A few years ago, David Adjaye received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his outstanding work in architecture.
The formerly colonised know one or two things about empire, mostly negative stuff, but the empire of photographs that Adjaye has created is beautiful and varied.
It spans the whole continent, from Djibouti on the horn of Africa to Senegal in the west, Egypt in the north and South Africa in the south.
His project involved photographing every capital city. The idea was to “document key cities in Africa as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism”.
There are, of course, a few pitfalls inherent in that decision. Some of Africa’s most important cities are not its capitals.
Excluded cities
Vibrant Lagos is not included because in the 1990s Nigeria’s politicians decided to move the capital to Abuja. Johannesburg, the biggest commercial city in Africa, is not included because Pretoria is the seat of government.
The same is true for Malawi, where Lilongwe is chosen over Blantyre. These are omissions Adjaye regrets.
The project, African Metropolitan Architecture, shows a professional bias — an architect’s interest in the city, a fascination with urban landscapes and city edifices, monuments and space.
Pan-African in his upbringing, it’s appropriate that Adjaye undertook a project of this nature.
He was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents and, as his father was a diplomat, he didn’t stay in one city for long. When he and his parents left Africa to settle in the United Kingdom in 1979, he had lived in five African cities, some of them of geopolitical importance — Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Accra and Cairo.
Lingering childhood memories
One imagines that when he went back to these cities, a digital camera in hand, he had lingering childhood memories. Pilfering time from his busy professional schedule, Adjaye captured thousands upon thousands of images over 10 years.
The 44-year-old architect studied at the London South Bank University and the Royal College of Art, one of the world’s top design and art schools.
After graduation, he trained with David Chipperfield Architects and Eduardo Souto de Moura in Oporto (Portugal).
He won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (Riba) first prize bronze medal in 1993 and was nominated for the Stirling Prize (a British prize for excellence in architecture) in 2006. He now has his own practice, Adjaye Associates.
The images Adjaye captured include the low-rise buildings of Banjul (Gambia), rusty and dilapidated, shown side by side with its suburbs, walls freshly painted and gardens well tended.
Pictures of the colonial architecture of Bissau (Guinea) are flanked by a striking sculpture of a man, hands aloft, who has broken free of his chains (a monument firebrand nationalist Amílcar Cabral would have loved had he lived long enough to see Guinea’s independence in 1975).
Ambition and early years of promise
The images of Abidjan show its ambition and its early years of promise — gleaming skyscrapers pierce the sky — and in a rather grimy Sierra Leone there’s a nod to Robert Mugabe, “bravo Mugabe of Zimbabwe” a sign on a hand-made billboard says.
On the opening night of his show at Gallery Momo, Adjaye said that whenever he went to a city he would get into a taxi and tell the driver to take him to every corner of the city. Yet you don’t get the sense that it was a humongous project, no doubt because Gallery Momo is a small, intimate space.
The result of this decade-long journey is a collage of a small selection of photographs, culled from hundreds of images, reminiscent of postcards.
The decorated writer from Trinidad and Tobago, VS Naipaul, infamously found Africa “obscene” and its people “primitive”.
In his new book, The Masque of Africa, he quotes Rian Malan as saying, “One legacy of apartheid is that this is the only country where the economy works and there are solid skyscrapers in the sky. The rest of Africa is such a mess.”
You don’t get that sense from Adjaye’s impressive documentation. He shows the images the politicians want shown on shiny postcards but is self-critical enough to gaze fixedly into Africa’s dark recesses and a lot in between.
African Metropolitan Architecture: A photographic journey by David Adjaye runs until October 25 at Gallery Momo, 52 Seventh Avenue, Parktown North, Johannesburg.