Architecture and Politics in Africa

Front matter

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PART 1: MAKING Global ambitions and national identity in Ethiopia’s airport expansion

JOANNE TOMKINSON AND DAWIT YEKOYESEW

. Building heaven on earth: Political rhetoric and ritual over Ghana’s national cathedral

EMMANUEL K. OFORI-SARPONG

China’s ‘parliament building gift’ to Malawi: Exploring its rationale, tensions and asymmetrical gains

INNOCENT BATSANI-NCUBE

. New homes for a new state: Foreign ideas in Ghana’s public housing programmes

IRENE APPEANING ADDO

Part 2: Living

. Beautiful state/ugly state: Architecture and political authority in Cote d’Ivoire

JULIA GALLAGHER AND YAH ARIANE BERNADETTE N’DJORE

VI

CONTENTS

Colonial legacies in architectures of consumption: The case of Sam Levy’s Village in Harare

TONDERAI KOSCHKE Public spaces? Public goods? Reinventing Nairobi’s public libraries MARIE GIBERT

The role of architecture in South African detention cases during the apartheid era

YUSUF PATEL

Part 3: Imagining

Pan-African imaginations: The African Union headquarters and its popular imagery in Ethiopia and Nigeria DANIEL MULUGETA

. Asantean noumena: The politics and imaginary reconstruction of the Asante Palace, Kumase TONY YEBOAH

. From prison to freedom: Overwriting the past, imagining Nigeria

LAURA ROUTLEY

Afterword: Theorising the politics of unformal(ised) architectures KuuKUWA MANFUL

Bibliography Index

246 270

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP Map of Africa highlighting the countries discussed in this book xiv

FIGURES Exterior of Terminal 2 expansion, Bole International, Ethiopia, 2019 18 Interior of Terminal 2 expansion, Bole International Airport, Ethiopia, 2019 19 Ceremony to lay the foundation stone imported from Israel at Ghana’s national cathedral, 5 March 2020 48 Images of the sources of inspiration mounted on site hoarding: ‘history’, ‘community’, ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’, 2021 49 Board depicting the connection of the Jewish tabernacle to royal umbrellas and the design of the cathedral, 2021 49 Entrance of the Malawi Parliament building in Lilongwe, 2019 58

An experimental swish building for the Forestry Commission at Kibi, built in the 1950s 82

House Type DH 121E, built by Ghana Housing Corporation, 1958 88 House Type 3 (DH 121), built by Ghana National Construction

Corporation, 1958 89 Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix, Yamoussoukro, 2019 102 Cité Administrative, Abidjan, seen from the steps of Cathédrale

Saint-Paul, 2019 103 Palais Présidentiel, Yamoussoukro, 2019 108 Sam Levy’s Village, Harare, 2019 120 Extension to Sam Levy’s Village, Harare, 2019 128

Sam Levy’s Tower, Harare, 2022 130

VII ILLUSTRATIONS

7.1 The McMillan Memorial Library front entrance, Nairobi, 2021 135 7.2 The main room of the Kaloleni Library, renovated 2020, Nairobi,

2021 140 7.3 The main room of the Makadara (or Eastlands) Library,

renovated 2020-21, Nairobi, 2021 141 8.1 Forensic recreation of the architectural layout surrounding the

death of Ahmed Timol, Johannesburg 161 8.2 Forensic recreation of the complicit staircase in the torture of

Salim Essop, Johannesburg 163 8.3 Forensic recreation of the architectural layout surrounding the

torture of Kantilal Naik, Johannesburg 165 8.4 Forensic recreation of the architectural layout surrounding the

torture of Dr Dilshad Jhetam, Johannesburg 167 9.1 The African Union headquarters viewed from a nearby street,

Addis Ababa, 2019 180 9.2 The dome of the African Union Conference Centre, Addis Ababa,

2019 184 10.1 The British-built ‘palace’ for Asante, now a museum, 2019 195 11.1 Main stage, Freedom Park, Lagos, 2019 213 11.2 Pergola cells, Freedom Park, Lagos, 2019 216 11.3 Skeletal cells, Freedom Park, Lagos, 2019 222 11.4 Contemplation, Freedom Park, Lagos, 2019 223 12.1 Drawing of Kumase in the nineteenth century based on historical

accounts and images, 2022 235 12.2 Building Permit Application number 13, 1892 236 12.3 Menzgold Accra Premises, 2021 243

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Irene Appeaning Addo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana and a practising architect in Ghana. She holds a PhD from the University of Ghana. She has a postgraduate degree in Architecture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, and a Master’s degree in Housing and Inner City Revitalisation from the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Rotterdam. Her research focuses on African architecture and urban housing in West Africa.

Innocent Batsani-Necube 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 A frican states and state and non-state actors from China, India and Brazil. He is interested in understanding whether A frica’s relationships with these actors from the Global South are potentially transformative, or again playing out in dependent form.

Daniel Mulugeta is a Lecturer in International Politics of Africa and UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow at SOAS, University of London. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the ethnography of the state in Africa, materiality and regional politics, cutting across the fields of politics, anthropology and sociology. His Future Leaders research focuses on understanding the gap between pan-Africanism as an ideal and pan-A fricanism as a policy tool, in the contexts of security and development in Africa and Black identities in the diaspora.

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.

Julia Gallagher is a Professor of African Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her research builds on a long-standing interest and engagement in

X NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS statehood and international politics in and about Africa. She has published Zimbabwes 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.

Marie Gibert is an independent scholar and secondary school teacher of history and geography, based in Lille, France. She lived and drove through Nairobi’s legendary traffic jams from 2016 to 2021. Her PhD, from SOAS, and post-doctoral research focused on Africa’s international relations.

Tonderai Koschke is a visiting student at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and is completing a Master’s degree in architecture from the Technical University of Munich. She has practised at Boltshauser Architekten in Zürich as well as worked in project management at Architangle publishers in Berlin. Her research interest within these fields is in post-colonial identities.

Kuukuwa Manful is a trained architect and PhD candidate in the Politics Department at SOAS, University of London. Her British Library-funded project has digitised endangered architectural documents produced in Accra from 1904 to 1947. She has Master’s degrees in Architecture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, and African Studies from the University of Oxford, UK. Her current research examines nationbuilding, social class, and modernity through a study of the architecture of schools in Ghana.

Yah Ariane Bernadette N’djoré is a PhD candidate in Communication Science at Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Cocody in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). Her research interest is in the Science of Education and she explores on various themes around violence in education, inclusive education, higher education and Islamic schools. Her collaboration with Julia Gallagher has led her to study the politics of public buildings in Western Africa, especially in Côte d’Ivoire.

Emmanuel K. Ofori-Sarpong is an architect and Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Design (SADe) in Central University, Ghana. He has a Master’s in Architecture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. His current research explores how various ideologies and historical events give shape to large-scale urban developments, civic spaces, cultural buildings and housing.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS XI

Yusuf Patel is a South African architect, who practises in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has two Master’s degrees from the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg (Master’s in Architecture and MA in Design and Theory). He takes up a PhD project in 2022 at Newcastle University (UK) to further his interest in prison architecture.

Laura Routley is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Newcastle University, UK. She is the Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme Trust funded project Afterlives of Colonial Incarceration: African Prisons, architecture and politics which explores the memory politics of former sites of colonial imprisonment in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. The project engages with questions about how the architecture of colonialism continues to mark African cities. These interests emerged out of her research on prisons in West Africa. She has also previously worked on NGOs and corruption.

Joanne Tomkinson is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her PhD thesis in Development Studies from SOAS was a comparative political economy examination of the challenge of late development in the age of neoliberalism in Ethiopia and Vietnam. Her current research explores the role of airport buildings and infrastructure in national development strategies, focusing on Ethiopia and Ghana.

Tony Yeboah is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. His dissertation examines the entangled themes of colonial power, the built environment, and community making in one of the greatest West African capitals, Kumase. 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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book started life in a workshop called ‘The Politics of Architecture in Africa’ held in Johannesburg and organised by the African State Architecture (ASA) project at SOAS, the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS) and the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at the University of Johannesburg in December 2019. We would like to thank everyone who helped organising the workshop, particularly Peter Vale, Bongani Ngqulunga and all the team from JIAS, Lesley Lokko and her team at the GSA, and Sunil Pun, Sadeep Rai and Carolyn Charlton at the ASA project.

Most of the papers received a further outing at an online workshop organised between the ASA project and the British International Studies Association in cooperation with their Africa and International Studies Working Group in September 2020. We thank all the people who came along to listen and the many great comments, questions and challenges they put to us.

We are grateful to Jaqueline Mitchell, who has been a keen supporter of this project for several years now. We thank everyone at James Currey, and the anonymous reviewers who shared their comments and ideas with us.

The workshop and research carried out by the ASA team received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 772070). The ERC is also supporting the open access costs for this book.

AU AUC CBD CCAG CCG CPC-ID CPP DPP EAE EPRDF FGD GCBC GHC GNCC JPB MNA

MRA MCP NGO NPP OAU PMFJ PRAAD

PRC PWD

ABBREVIATIONS

African Union

African Union Commission

Central Business District

Concerned Clergy Association of Ghana

Christian Council of Ghana

Communist Party of China’s International Department Convention People’s Party (Ghana)

Democratic Progressive Party (Malawi)

Ethiopian Airports Enterprise

Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front Focus group discussion

Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference

Ghana Housing Corporation

Ghana National Construction Corporation

Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast

Consortium of three architectural firms, MD Initiative, Norman & Dawbarn and ABC Design Associates (Malawi) Malawi Revenue Authority

Malawi Congress Party

Non-governmental organisation

New Patriotic Party (Ghana)

Organisation of African Unity

People’s Movement for Freedom and Justice (Ghana) Public Records and Archives Administration Department (Ghana)

People’s Republic of China

Public Works Department (Ghana)

ZANU-PF Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front)

TUNISIA rE ERITREA

GUINEA-BISSA\

SEYCHELLES

(8) [E] Countries discussed in the book COMOROS @_MAYQTTE © ST HELENA @ MAURITIUS REUNION @

Map 0 Map of Africa highlighting the countries discussed in this book (Sunil Pun, November 2021).

This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. It is based on research that received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 772070).

Introduction: Buildings are the stuff of politics

DANIEL MULUGETA, JOANNE TOMKINSON AND JULIA GALLAGHER

In 2019, to considerable global fanfare, the new Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, opened the former palace of Emperor Menelik II to the public for the first time. Located in the heart of the capital, Addis Ababa, with sweeping views across the city, the buildings — used by successive Ethiopian regimes since the late nineteenth century — represent some of the most significant centres of political power in recent Ethiopian history. Breaking with centuries’ old traditions of secluding state buildings from popular view, the buildings now lie in a vast public complex called Unity Park alongside examples of indigenous architecture from each of Ethiopia’s nine ethnic regions. The Park is intended to be a symbolic national site that embodies and condenses Ethiopia’s cultural and material diversity. However, from the outset the purpose and official meaning of the Park as a symbol of unity have been contested by alternative narratives, reflecting how architecture and built spaces take on political meanings beyond the expressed intentions of their creators. In particular, the Park is accused of being a foreign-funded political vanity project which represents an oversimplification of the complex history of the country. The site has fuelled wider debates regarding Ethiopian history and politics in relation to where the country has come from, what constitutes its diversity and where it is going.

Such political contestations over the Unity Park underscore how public spaces and buildings function as political texts. The controversy surrounding Unity Park particularly captures how built spaces serve as arenas where national politics and cultural identity are tangibly negotiated across Africa, where buildings are overlaid by complex meanings associated with colonialism, nationalism and globalisation. Maurice Amutabi, for example, describes the powerful political effects of buildings in his account of colonial architecture in Kenya. Enormous buildings erected by the British in Nairobi were designed to ‘civilise’ Africans and held many of them ‘everlastingly . spellbound’, anxious that they might be ‘trespassing’, impressed by a seemingly overwhelming power (Amutabi, 2012: 326).

Colonial architects often set out to use architecture to entrench dramatically unequal power relations, and to reshape African subjectivities in the process. Quoting words attributed to Christopher Wren, colonial architect Herbert Baker, who designed South Africa’s Union Buildings, wrote in 1911 to Prime Minister Jan Smuts: ‘Architecture has its political use: public buildings being the ornament of a country; it establishes a nation, draws people and commerce, makes the people love their native country, which passion is the origin of all great actions in a Commonwealth’ (Baker, quoted in Metcalf, 1989: 193). The Union Buildings have been the heart of the colonial, apartheid and post-1994 regimes.

However, as in Ethiopia, the commissioners and designers of these buildings did not get to exclusively determine their meanings: public opinion and patterns of ordinary usage have also defined them and shaped their perpetual reinvention. The Union Buildings also became the site of popular protest. They embodied the nation, both as a projection of power and an object of dissent. Now they house a democratically elected presidency; but also represent the Women’s March against the pass laws in 1958 and Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration that overturned its colonial rationale. It is the embodiment of a different form of nation, still the place to which people take their political grievances, but also a carrier of a painful history (Gallagher, forthcoming).

In this way, buildings both describe how political regimes wish to be perceived by citizens and the international community (see Vale, 1992) and how they collect and become inscribed with popular descriptions, stories and myths about political power and social relationships. Public buildings are the constant referents in everyday urban life and assume significant roles in the development of national consciousness. Their visibility can provoke vigorous political controversies and their association with particular identities can reinforce or challenge insider/outsider status. They host public ceremonies, political rites and national festivals, serving as the backdrop to the national drama. Sometimes they embody national aspirations of modernity and technological advancement; and at other times, ideas of conservation and tradition. Buildings in Africa, as everywhere else, are thus ‘politics with bricks and mortar’ (Beck, 1998: 115). They constitute political space that is normatively inhabited by politicians and bureaucrats, but also shaped by citizens, who engage with ideas, policies and practices that shape political imagination such as the nation, community and society (Milne, 1981).

The point here is that buildings are the subject of discussions about power, distribution and identity from the moment they are conceived and for as long as they are used — and perhaps even longer, if they survive in popular memory. In this sense, architecture is possibly the most political of all the arts, bringing elite and everyday ideas of politics together. As the Ethiopian example shows, this is not just a colonial story — there are powerful examples of the political uses of monumental architecture in pre- or non-colonial Africa (Hughes, 1997; Biruk, 2020). Post-independence elites have similarly used architecture to articulate and exert post-colonial political power (Elleh, 2002). The dynamics of this architecture-as-politics vary enormously — just as architectural styles do — and they can be studied to explain and expose new facets of the nature of political systems and socio-political relationships in different contexts. It is these dynamics then, those created by these most ubiquitous of material representations of political authority, that this book explores.

Stylistically, Africa’s rich and varied architectural heritage and building traditions reflect the diversity of material life across the length and breadth of the continent (Adjaye, 2012). Builders across the continent have also adopted and transformed architectural ideas and built forms from other cultures, further adding to diverse local tastes, traditions and building practices (Elleh, 1997). Architecture usually requires large capital investment and tends to be commissioned by political and cultural elites, illustrating and shaping wealth distribution and reflecting the socialised construction of ‘taste’. Colonial-era buildings include those in classical European style, such as the Union Buildings, as well as those in the supposedly more locally sensitive tropical modernist style. Post-independence architecture betrays the influences of modernism, as well as pre-colonial architectural aesthetics — all bidding to assert confident new forms of nationhood (Hess, 2006). The continent’s recent building boom has seen a plethora of new foreign-financed public buildings that are dramatically reshaping many African capitals once more (Biruk, 2020). These developments have engaged Africa in long-standing debates about the impacts of globalisation, capitalist expansion and cultural homogenisation on architecture (Sklair, 2017). Hybrid physical forms, weaving together local, national and global influences and power relations, thus lie at the heart of architecture in Africa.

Yet, despite the rich and varied politics to which they speak, buildings in Africa receive scant attention in political science literature. This volume sets out to address this lacuna, offering a multifaceted reflection on the dynamic and co-constitutive relationships between architecture and politics and political institutions. The book is distinctive in seeking to understand the materiality, use and meaning of public buildings, and to use them to begin new debates about political life in Africa. The overarching question that frames our analysis is: what can architecture tell us about politics in Africa today? As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, looking at politics through the optics of architecture opens up many new avenues for research, including on popular perceptions of politics in Africa, the legacies of colonial relations, the spatial practices of governance, the gendering of space, in both pre- and colonial contexts, the role of religious architecture in the service of political power, conceptions of modernity and the politics of identity construction.

A significant point of departure for all of the book’s contributors is their reading of buildings as part of a repertoire of material culture that structures political imaginaries and social relationships. Yet our conceptualisation of the material is different from the classic formulations used in the African politics literature to date. Here the concept of the material tends to be used in relation to the notion of patronage and distributive politics (Bayart, 2009; Schatzberg, 2001; Chabal and Daloz, 1999). It is in part taken to mean the things that politicians dispense (benefits, salaries, jobs) to their followers in exchange for political support (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997). It is also taken to mean the reverse: the things politicians accept (bribes) in exchange for favours. In its classic sense, the material supposedly demonstrates the distinctively African patron-client model of leadership, that is, the reciprocity of eating and feeding and practices of ‘chopping’ and looting public resources or ‘dividing the national cake’ (Isichei, 2004; Schatzberg, 2001). Broadly cast under the catchphrase ‘the politics of the belly’ (Bayart, 2009), in Africa, the material is usually deployed as a metaphor for practices of corruption and given as a cultural explanation of political behaviour.

In contrast, this book moves the concept of the material in discussions of African politics beyond the confines of the politics of patronage, which although important, offers partial insights into the politics of the continent. By fully engaging with the architectural objects and spaces that help to constitute the political world, we uncover a much broader and more complex set of political stories, encompassing issues of ideology, aesthetics and agency that are channelled through and embodied in public buildings. By taking architecture, not resources, as the material matter of politics, the book provides a richer understanding of the array of relationships, ideas and power that constitute political life in Africa.

The material is viewed broadly, conceptualised both in terms of the assemblage of built forms, physical artistic elements and the political contexts that form the intertwined poetics of socio-political life in Africa. The study of architectural materiality involves looking at building forms, designs and layouts; the political processes of commissioning, financing and producing public buildings; as well as controversies over the selection of sites, stylistic preferences, the choice of architects and material elements (Yaneva, 2016). Hence, the contributors apply the concept of the material to a wide variety of themes in different contexts, taking stock of the physicality and the representational significations of architecture. The authors insist that material and value systems need to be conceptualised as one complex and inter-related phenomenon.

By focusing on the relationships between built and socio-political forms, this book builds on three important existing approaches. The first has been to explore how architecture reflects the societies and cultures that produced it (Lawrence and Low, 1990). Within this tradition, scholars have laid bare the representational mechanics through which buildings can be seen as resonant symbols that evidence broader social, cultural and kinship relations, political contexts and cosmic structures. The built space in this sense is conceived as a purveyor of social and political processes (Bourdieu, 1979; Moore, 1986). Meanings are thought to be inscribed in the built space and the task of the scholar is to decipher and decode their underlying social and cultural messages (see Pierre Bourdieu, 1979; Vale, 1992). A second approach draws on the intellectual tradition deriving from Foucault, wherein architecture is viewed as a medium of social control and power. This approach emphasises the manner in which the hegemonic power structures of what Michel Foucault calls disciplining institutions such as hospitals, schools, the military, factories and prisons, is effected through architectural and spatial practices (see Foucault, 1975; Mitchell, 1988; Barnard, 2005). The third and final influence has been to understand buildings as mediators that can ‘transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005: 39). Crucial here is a relational conceptualisation of humans, spaces, objects and events as entangled in constant processes of mutual shaping and reshaping. In so doing, this understanding moves beyond and problematises essential dualisms between agency and structure, human and non-human, knowledge and power, materiality and sociality.

Bringing together these three approaches to the study of architecture illuminates some of the different facets and textured layers of meanings of buildings and how they shape and are shaped by the political system. Buildings as material forms are intertwined with the fabric of social and political life — in Africa as in other contexts — so that their meaning and function are contingent upon their imbrication within the wider relational field in and through which both humans and things are interwoven. Thus, we suggest that balance should be sought between different ways of exploring buildings through their physicality, symbolism and political connotations. This means our approach accounts for symbolic resonances, socio-political practices and material considerations and illustrates the ways in which politics is mediated by concrete, social and sensorial, entanglements (see Ingold, 2013) of different actors and actor-networks (Latour, 2005). We posit that buildings are key symbolic media of social relations and instruments of political power. But they can do more than represent existing social arrangements, cultural and political ideologies, or modes of thought. They can help to create them. Buildings inform thoughts, affect the human, mediating emotions and stimulating imagination and meaning-making. As Martin Heidegger (1971) notes in his seminal study on the relationship between dwelling, living and thinking, buildings are an integral part of human experience and existential meaning-making. We treat buildings as more than an epiphenomenon of social and political processes. Such an approach helps us move away from the patronage literature that compartmentalises socio-political life in Africa into bounded units of material and ideational domains. We suggest that buildings as material allow for a dynamic and multifaceted perspective on political dynamics in Africa.

Constructing the volume: methodological approaches and scope

From inception, this book sought to effect new kinds of dialogue between buildings and the study of politics in Africa. It began life within the interdisciplinary African State Architecture research project based at SOAS University of London, which comprises academics with training in African Studies, politics, architecture, anthropology, sociology and development studies. This has shaped the approach taken to the book which, as it evolved, has been characterised by a keen interest in understanding buildings within the politics which coalesce around, converge within and emanate from their physical forms. In calling for contributions for this volume we were interested in bringing together diverse perspectives on the ‘politics’ of architecture.

The question of how this was to be done was deliberately left open. It was an intention, in deciding to publish an edited volume, to see what fresh perspectives might emerge from a process of active dialogue between our contributors as the chapter drafts developed. Potential contributors were invited to attend a workshop, entitled The Politics of Architecture in Africa, organised with the University of Johannesburg in December 2019. This proved particularly fruitful for sharing and developing ideas across disciplines and across Africa, many of which have become chapters for the book. Indeed, by bringing together a group of predominantly young, early career scholars, the workshop opened dialogues that were at times challenging and searching. Architects were invited to see the bigger politics that their buildings speak to. Political scientists were encouraged to put more of the building within their work. Political economists were entreated to see beyond the flow of resources and goods and examine the symbolism underlying their buildings of study.

To a large extent, the themes presented at that workshop confirmed our instincts that buildings provide a rich vantage point for the study of elite and everyday politics. They ranged from the quotidian such as gas stations and motels, libraries, shopping malls, houses, airports and prisons to grand institutional headquarters, parliaments, palaces, ministerial buildings and cathedrals, and they took in challenges to ‘big-A architecture’ made by citizens,' and discussed in the ways architecture should be taught, studied and produced. But, in addition, they also unsettled our assumptions and posed distinct challenges. Chief among these was how to ensure the connection between the kinds of politics being found through the study of the building and the debates residing within the literature on African political practices, its international relations and post-colonial state building. The fit between the empirical material and these established intellectual traditions was not always neat, and posed challenges for our contributors in terms of situating their buildings within existing academic conversations. Yet, as well as posing challenges for the authors, looking at African politics from the ground up has also exposed the limits of existing conceptual tools, and we have, as a result, encouraged our authors to tie their studies into such moments of departure.

A second issue was more circumstantial and logistical. With the workshop taking place shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic took root, several contributors had their subsequent research and travel plans disrupted, and have had to adapt and innovate with more collaborative methods of data collection, or by replacing them with virtual interviews. The study of buildings does indeed pose particular kinds of challenges here. Their initial encounters with the structures, followed by subsequent triangulation from more distant sources, have thus provided some insights into how academic work might be rethought going forward.

The methods deployed by authors within the volume are diverse. Many authors begin with the elite agendas driving building conception and construction and use elite interviews, archival, document and media analysis to do so. Several others were more interested in how buildings are understood and perceived by those that use or negotiate them, and so adopted interviews and focus groups with ordinary citizens and users of the buildings, as well as photography, participant observation and techniques from auto-ethnography. Other authors had the challenge of studying buildings that do not yet exist — located in the imaginaries of elites and communities rather than actual bricks and mortar. Yet the politics of these buildings is no less real for that, and their study encompasses much the same methods as their already existing counterparts. This diversity of tools to study the same relationship can provide a guide to others researching Africa, as politics in the continent — as demonstrated