Africa Is a Country

David Adjaye's Urban Africa

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

David Adjaye's Urban Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

For a while now I’ve been wanting to post some of the images by celebrated architect David Adjaye‘s to “… photograph and document key cities in Africa as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism.”  It is also part of Adjaye’s “… personal quest … to address the scant knowledge of the built environment of the African continent.” The pictures were displayed at London’s Design Museum till earlier this month as a series of large projections against a backdrop of African beats composed by Adjaye’s brother for the exhibit. David Adjaye visited 46 cities and took 36,000 pictures. Only 3,000 pictures were displayed in the gallery. Some of it gives the impression of holiday snapshots, while others have more to them, like the one above taken in downtown Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, a city once referred to as the “Paris of West Africa.”  Here‘s a link to a mainstream review. Anybody went to see it? Would love to hear your reactions of seeing the photographs in the exhibition. The pics here are only a small sample.

(BTW, Adjaye has been commissioned to design the new Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture planned on the Mall in Washington D.C.).

Asmara, Eritrea

Cairo, Egypt

Gaborone, Botswana

Dakar, Senegal

Nouakchott, Mauritania

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.