ABSTRACT
As a construct, Africa has always been dened in the interest of outsiders. Predominantly conceived of as a resource base for its mineral wealth and cheap labour, the continent has been historically reduced to a commodity. This ‘othering’ was exemplied by colonial practice which overwrote all in its path, eectively embarking on a project of cultural genocide. ‘Whiteness’ in the shape of Western value and its limited Cartesian and perspectival vision became the measure of all things ‘good’. This marginalisation of the local had profound eect on spatial practice. Under colonial rule, indigenous architecture and the vernacular were subject to ‘arrested development’ with Western modernism supplanting the local. Indeed with modernity underpinning the colonial project, modernism became the logical handmaiden of the colonial project. Consequently, it is possible to travel the entire continent and be confronted with exceptional examples of modern architecture and urbanism.1 ‘Colonial Modern’ as Tom Avermaete and others have chosen to term it, reects the persistence of the colonial project in a context of the creative experimentation with local conditions, which ultimately contested the colonial imperative, evolving to more nuanced and negotiated moderns.2 This is not unlike other colonial peripheries such as India, Brazil and Turkey where the contradictions of climate, technique and cultural imperative have been critically incorporated by designers in countering the hegemony of colonial imposition.3
