Understanding Statehood through Architecture: a comparative study of Africa's state buildings

Project Information

ASA

Grant agreement ID: 772070

DOI

10.3030/772070

Project closed

EC signature date 6 February 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 March 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 870 665,00

EU contribution

€ 1 870 665,00

Coordinated by

SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES ROYAL CHARTER
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ASA (Understanding Statehood through Architecture: a comparative study of Africa's state buildings)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project explores how states work in Africa through a study of state buildings.

Most African states are relatively new, having emerged since the ending of colonial rule over the last 70 years. They face common legacies and challenges – colonial heritages, diverse populations and limited capacities – and yet there is huge variety between them.

The project seeks to understand how statehood is established in the continent. In particular, it thinks about authority and representation, domestic and international relationships, and identity and citizenship and the ways these have played out in a variety of ways across the continent.

The project takes a novel approach to exploring these questions, by examining how politics is expressed through state architecture. State buildings – including parliaments, ministries, courts, airports, schools and regional HQs – help express how states symbolise statehood and enact state functions. The project explores their histories, uses, aesthetics and citizens’ perceptions of them to understand how states are thought about and produced in Africa.

The research speaks to important development priorities across the continent, in particular the challenges of democratisation and state consolidation.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project was primarily focused on fieldwork. Despite the travel restrictions created by COVID 19, the team carried out substantial fieldwork in South Africa, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Gallagher); Ethiopia and Nigeria (Daniel); Ghana and Ethiopia (Tomkinson); Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe (Ncube) and Ghana (Manful). Work included archival research, ethnographies of key public buildings, elite interviews, non-elite focus group discussions and the use of pop-up exhibitions to engage broader groups of people.

We held three academic workshops for scholars working across the continent on politics and architecture, in Johannesburg with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2019), in Ghana with the Centre of Africa Studies, University of Ghana (2022) and with SOAS in London (2024) and a workshop for young African architects and urban planners in Accra with the Institute for African Futures (2022). These projects led to the publication of two edited books and a further edited book and two edited journal Special Issues are in progress.

The research team – Prof Julia Gallagher, Dr Daniel Mulugeta, Dr Joanne Tomkinson, Dr Kuukuwa Manful and Dr Innocent Batsani-Ncube – have published their findings in ten peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and two edited book collections. Three monographs from Gallagher, Batsani-Ncube and Manful are under contract.

Findings include:

- how state authority and state-society relations in Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa are configured, with a particular focus on how citizens think about state buildings.
- how popular ideas of pan-African and regional relationships exist in tension with assessments of the performance of the African Union.
- how pan-continental airlines and airports project and help realise the developmental state in Ethiopia and Ghana.
- the ways in which school buildings in Ghana have shaped education and citizenship.
- how Chinese-made parliaments in Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe are changing African-Chinese relationships and attitudes towards parliamentary democracy.

The team has disseminated their work more widely through exhibitions in Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and the UK.

Our two PhD students, Manful and Batsani-Ncube were awarded their PhDs in 2022. All members of the team have gone on to win major post-doctoral grants or permanent academic positions.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The approach of examining statehood through architecture has been fruitful, opening up new ways to examine how statehood is projected and produced through buildings, within relationships between elites and citizens. Each member of the team, working within their own specialised sub-project, has made progress in formulating new ways to conceptualise problems:

• Gallagher has developed a new way to conceptualise the state using aesthetic and art theory. She has developed her ideas based on 60+ focus group discussions with citizens in five African countries, in which they developed critiques about state buildings. The work makes a bold intervention in discussions about state meaning, popular support and development in Africa.
• Daniel used descriptions (elite and popular) of the buildings of the African Union (Addis Ababa) and ECOWAS (Abuja) as an innovative way to explore tensions between ideals of pan-Africanism and regionalism and the realities of intra-Africa relationships and national identities.
• Tomkinson shows how Ethiopia and Ghana are using new airport buildings to express and realise their status as development states. Working on the processes of designing and financing these prestigious buildings, she unearthed substantial local agency in shaping international ideas of these countries' states.
• Manful explored the history of school building in work in Ghana. Her project involved an in-depth study of schools, including their design, existing fabric, and the ways in which they have been and are currently designed to produce citizens in each country. She created an innovative methodology involving school children in projects on the architecture and history of their schools, and made important findings about how schooling shapes class formation in Ghana.
• Batsani-Ncube explored Chinese-built parliaments in Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe, explaining how representation and democracy are produced, and how they are being altered by substantial Chinese engagement.

Kuukuwa Manful's architecture club, Ghana

Buildings being studied, Ghana

ASA team members on fieldwork and at the Johannesburg workshop

Scenes from the South Africa exhibition

Buildings being studied, South Africa

Buildings being studied, Cote d'Ivoire

Delegates at the Johannesburg workshop