The structure of this interview will be in three parts. We will start with an introduction to some of your main ideas, particularly as articulated in your book Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa. Then we will focus on how these ideas affect our understanding of architecture, and finally we will explore their repercussions for the writing of architectural history.

PART 1

1Kenny Cupers
I had initially asked you to be part of the conference that led up to this double theme issue of ABE Journal because your work is particularly powerful in its call to change the way we write the history — including the architectural history — of development. Drawing on a vast intellectual repository of ideas, you give us a sense of what needs to be done, and what kind of thinking and doing is necessary to decolonize development. To start with that call to change, could you explain to us what you mean by the “cognitive empire of development”? How do you characterize development and its history?

3I thought that the concept links very well with the complex debates on development. The first problem therein is determining the genealogy of the idea of development. Where does it come from? From the perspective of the cognitive empire, the idea therefore is that the mainstream idea of development actually emerged from the very unfolding of modernity, which took the form of the ways of knowing peculiar to Europe, and later North America. These ways of knowing were imposed across the world, accompanying the empire’s expansion. The impression was created that anything outside Europe is empty, devoid of ideas and even people. In short, empty lands are synonymous with an emptiness of ideas, knowledge, and expertise. This conception is the colonizer’s model of the world, whereby everything outside of Europe is empty. Africa emerged as a dark continent: containing darkness, and nothing more. That type of thinking means that the conceptions of development come from a single geographic space of the world: Europe, and later North America. Part of the baggage of the idea of enlightenment — linear thinking — is a view of development as salvation, as a civilizing mission, as progress, emancipation, and modernization. In other words, you look at other people, particularly those people of what is today called “the Global South,” as people who are desperate for outside help. Hence the introduction of ideas from other parts of the world into their space. You therefore don’t consider that these are human beings like yourself — that they have their own concept of self-improvement, that they have their own knowledges, that they have their own visions and utopias of the world. Instead, you run roughshod over all that and say it is emptiness. And then you impose a particular conception of development. It is from that perspective that you then develop concepts like “developed” and “developing,” or “developed” and “underdeveloped” in relation to parts of the world, holding Europe up as the goal to be reached. Europe becomes a beacon on a mountaintop, and everyone needs to be racing towards it on the same linear trajectory. Therefore, if you go to Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the Caribbean, and you don’t find anything similar to Europe, it means they are primitive. They are backward, and need to be guided by Europe and North America. That is where I find the concept of the cognitive empire very useful, in the sense that once you do that, you are actually invading these spaces and imposing particular ways of knowing, imposing a particular world view and particular modes of world sensing, and using that to make a judgement that they are backward and that they are primitive.

4That takes us to another important aspect of the cognitive empire and the concept of development: the concept of the colonization of time itself. This form of imperialism presents the other parts of the world as being primitive before modern. They are confined in that primitivity — they are living in the past, they are archaic. Then you claim modernity is for Europe and North America, parts of the world that are therefore ahead in time, with respect to the backward parts. To me, looking at debates on development in that light exposes their deepest flaws.

5Kenny Cupers
It’s clear from what you’ve said that development is historically linked to Europe’s colonial position in the world. In your opinion, did anything change in the second half of the twentieth century, and if so, what was it? I’m asking this because for a long time — although I think that may be changing — historians — have seen the historical period of decolonization, or rather of formal independence, as a turning point. You had colonial rule and then this new moment of nation-building, which became a movement not only of asserting sovereignty and identity, but also one of “catching up,” of development. This type of thinking fostered the growth of a “development industry” that continues to shape international relations to this day. What exactly changed and what stayed the same, or how do you see this moment in history?

6Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
I will present two broad arguments. The first argument is that perhaps we need to revisit the idea of a “rupture” between the empire and the rise of the modern nation state. I think there are more continuities than discontinuities in the shift from empire to the modern nation state, celebrated as decolonization. In 1919, when Woodrow Wilson comes to the Versailles Settlement with 14 points and the fourteenth point is all about self-determination, this self-determination is imposed and driven by the United States. If you look at the 1941 Atlantic Charter, again it is the US that pushes the question of self-determination. And if you look at the Charter of the United Nations, it promotes that same idea. I think the question is: did the US want decolonization? I don’t think so. The issue was to dismantle the empires because the empires had a monopoly over trade, and capital now was concentrated across the Atlantic. The goal of the US was to allow this capital to flow across the world more easily, unincumbered by the empires. Clearly, this argument is often lost when people think about decolonization as if it was a good thing. But I see the logics of capitalism, the logics of the rise of another empire — the US empire — remain, even after 1945. That is one argument.

7The second argument is that the idea of a rupture goes along with a teleology, in which the end result of decolonization is the attainment of nation-state status. I think that a major problem is that decolonization processes have been hijacked by modernists, like the nationalists themselves, whether they are African or Asian, Latin American or Caribbean. If we look at them that way, then we won’t be surprised that they embrace the idea of development. After 1945, if you look at the debates at the United Nations, there is the attempt to advance the idea that we need to develop like you, that we have to catch up as soon as possible, that to be decolonized is an opportunity to catch up with North America, with Europe. In that way, you will find nationalist leaders from the recently formed “postcolonial” states pushing within the the United Nations for development to be enshrined as a human right. In other words, instead of seeing a “rupture” or turning point, you see a continuation of this idea that there is something called “development.” That there is indeed a reality that because of colonialism, development was arrested in the Global South, and that with decolonization, we de-arrest it, and therefore it gives us the opportunity to develop. If you see it that way, therefore, you can say that it is embraced even by those who are saying that they were fighting against colonialism and against the empire.

8I find that to be very interesting for the discussion on development. Leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and almost all of them, they didn’t actually question the idea of “development” in the true sense of the word. At best, they queried the mechanics by which development would be achieved. What is very interesting for our debate today is that they said: now that the physical empire has withdrawn, why don’t you also deal with the asymmetrical power relations that enable Europe and North America to develop and the Global South to undergo under development? They push that to the extent that they come up with the demand for a New International Economic Order, in that there is a need for a New International Economic Order that is consonant with the development of the Global South. Within that you will find that they really say, the former empires have a responsibility to assist, in the Truman spirit, with the development of the Global South.

9At the same time there are nuances which we need to bring in. While they embrace development, you will find that Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung in 1955. There they come up with another vision of development whereby they say, instead of allying with either the Soviet-led Eastern bloc, or the US-led Western bloc, they want to pursue decolonization. To them, “development” is not a gift from outside, development is supposed to be predicated on self-reliance. In other words, if you remove the barriers, the structural and systemic barriers, we will develop ourselves. I think Tanzania under Julius Nyerere became a very good example of an attempt to do what we call auto-centric development. The Arusha Declaration of 1967 concretely becomes this vision. Whether it succeeded is something else, but it is the vision that captures the attempt to develop from below and from inside.

10Kenny Cupers
On that note of self-reliance, I wonder if you could compare the Tanzanian experience to the Kenyan one. In contrast with Tanzania, Kenya was quickly decried as one of the more explicitly neo-colonial regimes on the continent after its formal independence from Britain in 1963. At the same time, the Kenyan government also established a policy of harambee, a kind of self-reliant development. How do you assess or start comparing these two different trajectories of development?

11Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
This is an important question because different African countries, depending on the ideological orientation of the leadership, had different articulations of the path to development. Kenya is one of the countries that did not condemn the capitalist path of development under the founding father Jomo Kenyatta. They thought it was possible in an independent state to develop along the capitalist lines. Whereas Tanzania at the time was promoting African Socialism, meaning that we need to redefine, to make those who work the land the agents of development and we need also to start with rural development before we go to industrial development. But in Kenya, I think, they did not do that. They really went for industries and all these other Western-oriented forms of development. You can also bring in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) versus Ghana, in the sense that Côte d’Ivoire, like Kenya, never condemned capitalism as a path to development whereas Nkrumah in Ghana, was trying scientific socialism. The interesting part here is that Nkrumah and Houphouët-Boigny, the founding leader of Côte d’Ivoire, were actually competing. Nkrumah was saying “In ten years’ time, Ghana will be far ahead of Côte d’Ivoire.” And Houphouët-Boigny was saying “No, using the capitalist path, we will be far ahead of Ghana.”

12The issue is that all this is happening within the context of the Cold War. I think that we need not to forget that, because the context of the Cold War had its own dimensions in terms of which bloc you belonged to. If you were like Nkrumah trying to push Pan-Africanism, you are also trying to push scientific socialism. There were many brakes put on whichever initiatives you took, and Nkrumah ended up being removed from power in 1966. We don’t know how these contests between Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana would have panned out if Nkrumah had not been ousted. What I can argue is that up to today, Kenya seems to have fared better than Tanzania in terms of infrastructure and the good part of it was perhaps that it was not anti-systemic. If you are not anti-systemic, you are part of the system, you accept the system. Nobody punishes you. But if you try to be anti-systemic and come up with something new, the system punishes you. We can see that in many places.

13Kenny Cupers
Would it be right then to say that decolonizing development is impossible without anti-capitalism?

14Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
We have reached a moment whereby those who pursued the capitalist path and those who pursued the African socialist path, or another path — all of them in the Global South — have not attained “development.” It is a moment to reflect and say: then what is the problem? This is where, when I wrote my book on Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa, I began to think about these three issues. Decolonization, development, and knowledge. What are the links among these three issues? My argument is that, perhaps it would be important to really revisit the epistemic base of the imagination of development. If you imagine it from a Eurocentric, Western-centric point of view in a country like Tanzania where there were no workers and the bulk of the people were farmers, it could not work. If you also take into account history and culture, it then brings the question that development needs to be predicated on popular forces. It can’t be just an elitist project of just a few people who are in charge of the state, and they can’t pull through the workers and the peasants in this wagon which they call development. How do you bring the peasants and the workers into this if it is an elite class, a Westernized class, which is in charge of this state, and which is just copying, mimicking the West, without the means to achieve prosperity?

15Perhaps because of my historical background, I try to think: let’s give all societies the benefit that all of them, from time immemorial, were able to self-improve over time. If you look at Africa you can go back to their domestication of animals and plants, you can go back to their shifting from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. It means that, using their own cosmology, within their own context, they were always able to self-improve. Colonialism’s problem is that it actually erases all that and says there is nothing, and then brings in development as driven from outside. I think the issue is to reconnect with the self-improvement from inside, whereby it is the imperative of the people and the challenges they face that make them innovate, to adopt or to invent technology. The big civilization in the Nile River which led to the rise of Egypt as the centre of civilizations, the big civilization in Timbuktu in Mali, in Songhai, were based on the local technologies, the local knowledges and the local people thinking for themselves, to the extent that it produced the earliest universities in the world by bringing in the Islamic knowledges and the African knowledges together for the progress of the people. That was not imposed from outside. The major problem is this issue of imposing it from outside. To me, I find that is where the problem might be.

16Kenny Cupers
To wrap up this first part of the interview, if we look back historically, what would you say are the historically more successful attempts and initiatives to decolonize development?

17Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
I am thinking more from Africa than from anywhere else because this is where my locus of enunciation is launched. It is a depressing reality in the sense that even those who tried to say “no, let us not be anti-systemic, let us conform, let us follow the capitalist path,” reaped outcomes similar to those who were anti-systemic. While they did not become prime targets of destabilization like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) under Patrice Lumumba, they did not develop as expected. For example, in Kenya and in Nigeria I think there was not too much experimentation with other ideas but look at where they are now. Ethiopia, they say, was never colonized, it modernized and followed the Western model. Look where it is now. You can’t say that maybe Nyerere’s African socialism was the problem. What about those who followed the capitalist path? This takes us to the concept of uneven development, elaborated by Samir Amin. Amin posits a structural problem; while some countries develop, others undergo underdevelopment. André Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and others also pushed this thesis, and to me it still makes sense.

18When it comes to the time when the empires were withdrawing, you will see that they withdrew physically but they were not prepared to withdraw commercially. You will find that they devised methods of remaining there without being physically present. They devised technologies to maintain control such as the CFA Franc in the French ex-colonies of West and Central Africa. You can see it in the Commonwealth. There were attempts to rally the former colonies together again behind the previous colonial power. The purpose was not just the affinity of history, it was also the economic connections. It is within that context that Kwame Nkrumah developed the concept of neo-colonialism in 1965. Remember it was Nkrumah who said “Seek ye the political kingdom, all other things will be added unto you.” However, by 1965, he was actually revisiting that and saying, “Now I realize you can get the political kingdom without really getting economic freedom.” And hence he produces this concept of neo-colonialism whereby he says he has seen a country that is politically independent from the colonial power but still economically dependent on it.

19If you look at that, then you will begin to understand what Robert Gildea terms the rise of the financial republic after 1945. When the World Bank comes in, when the IMF comes in, when the World Trade Organization comes in, they really constitute themselves into a financial republic, and they use other means, particularly debt, to still control the economies of the Global South. This is why Gildea uses the concept of empires of the mind. Now it is not about physically controlling the people, it is really about controlling the minds. Then you produce what we will call a dependent subject or a dependent subjectivity, which impacts people up to today. For instance, when the president is elected in Kenya, the first thing he will think about is: how do we bring investment from Europe? Not how do we mobilize the local social capital, cultural capital, political capital, and economic capital for development. Why look outside? Isn’t that merely a reproduction of the Truman version of development? In my opinion, the concept persists, and we need to navigate more carefully. It looks like we are still hostage to what I have called the cognitive empire. There is some control somewhere. It might not be correct to call it cognitive empire, but so far that is the concept which I think names this control of the minds to produce dependent people.

20I want to end by saying, Fanon had seen it better than all others when he asked, “What is decolonization?” He says that if we are indeed decolonized, it means we will be reborn as craftsmen and craftswomen. In other words, the restoration of the genius of making things for ourselves. The Global South seems to be running short on their ability to do things for themselves. This has opened the doors for what we call aid. People then depend on aid from somewhere throughout — for food, for everything. But all this cannot be explained by saying maybe these people are incapable or not. It must be explained in terms of the economy, which was rolled out from the time of modernity.

21For West Africa, we have the peasant trade economies in which they don’t take the land like what they did in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, and other places. What they do is they change the mode of production from producing food to producing cash crops. Once you do that, then you lose that skill of producing food for yourself because the idea is: “don’t worry about producing food, produce cash crops, sell to use at cost, get the money, and then you buy the food from the shops.” That is the condition at the moment throughout Africa, and that has a historical basis. It’s not really that people voluntarily abandoned the modes of producing food for themselves. They were forced to do it.

22Kenny Cupers
The enduring structures of dependency through foreign aid, which you just mentioned, may also be linked to what you call the “developmental subject.” What do you mean by this? How can we understand the impact of development on subjectivity?

23Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
That is an important question to me because that’s where I thought about the modern people of today and how they have been produced by the systems and the structures and the institutions. I think the modern subjects of today in Southern Africa, even those who went to the university, they don’t produce anything. What they do is accumulate certificates, degrees, and diplomas, and then they look for employment. They do that within a context in which the means of production are not in their hands. Even after the so-called decolonization. I often hear people saying, “Africa is a rich continent.” Of course, this is like saying I’m rich because I live next door to a big house, which is owned by somebody else. The mines, the resources that are here on the continent are rich, but who owns them? That is the question. Go to the DRC, one of the poorest parts of the world, with all its mineral wealth. The question is, but who owns them? They are in the DRC, but are they of the DRC in terms of ownership? This is where the major problem is. Therefore, the subjectivity which emerges is of people who sit next to minerals, next to all these resources, but the resources don’t belong to them — they don’t own them. That’s one.

24Two, it is a subjectivity whereby you want to depend on gifts from somewhere which comes in terms of aid. Every time you look for gifts from Europe and North America, that actually creates what we call a dependent subject. In this context, you’ll find that for this dependent subject, the issue is that when we have an election, we are voting for who will be a better beggar than this one so that we eat. This then creates again a consumerist subject, but one who does not produce what they consume.

25There are a number of levels in which we can engage this question of a developmental subject. I think it was Ali Mazrui who said, one of the major problems about capitalism in Africa is that it imposed capitalist appetites and tastes without the know-how to produce whatever we are consuming. He went on to argue that because of how we are evolving in modernity, even if we know its problems, it is very hard to break out and move outside the modern moment. So much so that you will find that even the socialist option is a modernist option, just like the capitalist option. There is nothing African about it in the true sense of the word. The options are within a framework which is already set, and it is very hard, really, to come up with something that you can say is authentically African, even in terms of the Nyerere experiment with all African socialist ambitions. It was a modernistic project of trying to unite people so that they produce their finance to do that. But what is the difference between what Stalin was trying to do and what others were trying to do? That is where the cognitive empire become really scary, as if we were captured within a web that is inescapable, because it encompasses everything, every option.

PART 2

26Kenny Cupers
Thank you. These ideas set the scene perfectly for the second part of the interview. Now that we have a critical perspective on development, let’s discuss architecture. It is a particular form of expertise and a mode of practice, but it is also a profession and an academic field. Architecture has played a significant role in the development industry or the foreign aid economy, as per the framing of this journal issue. In that sense, architecture is in multiple ways witness to the power relations and problems that you’ve just outlined. My question is based on the following. Many architects, especially from a European perspective, have thought about their social role and involvement as part of a longer tradition of contributing to the “public good.” By building schools or hospitals, for example, architects present their profession as primarily engaged with assisting in human improvement and humanitarian causes. This gives us a rosy, optimistic picture of what architecture is or does, contrasting significantly with what you’ve just outlined. Could you speak a little bit to those two different understandings of architecture? One being architecture’s good intentions and the other being the structural injustices in which it has participated, rather actively I would say.

27Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Let me introduce another take on architecture, perhaps broaden the canvas. The architecture of the world itself, going back to cartography, mapping, and the planning of the world itself, is in tandem with the dictates of modernity, which gives us what James Blaut has termed the “colonizer’s model of the world.” Within that, of course, there is the rhetoric of emancipation, salvation, and progress as positive. The idea that we are doing all this, reordering the world, for the benefit of everyone. However, at the end of the day, one of the issues which I think those in the history of architecture need to understand, is that certain invisible architectural achievements, which I will try to map out, still create a problem for us. One of them is the social pyramid created out of modernity. This social pyramid, first of all, socially classifies humanity and then sets up a hierarchy based on races. You create this social pyramidal structure in which those with the lighter skins are on the top of the pyramid. Brown, yellow, black, they are below in that architecture, if I can put it like that, that structure which is created. If we don’t understand that, all of the things which we are talking about today won’t make sense because that is an invisible social pyramid which is really deliberately created. If you are a sociologist, you might say, no, the pyramid is right: it represents the social order. But from a decolonial point of view, the social order is a powerful concept. Of course, it brings colonial order, but at the end of the day it also gives the colonialist a social pyramid that enables him to say how particular peoples are subjected to particular forms of power.

28Kenny Cupers
That response goes well with my next question because the conference, which is the reason why we are speaking in the first place, frames architectural involvement in development as a matter of knowledge or expertise. Architects have successfully portrayed themselves as experts, not just as liberal professionals selling their services on the market, or artists who provide images of a different or better world, but as technical experts in the process of development. They are people who have technical knowledge that “ordinary people” lack. I would argue that architectural historians have also adopted this stance, somewhat uncritically, thereby validating the figure of the architect in a particular way. I wonder if you can relate this understanding of architecture as expert knowledge to the social pyramid structure you just discussed.

29Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
The social pyramid I have described embodies the coloniality of being, as articulated by Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, on which I have elaborated. The coloniality of being human. Being human, being colonized itself, redefined, hierarchized, racially hierarchized and gendered. All that has implications for knowledge in the sense that those who are at the apex of the social pyramid claim full humanity; that is, they also claim to be the repositories of knowledge and to hold a monopoly on expert knowledge. Those who are brown, yellow and so on, are subhuman and their knowledge is suspect. The idea about those who are pushed to the lower rungs of the ladder, who are enslaved, is that they have no knowledge at all. The idea about those who were subjected to genocide is that they simply were not human beings and nothing happened. Perhaps those who were enslaved might be granted some superstitious knowledge, primitive knowledge. But the idea about those who are physically killed is that they are not human beings. Therefore, they have no knowledge.

30This links very well with the idea of experts. In this pyramid, where do experts come from? This is where, to me, there is a link between the coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge, because without understanding this social classification and the racial hierarchization, you won’t understand who the experts are and are not. The graduated human ontological density is linked to the knowledge attributed to you. This is why I find that the idea of experts is problematic in itself. Where are the experts from? And where do they practise their expertise? When they travel to practice their expertise, do they take other forms of knowledge into account? There might be other experts who are not certified experts in the strict sense, but who come from another knowledge where there are no certificates. It is nevertheless still knowledge. This applies even to us now, as intellectuals who are produced as experts on these issues of decoloniality and all that, because we come from the Westernized university which certificates, legitimates and gives you authority to speak. I find that every time we do decolonial work we are asked those questions. If, Sabelo, you speak like this, you speak like an expert, but who gave you the right to speak on whose behalf? You see this question hits us every time. To say you are speaking like this, you are speaking as an expert, but on whose behalf? Who are you speaking about and who gave you the authority to do that?

31A question I weave into all three of these frameworks, of decolonization, development, and knowledge, is to ask which of these three is the primary one. I think, in Walter Mignolo’s terms, epistemology frames ontology, or knowledge frames reality. If we agree on that, then it takes us to the politics of knowledge. Whose knowledge matters? And whose knowledge produces an expert? And whose knowledge is not counted at all? I think in the history of architecture, we need to go back and perhaps develop a decolonial understanding of architecture history. When I was going back to the issue of the social pyramid, I was trying really to formulate perhaps a decolonial understanding of architectural history.

32Kenny Cupers
Your argument makes me think about the role of African universities in the immediate post-independence period. For example, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, was one of the most prestigious universities on the continent, and one that also had well-known programs in architecture, engineering, and planning. There was much exchange between European experts (both Western and Eastern) and African architects and other technical experts in development, promoted by Nkrumah to serve the causes of nation building and Pan-Africanism. Can you speak to this ambiguity? On the one hand there’s this call for technical expertise which suggests a continued reliance on Europeans and Americans, and on the other hand the substantial involvement of African experts in transnational networks of knowledge production. How do you understand this particular history of traveling and non-traveling experts? I’m asking because architectural historians tend to focus on such figures and the institutions they move in and through in order to craft less colonialist narratives of the history of development, as they foreground the role of African actors in the process of development.

33Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
The issue is not to sever Africa from the rest of the world, cutting it off from the world of knowledge. It is really to say, can we meet and perhaps produce what Boaventura terms “ecologies of knowledges”? A person like Kwame Nkrumah was of course a modern Western subject. He actually believed in the project of modernity. He might have taken the socialist-scientific, the Marxist-scientific approach, but it was still a modern, Western project. It is not surprising that he thought of bringing experts from Europe to meet the experts from Africa in the hope that they would work together, and enable Ghana’s national project to develop. But Nkrumah was also pushing for the Africanist part of it. He pushed for the establishment of the Institute of African Studies. At the opening of the Institute of African Studies, his speech was about the African genius. In other words, he was agreeing that colonialism arrested the African genius and that the duty of decolonialization is to free and enable this genius. When in 1964 he opened the First International Congress of Africanists in Ghana, his speech was about the African renaissance. Nkrumah was not hostile to Western knowledge per se, but he was saying there is also knowledge from Africa, and these two need to be brought together for the development of Africa. It is said that he always kept a portrait of Edward Wilmot Blyden on the wall of his office. Blyden believed in an African “personality” and, in 1887, produced the book Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Blyden was talking about how to synthesize the European Christian tradition, the Islamic tradition, and the African tradition so that together, they produce a modern African. Then, in 1964, Nkrumah introduced the concept of Consciencism. Writing about consciousness, he picks up where Blyden left off, saying that the modern African, the capable modern African, will be a product of three traditions: the Western European, the Islamic, and the African. That is also picked up in 1986 by Ali Mazrui in The Africans: A Triple Heritage.

34While perhaps Boaventura gives us the concept of ecologies of knowledges, this synthetic blending of knowledges has always been there in African thought if I trace it from Ghana. It has always been there, this idea that, however painful these processes have been, they are now a part of us, and we need to produce the best out of them. I think this is what Nkrumah believed to be the best way to go, rather than throwing out European and Islamic thought, because they are un-African.

35That takes me to a commentary about the products of the universities in the sense that you will find that even today, you will find people who think like me, who think about decolonization, and you will find others who believe in the modernist version of knowledge, who think that there are standards to be followed. And then there are still others who are very angry about everything, and they adopt what we call Afrocentrism, to the extent that Africa has its own ways of doing things and we need to go back to doing that. The danger is that then you degenerate into nativism, ghettoization and other problems. You will find intellectuals produced by universities who think along these lines.

36Kenny Cupers
This brings me to questions of indigeneity in architecture. There is a kind of colonial difference that structures architectural historiography, a distinction between architecture, as the authored product of professionals recognized as architects, and what was long called “vernacular” buildings, constructed by “ordinary people.” Often these people are categorized as ethnic others. This is therefore not only a distinction but also a hierarchy, which probably has a lot to do with the social pyramid that you’ve just outlined. This pyramid of humanity, you could argue, still persists today in architectural and planning education, if you think about how the contemporary building cultures of the urban poor are generally relegated to the status of a technical problem despite their massive importance in cultures of human dwelling globally. How can we develop other ways to understand common home-building practices in the majority world, whether they are part of rural or urban cultures of invention, tradition, and adaptation?

37Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
The problem is that regardless of whether somebody is in an informal or a formal settlement, modernism still determines what they build. It can be a poor version of the modern house, but everyone seems to be mimicking the modern house, modern structures, and modern planning. In informal settlements, the materials used are what distinguishes the dwelling as informal. But basically, the model is that of the formal dwelling, partitioned into rooms, with a bedroom here and a kitchen there. The modernist conception of the dwelling is still making the rules: the architecture is merely limited by the resources available to the builders. These informal settlements differ significantly from those in rural settings. Outside the cities, dwelling architecture is still informed by indigenous knowledge — I don’t like that term, but let us use it: indigenous knowledge system. Where you still have rondavels, with thatch, and doors that face a particular direction. This architecture is informed by another knowledge, one which is receding, and is not taught in the university. It brings us back to your question about the universities, because the universities don’t teach any other mode of planning except the Western one. This bias then percolates to the people who create informal settlements. There are many young people who think the city is an attractive space, but they are not accommodated housing-wise. They move away from the rural areas, to be nearer to the city. What attracts them are the lights and what the city promises, but then they create an informal settlement around the city. When they create these informal settlements, they mimic the Sandton of Johannesburg. They mimic that, but with poor resources. I don’t think there is any epistemic basis which is very different from the modernist one that informs the way the informal settlements are structured. The only difference maybe, is that there is still a high level of commonality in an informal settlement compared to the suburbs. There is a lot of communal life, so they bring the rural communal life closer to the city. Some people call this phenomenon “the ruralization of the urban.”

38This is where modernity is a difficult thing to escape, because whether you are in the rural or the urban, you are inside. I think it was Enrique Dussel who says there is no outside — you can’t think about the outside. And Mignolo says, you have the potential to think from the border. In this sense, the informal settlements exist like a border. Mignolo is thinking epistemologically and is talking about border gnosis — the knowledges that develop at the border, that are not really thinking from the center. That’s the only way you can think about it. You can’t say they are either outside modernity or they are inside, they think from the inside. It doesn’t leave anything outside, but it can push you to a border to exist.

39Moreover, the rural areas are less rural than they used to be. In Zimbabwe, there was the term “reserves.” That meant that the rural areas are reserves of cheap labor. In other words, these areas are still defined from the center as reserves. They are not really self-defining so to speak. All of the reserves have long roads, they are not tarred roads, but they are roads. That was the colonial logic of easily collecting tax from them, so they put them in lines of linear settlements. It’s no longer the precolonial circular settlement. Even the rural is not rural in the true sense of the word.

PART 3

40Kenny Cupers
That brings us to the last part of our interview. Let me ask you to consider how your work challenges architectural historians who are currently writing the history of development. I have questions about the themes of subjectivity, temporality, and engagement as they relate to the writing of architectural history. To begin with subjectivity, you talked about the developmental subject as a partly or fully dehumanized subject. How or from what subjective or embodied perspectives can or should the history of development, the architectural history of development, be written?

41Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Firstly, on the level of subjectivity, we should be clear that modernity has created a people to be developed. A people who are not designers themselves. People who marvel at what is designed for them. This speaks to the question of agency. I spoke about it in terms of Fanon speaking about craftswomen and craftsmen, that if we are fully decolonized, we will regain our genius, the ability to do things for ourselves. I think we have not reached that level. Even the universities don’t seem to be enabling us to do that.

42Secondly, when it comes to the contribution of my work to how to rethink things, I think the first issue is that we need to do is to delinearize. I hope that concept will become clear. We need to let go of the linear: the enlightenment, modernist linear conception of things. If we continue to follow it, restoring the genius of the people will be very hard. In line with delinearization, we have to revisit the concept of time, because linearity has something to do with time — the Hegelian historical time, History with a capital H. We need to go back to a history with a smaller h. That history with a smaller h will be important in the sense that we begin to see a human history in its connectivity and heterogeneity, instead of in its linear, bifurcated faces. Some people use the term ahistorical societies: societies that, if they were foraging societies, are not really outside the history in which we live today. They are also part of the past, and we need not call it the distant past, totally cut off from the current world because of the way modernity has cut time into premodern and modern. I think we need to remove that dichotomous way of thinking about history. If we do that, we will be able to learn from all other societies. That’s two.

43The third issue, which is related to the question of time, is the issue of space. Modernity came with cartography, continents, nation states, towns, and rural areas. The cartographical machine makes it very hard to create connections. It actually projects what we call the paradigm of difference. In decolonial thinking, we emphasize the importance of human connectedness, and this has epistemic implications. If we delinearize and at the same time we rethink the issue of cartography, it will mean we can benefit from the knowledges of the rest of humanity. They are part of the same historical time, if we remove the modernist cartography, which divides the premodern from the modern, and post-modern.

44That is basically how I’m thinking that decolonizing knowledge needs to intervene. To the extent that we engage in this process, we can actually lay a foundation for ecologies of knowledge. Also, we can perhaps speak of inter-epistemic dialogues. In our thinking about the history of architecture, we must draw from multiple epistemologies. Another possible term is intercultural translations, so that when we think about this issue of the history of architecture, we really think about it in relation to the existing world — which is a multiple world, with multiple knowledges and multiple cosmologies. All that is not a problem, it is actually the richness of the plurality of the world. If you then want to wipe out a part out of existence so that you protect one part, then you have a problem.

45This made me think about when you were talking about the migrating or traveling expert. The traveling expert is not traveling, he is static. As long as the traveling expert carries a particular epistemology, a particular cosmology, he fails to travel epistemically, even when he travels physically. It is important that when we talk about movement and travel, we are really talking about moving epistemically, not moving physically while carrying your own language, culture, history, and worldview and imposing them on others and their worlds. If you do that, you have traveled physically, but you have not moved to a different place. That is the major problem of colonialism: empires spread across the world physically, but I don’t think they moved epistemically, they didn’t move cosmologically. They remained in one place.

46Kenny Cupers
I think this idea of epistemic movement is very interesting for architectural historians, as it allows us to write differently about architecture and its “experts.” Instead of focusing on whether an expert identifies or can be identified as Ghanaian or European, black or white, we can shift the analysis to explore the extent to which an inter-epistemic dialogue takes place in various moments of collaboration, encounter, or conflict. It is likely that when the African experts and the European or American experts met in the boardroom to work on their development project, they already shared the same world view or epistemology prior to that meeting. In this case, the inter-epistemic dialogue does not take place in the collaborative work between the experts (regardless of their country of origin), but might take place on the construction site, between the African architect and the inhabitants who may be displaced by the development project.

47Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Knowledge has no boundary even if experts and academics consistently draw boundaries. Perhaps it was this reality that made Edward Said coin the concept of “traveling theory.” But at the same time, if the African experts are African only in skin color and geographic location, but epistemically are in tandem with Western thought, you have indeed put the same people together in the same room instead of seeking inter-epistemic conversations. There is no inter-epistemic dialogue taking place. Maybe the term for this issue could be methodological nationalism, as a by-product of the cognitive empire within modern nation-states. Methodological nationalism tends to conflate political and physical boundaries of nation-states with epistemic and cognitive boundaries. The consequences are multiple. Nationalism as a product of colonial political modernity and the cognitive empire always tries to impose itself on ways of knowing, resulting in epistemological nativism and epistemological xenophobia masquerading as epistemological decolonization. The point I am trying to deliver is that the physical location of experts and scholars must not be confused with their epistemological and social location. Across the Global North and Global South, modern Westernized experts and academics draw from a common epistemology and are often involved in a monologue of people coming from the same worldview, in spite of different geographical locations. This is the success of the cognitive empire and its technologies of coloniality of knowledge.

48Kenny Cupers
That brings me to my last question, for which it is very useful to have your perspective as an outsider to the field of architectural history. For whom do we write architectural history? And to what end? Who do we engage in the knowledge production process? I think this is a key question that you’ve also raised in terms of not guarding the expertise and knowledge in some kind of realm that is removed from social life, but rather to think about how to make these connections.

49Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
This question is applicable not only to architecture. It is really related to producing knowledge, and for whom it is produced. On one level, the issue is that the expert in architecture is perhaps a disciplinary expert, and if he/she is a disciplinary expert, one of the major problems is that these experts routinely engage in disciplinary debates. However, since they are all experts, it is a monologue instead of a debate. There are no people involved in that. In decolonial thinking, we say we are trying to break out of disciplinary silos so that we can address the problems facing humanity. It is a very difficult move, but we hope that the knowledge that we produce speaks to the problems that humanity is facing, rather than to disciplinary debates that circulate within universities. At these gatherings, they exchange views, they listen to each other, and they really enjoy the disputation of facts, which are disciplinary debates. But for what benefit, nobody knows. It is indeed that type of knowledge that is disciplinary knowledge for the enjoyment of those who are actually embedded in disciplines.

50Then there is also supposed to be knowledge which really speaks to the human problems. And I think that’s where architecture needs to take us — what are the buildings and towns you are building, and for whom? Who benefits from those? With architectural historians, just like other historians, just like other modern trained people from Westernized universities, the issue is that we have been removed from society in the first instance. We are confined in the university, at a great distance from the problems people face. Many countries in Africa produce engineers and town planners, but nevertheless, everything is collapsing. What are these experts using their expertise to accomplish? To nail high-paying jobs, not to solve problems of the people. It is the way we have been trained. The textbooks we read are all about America, about Europe, about worlds we don’t even inhabit. We are not learning about the world we inhabit. It is a big challenge, and it affects all disciplines.

51Kenny Cupers
Absolutely, this is not only a problem of architectural history. So it is here where architectural historians can learn from how others in and beyond the university tackle this huge challenge. It has been wonderful and enlightening to speak with you, thank you.