Architects of Liberation: Modernism in West Africa
MoMA
Through January 2, 2027
In Act II of the long-running Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, a group of missionaries, uniformly white American men, declare, “Africans are African, but we are Africa!”
Both critics and cast members have argued that The Book of Mormon renders its African characters as line drawings, reserving the dignity of three dimensions for its white ones. I don’t disagree. But in the show’s limited defense, it does purport to be a satire. A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, however, centers the West in an underproblematized tale of African self-determination—without the same ameliorating irony.
Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa explores the role of architecture in western Africa’s transformation from a collection of colonies to an array of sovereign states. To this end, drawings, photographs, architectural models, and other paraphernalia have been sorted into seven thematic alcoves with pastel-colored walls and titles such as “Networks of Mobilization” and “Landscapes of Education.” Each alcove orbits an epitomizing building, such as the Gare de Bessengué in Douala, Cameroon, or Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. And most feature a basswood model of that building, built by students and recent graduates of The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and commissioned specifically for this exhibition. The exhibition also features four maroon-hued interludes, each dedicated to an individual architect.
MoMA describes Architects of Liberation, organized by Martino Stierli and Ikem Stanley Okoye with Mallory Cohen, as the first major effort to explore modernism in the postcolonial, western African context. Visitors are greeted by jaunty West African music and another ambitious statement on firstness; the exhibition will emphasize “the first generation of professionally trained African-born architects.”
Despite this soundtracked promise of continental talent, an eye test (and a retrospective accounting of the exhibition checklist) tells a story of importation. The sum of the exhibition’s placards reveals that these revelatory contributions to Africa’s postcolonial architecture come from a cohort composed mostly of men from the Global North.
To be clear, MoMA is not responsible for the historic dearth of African architects. It’s not MoMA’s fault that modernism emerged as a multipurpose tool for unifying profoundly heterogeneous populations bound together by Berlin Conference–era borders. Nor that Ghana’s first architecture school was founded in 1957, the same year as Ghana itself. These are just two good reasons, out of several, for these particular objects to have found themselves in The Robert B. Menschel Galleries.
But rather than use these 450-odd objects to tell a more equivocal story, the exhibition suggests a straightforward march towards decolonization. It skirts around the contradiction of newly independent nations having to turn toward the West—and often toward the very countries that colonized them—for the architects with whom to engineer an Africanized identity. It avoids naming the series of unfortunate colonial events that could allow the French-born Armand Salomon to become the “de facto architect of the Cameroonian government.” It mentions the eighty thousand Ghanaians who were displaced by the 1961–65 construction of the Akosombo Dam as a “great cost” of modernization but stops short of platforming their perspectives on their own displacement or their place in the Ghanaian political project.
Instead, the full weight of western Africa’s ambivalent architectural condition makes itself known in obfuscated ways. The interlude for Cheikh Ngom describes him as one of “the very few” Senegalese architects to receive architectural commissions in the country—the wall text notes that French architects typically got preferential treatment over their Senegalese counterparts but doesn’t get into why that was. And when African architects receive attention in this exhibition, their work, more so than their Western peers’, is accompanied by that purgatorial ambiguity called “unrealized.”
The sidelining of Africanization, as experienced by Africans, is made material by a section titled “Identities.” The marquee structure of this portion of the exhibition is the Musée des civilisations noires, a pan-African museum originally commissioned by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. A broad architectural drawing of the Musée’s first floor shows a series of circular pavilions, themselves circling a central courtyard. In the illustration, one might see an island universe, populated by all that Black people are and could be.
But Senghor’s dream went unrealized. And “Identities” is the only section that does not feature a custom basswood miniature of its central building, though it does offer a speculative model of the Musée from the 1970s.
Honestly, the speculative model is more alive than the specially commissioned basswood that can be found elsewhere in the exhibition. For one, the mini Musée, empyrean, has been painted—bronze and various shades of green cut against the section’s taupe walls. And unlike the basswood models, which focus strictly on the buildings themselves, this model includes trees, tiny cars on tiny roads, and even tinier museum patrons.
But unlike the society-rending machinations of colonialism itself, what to display, and where, was well within the MoMA’s control. To refrain from presenting an extant building, in the section about African identity formation, is to intimate that Africans don’t have much to say about themselves. A supposed mutism that’s belied by about 70 years of postcolonial thought and the eventual realization of an alternative Musée in 2018, designed by the Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby Atepa.
The final piece of the exhibition is Kader Attia’s Indépendance Tchao. Standing in a black room is the artist’s reconstruction of Senegal’s Hotel Indépendance, using metallic boxes from the French colonial administration. The last word belongs to an African.
I can pick up what the Algerian French artist is putting down. Decolonization is messy, piecemeal, curvilinear. But the thesis that Attia posits is undercut by the strained sanguinity of all that came before.
If I could respond to sanguinity with optimism, then optimistically, the actual architects of Africa’s still-forthcoming liberation are designing new works at this very moment. What are their names?
Ekemini Ekpo is a writer from the American and Nigerian Souths; she mostly writes about arts, culture, and the built environment.
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