ABSTRACT
For more than a decade, the history of the Modern Movement's encounter with West Africa has been documented and told to audiences inside and outside Africa. The role of key characters and schools who had the most influence and investment in the evolution and spread of post-World War II, modernist projects in the region have also been recorded by many scholars. This chapter focuses on the views and engagement of local West Africans who encountered and used the new West Africa modernist architectural infrastructure and landscape of the 1950s and 1960s. Modernism was a product of an admittedly short but clearly transformational period in West Africa's architectural history. The region's national engagement with Modernism could at one level be seen as problematic from a Western viewpoint. These modernist buildings, however, were never built to be precious, most were utilitarian in nature and remain so today.
