What is it about?
This paper delves into the development of architectural education in East Africa—current-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—and the underlying socio-cultural, economic, and political factors that contributed to this during the latter half of the twentieth century. This paper examines the origins of architectural education in East Africa, continuing to discuss the key factors that have influenced developments in education and practice over the decades. The paper concludes with a discussion of the emergence of winds of change emerging from practice, a shift in the role of architecture in addressing the “African condition” and in so doing may influence the direction of architectural education. The paper is developed as a broad historical investigation, acknowledging the lack of readily accessible documentation across the region, making use of creative ways of gathering material, and constructing evidence from often fragmented knowledge sources.
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Why is it important?
The paper sheds light on the political economy of architecture education in East Africa, detailing its links to geopolitics, the logic of foreign funding and its legacy. It captures some of the challenges architecture education continues to face and touches on efforts to redress this.
Perspectives
This article allowed me to delve into the hidden histories of architectural education in sub-Saharan Africa. Uncovering these histories is an important part of the developing story of architecture in the region, a story I am privileged to bring to a wider audience.
Dr Mark Olweny
University of Lincoln
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Foreign and the Local in Architectural Education in Late Colonial and Post-Independence East Africa, ABE Journal, December 2023, OpenEdition,
DOI: 10.4000/abe.15314.
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