities
Our aims and objectives are:
To be a repository and hub to consult for links to researchers and research collections pertaining to West Africa in North West England
To host and develop links with researchers in the North West of England and West Africa in order to promote future collaborative research links
Ultimately and importantly to strengthen research networks and institutions in West Africa through their collaboration with UK institutions from PG research and teaching opportunities to the collaboration and co-production of major research consultancy, and other potential outputs.
We are working in association with several collaborators including:
UCL and UCT (Modernist Heritage of Africa Project)
ACRC (University of Manchester) – the African Cities Research Consortium
DOCOMOMO International. (Shared Heritage Project)
ASAUK – Curating the proceedings and publication of the Online ASAUK Biennial conference 2022
UNILEVER – on the United Africa Company archive
We are in the process of undertaking the following:
Setting up MoU’s and working relations with colleagues at the IADS University of Lagos and IAAS University of Ghana, Legon.
Production of the first AHUWA newsletter in March/April 2023
Establishing links with the School of Architecture, Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone
Undertaking scoping research in Freetown Sierra Leone
Working towards developing collaborative research grants within the scope of AHUWA’s research thematic areas.
Inês Nunes is a PhD student at University of Coimbra, Portugal and is investigating, “The Social Within the Tropical: Jane Drew and Minnette de Silva designing an inclusive modernism in the tropics”. Here’s an update on a recent visit to the RIBA archive.
“My dearest, darling Jane”: unfolding Fry and Drew Papers
In a conversational tone, Maxwell Fry addresses Jane Drew from the ‘remote’ mid-1940s Accra. “Darling Max”, she replicates. Their correspondence, a lively itinerary from West Africa, India, Iran, or Mauritius, belongs to a treasure chest named Fry and Drew Papers. It is accessible, along with unrivaled archival material, in the RIBA Architecture Study Rooms of the Victoria & Albert Museum(London).
Love notes handwritten on hotel letterheads, diaries displaying candid reflections about life, and memoirs manuscripted on paper bags are entangled with professional-wise material. Included are lectures and articles revealing narratives about architecture, extraordinarily illustrated with colourful drawings or sharp pencil sketches. Both are complemented by miscellaneous data: postcards, press cuttings, administrative files, address books… The characters gain life in every opened box. Their voices echo through calligraphies, signatures, ideas.
In its uniqueness, Fry and Drew Papers are an overwhelming resource regarding the life and work of both architects and an efficient record of the dynamic of their global scope partnership. Even so, it excels. Flexible and embracing enough to accommodate diverse interests and aims, unpublished personal letters, diaries, and autobiographies provide captivating details to any enthusiast – for instance, Fry’s diary was only made accessible in 2021. Furthermore, the archive is a source of knowledge about British historiography and significant architectural thematics: the MARS Group, the Modern Movement, Tropical Architecture, and Chandigarh are noteworthy.
Overall, the research was a privilege and the expectations were exceeded. My deep gratitude to Dr. Shireen Mahdavi for supporting this endeavour. The wealth of these primary sources allows an experience that couldn’t have been more rewarding. By immersing in Fry and Drew’s universe, how inspiring becomes their lifetime of respect and companionship, the robustness of their practice, and the profound vow to “produce towns and housing that will be loved, lived in and cared for” (Drew, F&D/27/2).
Call for Papers for Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium
Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene is part of the MoHoA global collaborative and builds on the Modern Heritage of Africa symposium hosted by the University of Cape Town in September 2021. Coordinated by The Bartlett’s Professor Edward Denison and Head of the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture, Professor Ola Uduku, along with partners at the University of Cape Town, the Africa World Heritage Fund and around the world, this upcoming hybrid symposium responds to an age of planetary crisis in which a precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future.
The international railway settlement of Fushun (northeast China), with its modern town planning and the Ryuho Colliery, built by Denang and Siemens, and home to one of the world’s largest open cast mines in the 1930s.
Modern heritage in all its forms and from around the world is the subject of this multidisciplinary symposium, presenting the paradox of being of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. MoHoA was originally conceived within an African context to interrogate this paradox because the continent encapsulates the historical inequities that characterise the modern and its associated notions of development and progress while also facing the highest rates of urbanisation over the next 30 years, demanding new approaches to the past and present that achieve equitable and sustainable futures on a planetary scale. The outcomes of the two symposia will synthesise in the recognition of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage.
Call for papers
Submissions are invited from researchers, academics, and practitioners. The organisers are seeking papers or equivalent submissions that critically engage with reframing, re-evaluating, decentring, and decolonising recent, hidden or marginalised pasts in pursuit of achieving more equitable, just, and sustainable futures. Participants will contribute to the completion of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, supporting policy change at a global level through our partner UNESCO.
Topics can include, but are not limited to:
Practices of coloniality, decentring and decolonising history and historiography
Considerations and conceptualisations of multiple modernities
Modern heritage and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Planetary futures and the Anthropocene
Infrastructure and (post)-industrial heritage
Combining culture and nature, and the role of natural heritage in society
Public space and memory: memorialisation, commemoration and remembering
Modern heritage and the World Heritage Convention
How to submit
Submissions should be in English or French and should be emailed to mohoa@ucl.ac.uk by 31 May 2022.
Notification of acceptance will be provided by 30 June. Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words or equivalent format (e.g. film shorts, blog, or Instagram story) for other types of digital submissions.
Selected papers or presentations will be published as part of the MoHoA Book Series after the conference and selected extended papers will appear in a special edition of the journal ‘Curator’.
During this international conference, a series of scholars from different disciplines (history, anthropology, political science, architecture,..) and backgrounds will present their (ongoing) research on railways in Africa and engage in a conversation with Anne Wetsi Mpoma and two artists currently in residence in the context of Europalia Arts Festival, Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe and Arnaud Makalou. Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka will start the day with a keynote lecture. Please note that interventions will be in French and/or English, with no simultaneous translation.
We will open a work-in-progress exhibition of work produced by students and staff of the Department of Architecture and Planning of Ghent University on the theme of the railway in Africa, conducted over the last couple of years. Two keynote lectures, one by historian Geert Castryck (University of Leipzig, Germany) and one by digital humanities scholar Chao Tayiana Maina (African Digital Heritage, Kenya) will provide a broader context on the theme. The interventions will be in English.
Eager to secure the provision of raw materials at low cost to its flourishing soap factories in Liverpool, Lever Brothers and the United Africa Company (UAC) acquired land concessions from colonial states across the oil palm belt in West Africa. Beginning from the early 1910s, subsidiaries such as the Huilieries du Congo Belge (HCB, later Huilever and Plantations du Congo), and Pamol, established oil palm plantations in today’s DR Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone.
Plantation workers holding a bunch of fruit of Elaeis Guineensis (African oil palm). Oil is derived from fruit’s outer layer and cracked kernel. The photo was taken near the Alberta plantation in the Belgian Congo, probably in the 1930s or 1940s.Agronomists selected oil palm varieties to maximise the quantity of oil and facilitate the cracking of the kernels.Plan of a plantation on the Benin river in Nigeria showing the subdivision of the planted area in square sectors; the location of the oil mill and wharfs where palm oil was extracted and loaded on boats; and the area where worker houses were built.
Historians such as Jules Marchal lengthily detailed the brutality of Lever Brother’s exploitation especially in the Belgian Congo, the forced resettlement of local population, and the violent repression of “uncooperative workers”. However, this attitude uneasily coexisted with a paternalistic, but probably genuine, hope that plantations would bring “progress and civilisation”. Such hope – Benoit Henriet argues – was compromised by the overriding need to turn a profit but it requires to be analysed beyond oversimplifying narratives of predatory capitalism.
Our initial exploration of the rich UAC archival collection revealed that plantations had been the locus of a wide array of experiments combining agronomic knowledge with political, economic, social, and cultural tools. The plans and photos of worker houses and communal facilities, and the numerous written exchanges on the social aspects of work organisation and the daily life of workers in the plantation shows that architecture played a relevant role in giving tangible form to the company’s largely unfulfilled ambitions to widespread social development.
Diorama showing two HCB oil palm plantations presented at the Ghent Universal and International Exhibition in 1913.“Model houses” for workers in the Brabanta plantation, Belgian Congo.Native dwelling quarters in an unidentified Huilever plantation.Views of worker houses and public facilities in Leverville, Belgian Congo.
While the construction of villages for plantation workers such as Leverville offers the occasion for a critical reflection on the role of architecture in private colonial exploitation, other documents from the UAC archives suggest that plantations had been the testing ground for innovative spatial planning models. Indeed, over the course of the 20th century, changes in plantation management and spatial structure overlapped with the evolution of ideas on social engineering and rural development.
In the 1930s and 1940s for example – as Jonathan Robins highlights – in response to the well grounded critiques on the social and environmental sustainability of plantations in West Africa, UAC proposed plans for a reformulation of plantation organisational system. The model they proposed would later influence policy recommendations given by international organisations such as the World Bank to developing countries across the globe. The experimental plantation model, the Nucleus Estate-Smallholder (NES) model, claimed to combine the virtues of the plantation system of management with the “social attractions” of peasant agriculture. This farming system entailed a spatial structure in which a nucleus, composed of a plantation established on a land concession and managed by UAC, is surrounded by further plantation sectors operated by smallholders.
The extent to which this and other models were successful in improving the living condition of local farmers or rather were functional smokescreens for the perpetuation of colonial or neo-colonial extractivism remains an highly debated topic. Certainly, plantations remains, both at the architectural and territorial scale, a fascinating subject which we will continue to explore in the following months and an opportunity to explore the multiple intersections between development ideologies, colonial and post colonial histories, and architectural and planning knowledges.
–
Henriet, B. (2021) Colonial impotence: virtue and violence in a Congolese Concession (1911-1940), De Gruyter Oldenburg.
Robins, J.E. (2021) Oil palm: a global history, University of North Carolina Press.
Marchal, J. (2008) Lord Leverhulme’s ghosts, Verso. First published in French as (2001) Travail force’ pour l’huile de palme de Lord Leverhulme: l’histoire du Congo 1910-1945, vol.3, Paula Bellings.
The 20th anniversary of the Modern Heritage Programme, jointly initiated by UNESCO, ICOMOS, and DOCOMOMO, in 2021 presents a timely and important opportunity to reflect on the transformative cultural experiences and global consequences of the recent past that heralded the dawn of the anthropocene and its many impacts on climate, society, and the planet. Despite these impacts, the ‘modern’ era and its legacies are comparatively undervalued and overlooked, and disproportionately concentrated and interpreted in ‘the west’. MoHoA contends that Africa’s experiences of plural modernities include the positive and negative, colonial and post-colonial, tangible and intangible, urban and rural, culture and nature. This will need greater scholarly attention and can be instructive and transformative in framing modernities and modern heritage globally, as well as addressing the challenges of sustainability continentally. On the one hand, Africa’s contemporary cities, many of which are products of modern encounters, face the highest rates of urbanisation in the world over the next half a century, straining populations and resources, urban landscapes and rural hinterlands, and placing modern heritage at serious risk of alteration or destruction. On the other hand, the unique human settlement patterns in Africa, provides a new dimension, reflected in the cultural landscapes, “combining works of nature and humankind, they express a long and intimate relationship between peoples and their natural environment”.
The African World Heritage Fund has identified modern heritage as amongst the most marginalised heritage categories on the continent, demanding investment in research and documentation to better protect, increase resilience and subsequently Africa’s representation on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Through improved methods of understanding and assessing significance, raising public awareness and promoting inscription on local or global registers, Africa’s modern heritage has a vital role in contributing to rural and urban sustainability in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the New Urban Agenda (NUA), the African Union’s Agenda 2063, and the Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL) Approach.
MoHoA plans two symposia over two years and a series of supporting thematic workshops. The first symposium, focusing on Africa, will be hosted by the University of Cape Town in September 2021 and titled ‘Modern Heritage of Africa’. The second will be global in scope and hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) in 2022 and titled ‘Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene’. The outcome UCT symposium will lead to proposing a ‘The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage’ supporting efforts to modify international policy and guidance on modern heritage in line with present and future planetary challenges of ecological, social and economic equity. This will be presented to the World Heritage Committee as part of the reporting exercise and as a side event at the relevant Committee Session. The UCL symposium will discuss the wider implications of the MoHoA globally.
We invite submissions to the International Symposium on the Modern Heritage of Africa and welcome papers and other forms of communication including video, music, performance and literature accompanied with a commentary and interpretation focusing on any of the following themes evolving from the brain storming isivivana last August, highlighting both cultural and natural heritage, the tangible and intangible and their symbiotic relationships:
Considerations of modernities in Africa
Modern Heritage and Sustainable Development in Africa (SDGs)
Infrastructure development, particularly industrialization and transportation systems, as activators of modernism in Africa
Natural heritage and its role in society, linking culture and nature
Public spaces, memorialization and commemoration in postcolonial Africa
Modern Heritage of Africa and the World Heritage Convention
Any other theme not covered by the above
Abstracts: Contributions with African experiences of modernities and the sharing of heritage knowledge and we welcome abstracts of up to 300 words or equivalent format (e.g. film shorts, blog, Instagram story) for other types of digital submissions. For general reference in terms of format – see below. To submit an abstract, email: modernheritageofafrica@gmail.com
The abstracts: Date to be finalised
forming results: Date to be finalised
Publication: Selected papers or presentations will be published as part of the Modern Heritage of Africa Book Series to be published after the conference.
Audience: academia, heritage fields, professionals and practitioners from diverse disciplines addressing the tangible and intangible, culture and nature, documentation, archives and collections. We encourage participation from colleagues and institutions from Africa, particularly from youth and women.
Networking: Institutions of African Studies, Schools of Cultural Studies, Architecture and Planning – African Union and professional bodies.
Languages: Français and English
Dates:22 and 23 September and 24 September, South Africa Heritage Day 2021
Venue: University of Cape Town, South Africa
Participation: online registration will be required and is free; a $50 donation will be welcome.
Format: The MoHoA symposium will be a virtual, hybid, academic event, a dialogical field capable of moving beyond disciplinary boundaries with social and cultural exchanges. To ground its activities and foster dialogue, we invite proposals, ranging from operational practices to speculative and theoretical questionings. These can be presented in written, built, coded, drawn, figured, imagined, filmed, modelled or in any other format (do not hesitate to consult with us for any exotic format or idea!).
Contributions may take the following forms:
Paper presentations that will be shared and discussed through joint working sessions and panel discussions. These might include theoretical work, but also case studies and project reports. To submit your paper proposal, you must submit an abstract of up to 300 words.
Projects, models, images, devices, pieces of coding, hardware and all other kinds of contributions. These must be submitted by sending a 300-word optionally illustrated abstract in the form of a single PDF including text and images (max 5mb).
Contributions can be signed individually or collectively.
Contributors are welcome to submit more than one proposal in one or more formats. If selected, all contributors are responsible for covering the costs of sending their work in time for presentation. The conference is led by the University of Cape Town and planned virtually with a possible physical component on campus; please state if you would able to attend in person.
If selected, contributors might be assigned to a 15-min paper/project presentation session or a debate session to discuss their work. Or both. These might be done in person, by possibly attending one of the conference’s sites, or remotely. The final format and topics of the sessions will be configured once all submissions have been received, so it is possible and desirable that participants will be grouped in thematically coherent yet interdisciplinary sessions.
PAC@75 is an exciting four-day celebration marking the 75th anniversary of the 5th Pan African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945.
THURSDAY 15 – SUNDAY 18 OCTOBER 2020
Image created by: Zineb Berrais
Curated by Professor of Architecture, Ola Uduku, PAC@75 will be a multi-institutional series of creative and academic events, led by Manchester Metropolitan University, with contributions from The University of Manchester, the University of Salford, and the University of Bolton, and in association with a host of UK and international academic, creative and cultural individuals and institutions, including prominent local creatives and the Manchester public.
The Pan African Congress in 1945 was a precursor to the development of a number of African independence movements which went on to successfully secure self-rule for countries across Africa. It also signified the movement of the intellectual discourse on African self-realisation and solidarity with other causes; moving from the Americas and the West Indies, to the UK and then on to Africa.
The plaque commemorating this event is situated in the new Manchester Metropolitan University Arts and Humanities Building, facing onto All Saints Square, in what had previously been Chorlton Town Hall where the original six-day event took place. The Congress had 200 attendees from across the world; including delegations from Africa, America, the Caribbean and Asia, as well as black and white delegates from Manchester and across the UK.
Join us online to enjoy a range activities featuring high-profile international speakers, such as the Princeton-based writer and philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, the writer and historian Afua Hirsch, and the poets Lemn Sissay, (Chancellor of The University of Manchester) and Carol Ann Duffy DBE (former Poet Laureate 2009-2019). They will be joined also by student speakers, who represent our next generation of leaders. There will also be public-facing sessions including public literature readings, art projections, and theatrical performances by the Manchester School of Theatre and Contact Theatre. PAC@75 is curated in collaboration with Dr Kai Syng Tan.
PAC@75 will bring together academics, students and the public to celebrate the impact that the diversity of Manchester has had on global history, and how this history relates to today’s contemporary challenges in the face of modern racism and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans-African Highway
Kenny Cupers, Prita Meier
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 79 No. 1, March 2020; (pp. 61-81) DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2020.79.1.61
Focusing on the 1960s–70s project to build a trans-African highway network, Infrastructure between Statehood and Selfhood: The Trans-African Highway argues for the need to develop a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between people and infrastructure than current architectural and urban scholarship affords. As Kenny Cupers and Prita Meier describe, African leaders imagined infrastructure as a vehicle of Pan-African freedom, unity, and development, but the construction of the Trans-African Highway relied on expertise and funding from former colonial overlords. Based on archival research, visual analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya, this article examines the highway’s imaginaries of decolonization to show how infrastructure was both the business of statehood and a means of selfhood.
Map of the Trans-African Highway project, late 1970s (Rolf Hofmeier, “Die Transafrikastraßen: Stand der Planung und Realisierung,” Africa Spectrum 14, no. 1 [1979], 35).
From the automobile and the tarmac road to the aesthetics and practices of mobility these fostered, infrastructure was a vehicle for the production of subjectivity in postindependence Kenya. This new selfhood, future oriented and on the move, was both victim and agent of commodification.
![Map of the Trans-African Highway project, late 1970s (Rolf Hofmeier, “Die Transafrikastraßen: Stand der Planung und Realisierung,” Africa Spectrum 14, no. 1 [1979], 35).](https://transnationalarchitecturegroup.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/f2.large_.jpg)
Transnational Architecture Group 