Campus universitaires en Afrique (subsaharienne): vers une historiographie critique d'un partrimoine architectural méconnu

Universities constitute a rather recent phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa, even if in both French and British colonies there have existed colleges since the late 19th century. Training at a university level for Africans indeed only emerged on a significant scale after World War Two, when colonial regimes were witnessing a growing international critique from the United Nations and, in response, started to develop various initiatives to emancipate the African population. Providing higher education was one of those elements that were part and parcel of the introduction of a “welfare society” in post-1945 Africa. Much remained to be done after independence, however, and many university campuses in Africa were indeed only built in the period from 1960 till the mid-1970s. University campuses in Africa thus were “icons of development”, testifying of policies of emancipation but often providing European powers an instrument of sustaining their influence in a rapidly evolving continent. In this contribution, we start from the assumption of the German architectural historian Udo Kultermann, author of the first important surveys of modern architecture in Africa, that “it is no accident that the most significant architectural achievements in Africa are to be found among educational buildings”, to discuss to architecture of some of university campuses in sub-Saharan Africa. While acknowledging the architectural quality of projects for universities, designed by architects like Julian Elliott, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Michel Ecochard, Arieh Sharon, Georges Lippsmeier, Renato Severini and others, our aim, however, is not to confirm the hypothesis that Africa constituted a laboratory of modern architecture. Rather, we are interested here in highlighting some of the ideological agendas that underlie the construction of these complexes. Via a series of critical themes, we aim to dissect how architecture and politics were entangled in the building of a university campus in Africa, focusing on: the (spatial) relationship between the university campus and the African city; the specificity of the campus typology in a tropical African climate; the meanings underlying the choice of an architectural language, often a balance between modernism and tradition; and on the particular context of nation building and/or development aid in which university campuses came into being. Broadening the scope beyond that of the individual designer, our analysis thus connects with a strand of recent critical scholarship in architectural history, in particular the literature dealing with the Global South and the emergence of a transnational expertise in planning and building. To that end, we draw not only on architectural journals or monographs, but also on official policy documents and, in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on fieldwork experience. Kaleidoscopic rather than monographic in nature, our survey nevertheless remains a first, rather sketchy outline of a topic that requires further investigation. Bringing to the fore an architecture legacy of the mid-20th century that is still largely ignored, we argue that it is timely to write a critical historiography of the large infrastructures of higher education in Africa. This, we hope, will contribute to developing a specific policy vis-a-vis this particular colonial and postcolonial architectural legacy, without falling into the trap of the “politics of nostalgia”.