African liberation, the establishment of the New York City Landmarks Law, and formation of a corresponding Landmarks Preservation Commission each occurred by 1965. So did initiation of Columbia University’s Historic Preservation Program, which was incorporated with their School of Architecture that year. The nation’s first, the sector was started by architectural historian James Marston Fitch.
Taking the new Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exhibition “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa” as a point of departure, Columbia’s 2026 Fitch Colloquium was called “Preserving Independence.” It examined how today’s preservation practices are working out when it comes to sustaining, protecting, and restoring the built environment of the region of the world’s largest continent that Americans are most familiar with.
The answer, alas, is not much better than what occurs in communities of color in the U.S. The reason? It’s no different from here, either: Insufficient resources and low priority are dedicated to architectural heritage representative of non-whites. When it comes to historic preservation in Harlem or Bedford Stuyvesant, grappling with the economic, architectural, and cultural legacies of decolonization and liberation turns out to be not much different from engaging with and overcoming gentrification and erasure.
Moreover, as I remarked during questions, with a symposium, “which, notwithstanding proximity, has never once addressed Harlem, held by an institution where African Americans have always been fewer than 10% of students enrolled in the historic preservation program, ‘Columbia’ is a part of the problem of this aspect of white supremacy!”
As a student in Columbia’s preservation program from 1987–1989 and almost every year since, I have made it a point to raise this issue.
“Is there a problem preserving buildings that represent Africans, in Africa, but not those erected earlier, by imperial Europeans,” you might ask? I did, of one of the presenters: Stephen Angus Battle, senior regional director, Sub-Saharan Africa, for the World Monument Fund. Battle explained how Africa’s Victorian train stations, Edwardian government buildings, and historic houses for the elite survive in mostly exemplary condition, much as in the American south, just like the wigs barristers (defense lawyers) and judges persist in wearing in most nations formerly colonized by Britain.
World-wide, in any category, saving historic architecture is challenging, but Black landmarks anywhere, be it in Harlem, London, or Cape Town, are far less likely to either attract committed funds or have a multitude of advocates seeking their preservation, than those built by and for whites.
At home, 60 years or so ago, when the landmarks law was launched, buildings like Minton’s Playhouse, the Lenox Lounge, or the Audubon were ignored in favor of row houses and churches built by and for whites. Today, Black heritage continues to be dismissed, but on a more subtle level, by largely overlooking the entire area. Designations as city landmarks or historic districts are greatly constrained both by acting infrequently and with excessive selectivity. It’s therefore assured that the African American Cultural Capital will never know the kind of comprehensive protection accorded to Greenwich Village.
Ironically, symbolic of hopefulness, a seeking of progress, and an assertion of sophistication, African Nation States wholeheartedly adapted modernism. Struggling for self-determination, freedom, and autonomy, they commissioned grandiose masterpieces that were meant to show both the populace and the world something of the boundless potential inherent in 1960’s pan-African fervor. It seems to have mattered little that few local architects and construction workers were proficient in producing these monuments; invariably, they were the work of foreigners, at best nominally in collaboration with an African designer.
How quickly it ended. Disillusionment soon arose with revolutionary “big men” and their enabling, enforcing political parties. Few factored with the ferocity with which western powers fought against their success. Fighting literally for their own and their country’s lives, today’s champions seemed to easily turn into tyrants. Seemingly, they came to offer the same old despotism under a new guise. Ignoring the Black past, sometimes, still woefully reliant on ex-colonial sponsorship, all that and corruption, quite frequently has led to the ruin and abandonment of buildings meant to become architectural wonders of the world. Innovative and forward-looking, even as empty ruins, these structures are moving reminders of dreams of a continent whose future seemed boundless.
A chilling example? Kwame Nkrumah’s International Trade Fair in Accra, Ghana. A hugely ambitious project, it was set in motion during the first decade of independence. Esthetically, but abstractly, it was based on the ancient Pantheon in Rome. Devised in a framework of socialist theory, it brought together Ghanaian architect Vic Adegbite and Polish co-designers Jacek Chyrosz and Stanisław Rymaszewski. The impressive complex was envisaged as a hub of Pan-Africanist prosperity. Seen as a stimulus for Accra’s urbanization, it was aligned with utopian idealism, as opposed to capitalist exploitation. To Nkrumah, this had been the very underpinning of Great Britain’s social Darwinist brutality.
MOMA’s unprecedented show is on view through January 2, 2007. Among 400 objects on view are newly commissioned site-specific photographs and videos, as well as architectural models and archival images. Post-colonial modern masterpieces in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon are represented.
Both midday and in the early evening, Ishanlosen Odiaua (architect and senior social development specialist — WBG), Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann (associate professor and director, Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project), Ikem Okoye (associate professor, African Art and Architecture, University of Delaware), Jeanne Autran-Edorh ( architect with Studio NEiDA), and Prita Meier (professor of art and architectural history and deputy director of the Institute of Fine Arts) discussed specific forsaken modernist landmarks destined for adaptive reuse and rehabilitation.
Just as before, it’s hoped they’ll transcend into shrines to burgeoning self-reliance. Participants particularly lamented the ever-growing vulnerability of native African architecture and building traditions. Typically constructed from less enduring materials, these mud brick and reed buildings, whose design and engineering have pervaded centuries without change, are widely being abandoned in favor of the glass and aluminum towers that give large swaths of urban West Africa, the same unimaginative, undistinguished, indistinguishable, and unlivable appearance as the intersection of Third Avenue at 125th Street.
Meant to commemorate the United States 250th anniversary of independence, the colloquium sought to broaden contemporary reflections and appreciation of “freedom.” Panelist remarks foregrounded the role of architectural preservation in shaping the collective memory of independence in western Africa, even as it ignored all of Upper Manhattan’s landmarks associated with America’s founding and its economy based on enslavement.
Acknowledging how pilgrimages to well-maintained slave forts lend ever-greater growth of tourism from African Americans, we were introduced to one fortress rehabilitation, but foremost, the day was devoted to celebrating the first major museum exhibition to examine the role of architecture in shaping West Africa’s historic post-independence ascendancy. Under-recognized modern movement architectural works from across the region present new calls to action. Concurrently, new contributions by West African preservationists help to diversify and enrich debates about heritage, memory, adaptive reuse, and the preservation of architecture supporting a lifestyle imported from the so-called “First World.”
White supremacy prefigures both places — the white west and West Africa. Did this year’s Fitch Colloquium solve the dilemma of reconciling national identity, political aspiration, and cultural self-determination? No.
It seems like only yesterday that Black American lives were said to matter so widely, by so many. Yet, architect Frances Kere, from Burkina Faso, must have mattered more. Trained in Germany, Kere is a brilliant architect. In fact, he is so talented that in 2022, he won the Pritzker Prize, the world’s most prestigious award for recognizing excellence among architects in current practice.
Fine: Notwithstanding African Americans having so great a head start working as designers, Kere became the first Black architect to be so honored. A contest considering who suffers more is certainly futile for people who, together, are world champion targets of oppression, but remember how David Adjaye hijacked the job to design the African American Museum of History and Culture after Max Bond died: He won out over a score of other great Harlem architects, to design the new Studio Museum?
Just what is the exotic allure that still seems to make whites take every opportunity to celebrate Africans over African Americans? The answer is that this is but another measure of the depths of disdain white supremacists feel for Black Americans.
At the Fitch Colloquium, apart from invited Africans, one — speaking French — presented via a live transmission. In an exceedingly difficult-to-enter Columbia, there were no colleagues from interested parties at CCNY, Bronx Community, or Brooklyn Colleges (with so many more Black students and faculty members) to engage Jorge Otero-Pailos, who directs the School of Architecture Planning and Preservation’s preservation program.
It was, however, a day that included more Blacks than ever before. Dare we live in hope for more next year?
