ABSTRACT
Given the impact that African sculptural forms had on European modernism in the twentieth century, African contributions to modernist architecture and design might initially seem minimal. As Antoni Folkers notes, ‘Africa has never played a significant role in the debate on architecture’ (Folkers 2010: 13). Indeed, references to African architecture or modern design are largely absent from most Euro-American surveys. This parochial view is informed by Eurocentrism, but the legacy of colonialism is also at fault as well, insofar as ‘Africa’ continues to be imagined as a timeless or traditional space where the ‘modern’ must originate from outside. As James Ferguson has observed, ‘Africa always seems to come to the question of modernity from without. Generations of Western scholars have regarded Africa as either beyond the pale of the modern […] or before it’ (2007: 176). But from the outset, as Salah Hassan reminds us, two critical issues must be emphasized with regard to modernism and modernity: ‘The plurality of modernity, even in its European context, and the realization that there are other modernisms beyond the European context’ (2010: 454).
