About the Book
Innovative study of state politics, identity and buildings that sheds new light on the links between the material and the ideational realms of contemporary life in Africa.
Buildings shape politics in the ways they define communities, enable economic activity, reflect political ideas, and impact state-society relations. They are materially and symbolically interwoven with the everyday lives of elites and citizens, as well global flows of money, goods, and contracts. Yet, to date, there has been no research that explicitly connects debates about Africa's domestic and international politics with the study of architecture. This innovative book fills this gap, providing a new and compelling reading of the politics of identity in sub-Saharan Africa through an examination of some of its most significant buildings. Using case studies from nine countries across sub-Saharan Africa, this volume reveals how they are commissioned and built, how they enable elites to project power, and how they form a basis for popular conceptions of the state. Exploring a diverse range of buildings including parliaments, airports, prisons, ministries, regional institutions, libraries, universities, shopping malls, public housing, cathedrals and palaces, the contributors suggest a innovative perspective on African politics, identity and urban development. This book will be a compelling reference for scholars and students of African politics, development studies and city life in its elaboration of and challenges to established concepts and arguments about the relationship between material objects and political ideas.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Buildings are the stuff of politics
Daniel Mulugeta, Joanne Tomkinson and Julia Gallagher
PART 1: MAKING
1. Global ambitions and national identity in Ethiopia's airport expansion
Joanne Tomkinson and Dawit Yekoyesew
2. Building heaven on earth: Political rhetoric and ritual over Ghana's national cathedral
Emmanuel K. Ofori-Sarpong
3. China's 'parliament building gift' to Malawi: Exploring its rationale, tensions and asymmetrical gains
Innocent Batsani-Ncube
4. New homes for a new state: Foreign ideas in Ghana's public housing programmes
Irene Appeaning Addo
PART 2: LIVING
5. Beautiful state/ugly state: Architecture and political authority in Côte d'Ivoire
Julia Gallagher and Yah Ariane Bernadette N'djoré
6. Colonial legacies in architectures of consumption: The case of Sam Levy's village in Harare
Tonderai Koschke
7. Public spaces? Public goods? Reinventing Nairobi's public libraries
Marie Gibert
8. The role of architecture in South African detention cases during the apartheid era
Yusuf Patel
PART 3: IMAGINING
9. Pan-African imaginations: The AU building and its popular imagery in Ethiopia and Nigeria
Daniel Mulugeta
10. Asantean Noumena: The politics and imaginary reconstruction of the Asante Palace, Kumase
Tony Yeboah
11. From prison to freedom: Overwriting the past, imagining Nigeria
Laura Routley
Afterword: Theorising the politics of unformal(ised) architectures
Kuukuwa Manful
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
JOANNE TOMKINSON is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her current research explores the role of airport buildings and infrastructure in national development strategies, focusing on Ethiopia and Ghana. DANIEL MULUGETA is a Lecturer in International Politics of Africa and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at SOAS, University of London. His works include The Everyday State in Africa: Governance Practices and State Ideas in Ethiopia, published in 2020. His research looks at the connections between architecture and regional and pan-African politics. JULIA GALLAGHER is a Professor of African Politics at SOAS, University of London. She has published books on Zimbabwe's International Relations, Images of Africa and Britain and Africa under Blair. She currently leads a five-year research project on architecture and politics in Africa. DAWIT YEKOYESEW is a Lecturer and social researcher in the Department of Sociology at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. His main research interests are social development, and the interface between social sciences and health. He has engaged in evaluating development projects in Ethiopia. Emmanuel K. Ofori-Sarpong is an architect and Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Design (SADe) in Central University, Ghana. He has a Masters in Architecture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Innocent Batsani-Ncube is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Politics Department at SOAS, University of London, where he completed his PhD on Chinese Government-funded parliament buildings in Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe in 2022. His research explores the interaction between African states and state and non-state actors from China, India and Brazil. He is interested in understanding whether Africa's relationships with these actors from the Global South are potentially transformative, or again playing out in dependent form. Irene Appeaning Addo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana and a practicing architect in Ghana. Her research focuses on African architecture and urban housing in West Africa. JULIA GALLAGHER is a Professor of African Politics at SOAS, University of London. She has published books on Zimbabwe's International Relations, Images of Africa and Britain and Africa under Blair. She currently leads a five-year research project on architecture and politics in Africa. JOANNE TOMKINSON is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her current research explores the role of airport buildings and infrastructure in national development strategies, focusing on Ethiopia and Ghana. DANIEL MULUGETA is a Lecturer in International Politics of Africa and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at SOAS, University of London. His works include The Everyday State in Africa: Governance Practices and State Ideas in Ethiopia, published in 2020. His research looks at the connections between architecture and regional and pan-African politics. Marie Gibert is an independent scholar and secondary school teacher of history and geography based in Lille, France. Her PhD, from SOAS, and postdoctoral research focused on Africa's international relations. Yusuf Patel is a South African architect, who practises in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has a Masters in Architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. His research interest lies in the ways architecture was used in torture during the apartheid era. Tony Yeboah is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. Tony is a contributor for the OER, (Open Educational Resources), project and his works have appeared in History in Africa, the Journal of West African History, the Conversation, and Nursing Clio. Laura Routley is Senior Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Politics at Newcastle University, UK. Her books include Negotiating Corruption: NGOs, Governance and Hybridity (2016). Her current research examines prisons in West Africa (Nigeria and Ghana). Kuukuwa Manful is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department at SOAS, University of London. Her research examines the sociopolitics of nation-building, citizenship and modernity in Ghana through a study of school buildings and the building of schools.
Review :
Employing an interdisciplinary approach, the volume reflects diverse methodological approaches and draws on different theoretical traditions in its analyses. The result is an empirically rich collection of cases, underscored by a sophisticated theoretical framework that allows for rich insights into power, agency, resistance and identity.
The essays continually reinforce one another through generous cross-reference, giving the volume an effortless continuity and thematic support.
Architecture and Politics in Africa does offer insights into contemporary issues-like foreign influence or domestic political insecurity-that deserve to be more widely known.
