The Paramount Hotel, Freetown: Neocolonial Investment and the Business of Tropical Modernism in Sierra Leone
Résumé
This article examines the planning of the Paramount Hotel in Sierra Leone, completed to the designs of James Cubitt & Partners in 1961, during Sierra Leone’s transition from colonial rule to independence. This paper demonstrates that the hotel was conceived of as a neocolonial instrument planned and funded by the British government’s Colonial Development Corporation to support the continued operation of British capital in a post-imperial world. At the same time, tourist-based development was a central component of economic planning in the immediate post-independence years for Sierra Leone’s political class. This paper therefore reveals that the luxury hotel played a central, if unstable, role in planning for economic futures during the ends of empire in Sierra Leone.
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Introduction
- 1 Liverpool (United Kingdom), University of Liverpool Special Collections, Papers of James Archibald (...)
1At Sierra Leone’s independence celebrations in 1961, visiting diplomats and heads of state were accommodated in a brand-new luxury hotel, located on a hill in central Freetown. Constructed in reinforced concrete painted brilliant white (see fig. 1) and outfitted with furniture manufactured on government timber plantations at Kenema, the Paramount Hotel was framed as a statement of Sierra Leone’s modernity, economic self-reliance, and newly gained political freedom. As its architect proudly noted in his practice brochure, the Paramount Hotel was built “as part of [Sierra Leone’s] Independence Program.”1
Figure 1: The Paramount Hotel Exterior.
Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown.
- 2 Starting with the Hotel Conakry, completed in Conakry in 1954 to designs by Atelier LWD with interi (...)
- 3 Manuel Herz, African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence: Ghana, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Ke (...)
- 4 For the place of the hotel lobby in the imaginary of the global north, see: Siegfried Kracauer, “Th (...)
2The Paramount Hotel was one of several luxury hotels built across West Africa in the late 1950s and ‘60s.2 As Manuel Herz notes in his account of the Hotel Ivoire in Côte d’Ivoire (built from 1960), luxury hotels were seen by African politicians as a “tool for nation building,” to allow “young nations” to pursue “normalization and de-provincialization.”3 Long theorized as spaces of modernity in colonial metropoles, luxury hotels had particular valance as a symbol of modernizing legitimacy for newly independent nations emerging from imperial rule.4
- 5 See Mike Cowan, “Early Years of the Colonial Development Corporation: British State Enterprise Over (...)
3And yet, the Paramount Hotel—designed by the British tropical modernist architect James Cubitt and funded by the British government through the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC)—was far from a straightforward symbol of “decolonization.”5 Instead, this construction reveals how architecture encoded the former colonizer’s ideas of what a neocolonial future would look like as the British empire ended, while also demonstrating how architecture could be configured as a neocolonial financial instrument in and of itself.
- 6 Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Bedford: Panaf, 2004, p. ix. For an a (...)
- 7 Poppy Cullen, Kenya and Britain after Independence: Beyond Neocolonialism, London: Palgrave Macmill (...)
- 8 VY Mundimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington: I (...)
- 9 See: Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Pittsburgh PA: University o (...)
- 10 Anon, “The Bristol Hotel, Lagos” The West African Builder & Architect, vol. 3, no. 4 July-August 19 (...)
- 11 Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s-1970s,” The (...)
- 12 Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, London: Routledge 2003 (British Art and Vi (...)
4Under imperial rule, the extraction of Sierra Leone’s diamonds and other natural resources was controlled by British-owned firms. British policymakers planning for a post-independence future sought to maintain this situation: Sierra Leone was to be transformed from a colony to a neo-colony. Neocolonialism and the neo-colony were terms disseminated in the polemical writings of Kwame Nkrumah, who described the neo-colony as a state with “all the outward trappings of sovereignty” but an “economic system and thus its political policy […] directed from the outside.”6 These concepts have been criticized for framing the actions of the British as “far more coherent and planned during decolonization than they actually were.”7 The British withdrawal from Sierra Leone lends credence to this critique—decision-making was inchoate, reactive, and riven by the differing agendas of Whitehall Departments. But the Paramount Hotel illustrates that neocolonialism was an avowed policy of at least some British officials overseeing Sierra Leone’s independence. Civil servants in the Colonial Office in London planned for continuities of British economic activity in an independent Sierra Leone and envisioned new forms of architecture to facilitate this transformation from colony to neo-colony. Colonialism had, as VY Mudimbe famously stated, sought to permanently “transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs.”8 Architecture—in the form of the bungalow, the cantonment, the trading station, the railway line—played a central role in this attempted transformation.9 The neo-colony, by contrast, needed forms of architecture that facilitated transience instead of permanence. Built forms that met the needs of a newly peripatetic British business elite were required: spaces that offered the businessman traveler a comfortable short stay as well as a venue to socialize, transact and deal-make. This was explicitly acknowledged by the British government in their funding of the Paramount Hotel and at least two other hotels in West Africa during the transition from colonial rule to independence: the Bristol Hotel, Lagos (Architects Co-Partnership, from 1955-1962), and the Ikoyi Hotel (Ronald Ward & Partners, completed in three phases 1961-1966).10 Analyzing the planning of the Paramount Hotel and its Nigerian contemporaries demonstrates that the economic thinking accompanying the “dissolving of European empires” was spatialized at the level of the individual building, thereby making a key intervention into a body of scholarship concerned with financial planning and capital flows at the end of empire.11 At the same time, this also makes a necessary contribution to the lively scholarship on tropical modernist architecture, by showing that an architectural movement usually framed as a product of “welfare state imperialism” was directly embedded in commercial and economic thinking.12
- 13 Bruce Berman, quoted by Poppy Cullen, Kenya and Britain, op. cit. (note 7), p. 8.
5It is a common critique of the polemics of neocolonialism that they fail to reckon with Africans as “agents of their own history.”13 But, the Paramount Hotel was not foisted by the British on passive client-politicians in Freetown. African politicians leading Sierra Leone to independence, including the nation’s first Prime Minister Sir Milton Margai, pursued tourist-based development to secure inward investment. For Sierra Leone’s political class, the luxury hotel encapsulated ambitions for Sierra Leone’s economic future that were inflected differently from those imagined by officials in the Colonial Office in London.
- 14 Ruth Craggs, “Towards a Political Geography of Hotels: Southern Rhodesia, 1958-1961,” Political Geo (...)
- 15 For the idea of the future in relation to decolonization see Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: (...)
6It has been argued that hotels formed key sites for the performance of political identities and ideologies in mid-20th-century Africa.14 But here I am less interested in the degree to which the Paramount Hotel functioned in practice as a space for the enactment of neocolonialism. Instead, I excavate the archival record to illustrate how it was intended to act as such. The brief historical moment of independence was one in which different political actors imagined, and planned for, different futures.15 The Paramount Hotel reveals how architecture was mobilized in the service of these different visions of the future. Accordingly, I layer previously unpublished archival material deposited in the National Archives of Sierra Leone in Freetown and the United Kingdom in Kew to uncover the contradictory economic ambitions held by key individuals who shaped the development of the Paramount Hotel: its architect, James Cubitt; its original client, the last governor of the Sierra Leone Colony, Maurice Dorman; the hotel’s funder, the CDC; and Milton Margai. The article is structured sequentially around these individuals and organizations, using their differing motivations to recover the central, if unstable, role that the luxury hotel played in economic thinking during independence in Sierra Leone.
The Architect: James Cubitt
- 16 The hotel was subsequently extended by Cubitt in the mid-1960s. It was severely damaged during the (...)
- 17 In a move that strongly suggests how Cubitt envisioned the hotel would be run, segregated accommoda (...)
7The Paramount Hotel was a three-story building terraced into Freetown’s Tower Hill.16 Its ground floor featured an interconnected lobby, bar, and breakfast hall, giving access to south- facing terraces and gardens (see figs. 1-2). Below this, a partial basement floor housed the hotel’s restaurants. The three upper floors offered 48 en-suite guest bedrooms. Kitchens, stores, offices, and staff accommodation were arranged on the ground and basement floors to the north, away from the guest’s terraces and gardens.17
Figure 2: The Paramount Hotel Ground Floor and Basement Plans.
Key: Basement Floor Plan: 1 African Staff, 2 Laundry, 3 Boiler House, 4 Cooking Areas, 5 Stores Area, 6 Large Restaurant, 7 Small Restaurant, 8 Bar, 9 Terrace, 10 Plant Room, 11 Water Storage Tank. Ground Floor Plan: 1 Entrance, 2 Lounge, 3 Breakfast Room, 4 Main Bar, 5, Terrace, 6 Reception, 7 Accounts Office, 8 Manager’s Office, 9 Managers Suite, 10 Public Lavatories, 11 Concessions, 12 European Staff Quarters, 13 Open Court.
Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown.
- 18 See footnote 12 for the scholarship on tropical modernism.
8The hotel was carefully sited on a ridgeline to benefit from passive cooling through breezes. Guest bedroom windows were protected by strongly modelled pre-cast concrete brise-soleil; cross ventilation was promoted in its lounges and bars using glass louvres set in mahogany frames; terraces were shaded by canopies and parasols. These features might make the Paramount Hotel appear to be a paradigmatic example of the climatic mode of modernist architecture practiced by British émigré architects in mid-century West Africa, often referred to as tropical modernism.18
- 19 Anon, “James Cubitt: Recent Buildings in the Gold Coast,” Architectural Review, vol. 119, no. 742, (...)
9Tropical modernism was, in the imperialist words of The Architectural Review, “pioneered” in West Africa by the husband-and-wife duo Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in the 1940s.19 The pair developed a consistent vocabulary of building elements—brise-soleil, canopies, verandas, pierced concrete walls—to minimize sun exposure and maximize cooling breezes. The resulting buildings were richly decorated with referential patterns executed in cast-concrete block and modelled with an eye to dramatic effects of light and shade.
- 20 Alan Powers, “James Cubitt,” in Muriel Emmanuel (eds.), Contemporary Architects, London: St James P (...)
- 21 Ibid.
- 22 An office in Libya was later established in 1965-1971 to oversee the construction of Garyounis Univ (...)
10Cubitt was part of a second generation of tropical modernists who began working in the West African colonies in the decade after the arrival of Fry and Drew. Born in Melbourne to British parents, Cubitt was educated at the prestigious Harrow School and the University of Oxford before taking an architectural degree at the Architectural Association (AA) in 1940. Following wartime service in West Africa and the Far East, he established an architectural practice in London in 1949.20 Early commissions such as the London South African Travel Centre won the practice critical acclaim, and work on educational and housing projects throughout Britain followed, but the UK practice always remained small.21 For, almost immediately after forming his practice, Cubitt sought commissions beyond Britian: branch offices were established in the Gold Coast Colony in 1951, Burma in 1954, Malaya in 1955, and Nigeria in 1956. Perhaps significantly, these were all locations that Cubitt had experienced during his wartime service. Most of these offices were established to oversee a particular commission and were subsequently wound down upon the completion of the commission, but the West African offices became substantial operations—indeed, the Lagos practice continues in operation to this day.22
- 23 The extensive literature on colonial development is summarized in Frederick Cooper, “Writing the Hi (...)
11This imperialization of Cubitt’s practice was undertaken to profit from the developmental turn in the post-war British Empire. From 1945, colonial governments were empowered to raise loans from the British Treasury to fund economic and social development projects within their jurisdictions. Spending on development was intended to quell unrest and nascent independence movements by smothering anti-colonial critique under a welter of new infrastructure, school, and university projects, while at the same time boosting colonial production and extraction.23
- 24 Alan Powers, “James Cubitt,” op. cit. (note 20), p. 211.
- 25 Ibid.
12The resource-rich Nigeria and Gold Coast colonies were foci for imperial development. Accordingly, Cubitt’s practice expanded in the region: he designed schools, teacher training colleges, and public libraries across the Gold Coast Colony, and the headquarters of the Gold Coast Industrial Development Corporation and Cocoa Marketing Boards in Accra. He also master-planned the Kumasi College of Technology (later Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), and the University of Nigeria campus at Nsukka. These projects illustrate the importance of climate as a driver of design to Cubitt. His school, college, and university buildings are strongly rectilinear in their composition, using vertical brise-soleil and horizontal sun shading to create a crisp “straightforward geometry.”24 As Cubitt himself recalled: “the architect’s concern with the interaction of people, place, climate and function brings everything together as architecture.”25
- 26 Anon, “Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects: James Cubitt & Partners.” URL: http (...)
- 27 Daniel Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, op. cit. (note 12), p. 102.
13Cubitt’s school and library buildings are paradigmatic of the architectural typologies usually covered in histories of tropical modernism. But the degree to which the style was also applied to commercial buildings has been somewhat underplayed in the historiography. Cubitt’s career demonstrates this well: he was feted for his work on educational projects, but his West African offices also worked for an extensive roster of commercial clients, including Mobil Oil, Shell and the Coca-Cola Corporation.26 In Sierra Leone, which initially received comparatively little colonial development funding, Cubitt’s only other commission beyond the Paramount Hotel was an office block for the British-owned Elder Dempster Shipping Company, completed in 1958 with a sculptural façade composed of monumental pre-cast concrete vertical brise-soleil. Daniel Barber has noted how, in the middle decades of the 20th century, the façade was deployed “as a symbolic screen on which countries and corporations could claim sensitivity and openness to local conditions. A filter, a billboard, and a mask.”27 Cubitt’s usage of brise-soleil in Sierra Leone can be read in a similar vein—as a suggestion that buildings constructed to facilitate the post-colonial continuation of colonial capital flows should instead be read as aligned with state sponsored programs of welfare and development. In the case of the Paramount Hotel, the need for brise-soleil was, if not obviated, at least lessened by the prominent inclusion of air conditioning units in each of the hotel’s bedrooms.
The Client (I): Sir Maurice Dorman
- 28 Jessica Lynn Pearson, “Decolonizing the Skies: Global Air Travel at the End of Empire,” Humanity, v (...)
- 29 G.J. Williams and D.F. Hayward, “Recent Development of the Sierra Leone Airways System,” Geography, (...)
14The visitor to the Paramount Hotel would arrive in Sierra Leone via Lungi International Airport, located across the bay from Freetown. Airports, like luxury hotels, were freighted with importance by politicians during the transition to independence as “a means of building new relationships, re-imagining old ones, and an opportunity to jettison past inequalities.”28 But, like the Paramount Hotel, Lungi Airport was far from a straightforward expression of “decolonization.” Built using colonial development funds on the site of a former British Royal Air Force base from 1955, the airport served both international flights and a network of domestic air services “developed in the 1950s […] primarily to meet the particular needs of the diamond industry.” 29
15From Lungi, the visitor would be conveyed by water-taxi to the government harbor at Freetown, where a car from the hotel would be waiting. The road leading up the hill from the harbor passed by the Cotton Tree, a place with mythic importance in Sierra Leonean history as the site where, in 1792, former Black Loyalist soldiers gave thanks for their delivery from slavery, and founded Freetown. From there, the car would turn onto Independence Avenue—recently renamed from Government Road—climbing the lower reaches of Tower Hill. Immediately opposite the State House, the car would turn into the Paramount Hotel’s private drive, and soon come to a stop in front of a canopied entrance on the hotel’s eastern flank. The Paramount Hotel’s location, on a prime site immediately adjacent to the seat of government, illustrates the importance of the hotel to the last British governor of the colony of Sierra Leone, Sir Maurice Dorman.
- 30 For more on the colonial history of Sierra Leone, see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, (...)
16Sierra Leone was one of Britain’s oldest African colonies, with its origins in the 1792 foundation of the City of Freetown. As its name suggests, Freetown was founded as a permanent colony to house the formerly enslaved. A plot of land was dubiously leased from a local Mende leader, and a rational gridiron town plan was laid out, under the watchful eye of a British governor and a garrison of soldiers. By the late 19th century, Freetown had become an important node in the British Atlantic. Its large natural harbor made it the center of the Royal Navy’s operations along the West African coast, and accordingly the city had developed into a significant trading port, home to a prosperous Creole population, notable for their syncretic blending of Yoruba, Afro-Caribbean and British high-Victorian bourgeois mores.30
- 31 Selection Trust was a clearing house registered on the London Stock Exchange for the sale of shares (...)
17British penetration of the Sierra Leonean interior in the early 20th century was accompanied by the extraction of its natural resources. By 1930, Sierra Leonean chrome and iron ore were mined by DELCO, a partnership between the Scottish steel company William Baird & Co and a Unilever subsidiary, the United Africa Company. Similarly, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a subsidiary of a global mining company listed on the London Stock Exchange, was granted a century-long monopoly to work Sierra Leone’s extensive diamond fields.31 Sierra Leone’s natural resources were firmly under British control and in return, the mining companies paid rent and a small percentage of their profits back to the colonial government.
- 32 Ibid.
- 33 See correspondence in file, London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Diamonds: Formation of (...)
- 34 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation: Policy on Activit (...)
- 35 For contemporary accounts of Freetown see Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps, London: Heinemann, 1 (...)
18Accordingly, colonial extraction was framed as a fair and equal partnership between government and private interests that benefited Sierra Leone at large. The SLST, for example, described its operations thus: “the company discovered and developed the mines, put up the initial capital, and had since ploughed back a very considerable part of its earnings.”32 But in practice, the SLST was adept at citing poor yields or fluctuations in global diamond prices to negotiate down its contributions to the colony’s exchequer.33 Despite its mineral wealth, by the middle decades of the 20th century, Sierra Leone’s economy was small, and it was regarded as a territory of marginal importance to the British Empire as a whole.34 Sierra Leone’s colonial administration was a byword for inefficiency and torpor, and Freetown had a raffish reputation as a city of collapsing timber mansions and Nissen huts rusting in the tropical rains.35
- 36 Port Sunlight, (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, papers of the United Africa Company Sierra Leon (...)
- 37 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Hotel Development by CDC in Colonies in West Africa (...)
19This was the situation that Sir Maurice Dorman found on his arrival in 1956. Dorman was an experienced colonial servant, who was regarded by contemporaries as “progressive and energetic.”36 A year after his arr ival in Freetown, the Gold Coast colony secured its independence as the Republic of Ghana, and Dorman used the event to argue for greater development spending in Sierra Leone. Writing to the Colonial Office, Dorman invoked both the embarrassing state of the colony and the compressed timetable of independence: “Sierra Leone has been British for 150 years [yet] there is so much crying out to be done in this country, and so little time to do it. I feel most deeply and sincerely that in Britain we owe Sierra Leone more help than she has had in the past.”37 Dorman was bleakly aware that as the world’s media turned its glare on Sierra Leone during its transition to independence that the rundown state of the colony would reflect poorly on both his administration, and by extension, the whole imperial project. The belated developmental turn he presided over was intended to prevent this, and a luxury hotel was a central aspect of this strategy.
- 38 Joao Sarmento and Denis Linehan, “The Colonial Hotel: Spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, (...)
- 39 London, (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Hotel Development by CDC in Colonies in West Afric (...)
- 40 Ibid. Rather desperately, Dorman invoked an upcoming royal visit as justification for the new hotel
- 41 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, op. cit. (note 15), p. 44.
20Luxury hotels were an important element in the colonial refashioning of African cities in settler colonies, “part of a whole archipelago of settler institutions: such as clubs, safaris, race-courses.”38 But, in the non-settler city of Freetown, the only hotel of any note was, according to Dorman, an “indifferent and rather squalid” place.39 A new hotel, he noted, would “mean that visitors took away with them an entirely different impression from what they would be forced to do now.”40 For Dorman, the bright white concrete facade of the Paramount Hotel, on the slopes of Tower Hill in close proximity to the State House, was of representational importance as evidence for imperial rule as a modernizing force readying Sierra Leone for independence. Decolonization, a process of “reimagining the future” for so many Africans, was also a deep reckoning with the imperial past, especially for figures close to the imperial project.41 For Dorman, the Paramount Hotel sat at this loaded nexus of past and future.
Figure 3: The Paramount Hotel Lobby.
Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown.
Figure 4: The Paramount Hotel Bar.
Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown.
Sources of funds: the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC)
21On passing through the canopied entrance into the hotel lobby (see figs. 3-4), guests were greeted by a round reception desk, to the right, and a staircase and lift, to the left, leading to the bedrooms on the levels above. The lobby opened directly onto the slightly sunken lounge, set apart from the lobby only by a short flight of marble steps. From the lounge, guests could access the hotel bar and a breakfast room.
- 42 Tom Avermaete, “The Architectonics of the Hotel Lobby,” op. cit. (note 4), p. 60.
22Located between the inner privacy of the bedrooms and the outer public world, hotel lobbies have often formed a “grey zone […] neither private nor public but rather within the ambiguity and complexity of a modern public sphere.”42 In the case of the Paramount Hotel, the arrangement of lobby, lounge, and bar, comfortably furnished with small circles of armchairs and coffee tables, served as an interstitial space between the hotel guest and the state of Sierra Leone beyond. But the arrangement of spaces is also key to understanding the ways in which the hotel’s backers in the British Government conceived the Paramount Hotel. For Whitehall civil servants, the hotel would play a central role in the post-independence world order, as a space needed to facilitate the continued supremacy of British capital in the region even after independence.
- 43 Mike Cowan, “Early Years,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 68.
- 44 Ibid.
- 45 Ibid.
23The papers related to financing the hotel’s construction hint at these intentions. Sir Maurice Dorman’s request for investment in the hotel landed on the desk of the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC). Established in 1948 as the vehicle for British spending on development projects in the colonies, the CDC was intended to facilitate economic and social betterment by funding development projects geared to long-term economic growth in the colonies. But the agency was also an explicit response to the Marshall Plan era of post-war reconstruction, tasked with quickly developing “non-dollar sources of supply for food and materials” in order to regain British “economic independence” from the United States.43 The conflicting goals of “a British need for colonial production” in the immediate present and a “colonial need for welfare” in the longer term contributed to the spectacular failure of several CDC early schemes.44 As a result, by the mid-1950s, the CDC was reconstituted along more commercial lines. In this later incarnation, it acted more like a merchant bank loaning financing to clearly delineated projects with carefully calculated risks.45 Projects that lacked a clear ability to repay their costs to the treasury did not receive funding.
- 46 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Tourist Development in East Africa, “Holiday Lands (...)
- 47 More work is needed to flesh out this aspect of planning at the ends of empire, but the movement of (...)
24The CDC was no stranger to hotel development. The 1950s saw a push to refashion the Empire as a site of leisure and tourism. A brochure, Holiday Lands at All Points of the Compass, published by the British Tourist and Holiday Board in 1950, evidences these ambitions: “North to the romantic islands of the Hebrides, South to the Big Game Preserves of Africa, West to the Palm Fringed Beaches of the Spanish Main, east to the jungles and temples of Malaya, at every point of the compass you will find friendly, hospitable, exciting British travel areas.”46 Despite the global sweep of the rhetoric, efforts to accommodate tourists were concentrated chiefly in two locations. Initially, in the early 1950s, colonial planners saw East Africa as a potential mass-market tourist destination. Accordingly, one of the first projects funded by the CDC was the construction of a luxury hotel in Uganda. However, as the decade wore on, repression of anti-colonial protest in East Africa grew more violent, so ambitions for imperial tourist development switched focus to the Caribbean.47
- 48 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Commonwealth Liaison Committee Report by the Workin (...)
- 49 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation Hotels West Africa (...)
25The West African colonies, including Sierra Leone, were judged too “remote, underdeveloped, or climatically unattractive,” for tourist development.48 The request to fund the Paramount Hotel therefore sat at odds with the Whitehall's understanding of Sierra Leone’s tourist potential. Nevertheless, the CDC requested an assessment of Dorman’s application by an independent hotel consultant, and after this concluded that the Paramount Hotel would “pay its way at least.”49 The Colonial Office duly forwarded the application to the Treasury for the allocation of funds.
- 50 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation: Policy on Activit (...)
26At that time, the Colonial Office and the Treasury were at loggerheads over the issue of continuing investment in postcolonial territories. The Treasury’s general position was that once a state reached independence, all British funding for capital projects ought immediately to cease. In the specific case of Sierra Leone, the Treasury further dismissed the CDC’s proposals for continued investment as “precisely the kind of sink down which the CDC pours its millions,” because, it noted, “generally Sierra Leone is a bad risk from the economic and financial viewpoint.”50
- 51 London (United Kingdom), the National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation: Hotels West Afric (...)
- 52 Ibid.
- 53 Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism, op. cit. (note 6), p. xv.
- 54 This can also be seen in the contract to construct the hotel which was awarded to Taylor Woodrow Si (...)
27The CDC countered by reshaping the ownership of the Paramount Hotel project in terms more favorable to the Treasury. The hotel was vested in a company one third owned by the CDC and two thirds by the Sierra Leonean government. While superficially a beneficial arrangement for Sierra Leone, the shares of the hotel owned by the British Government through the CDC paid out a higher dividend income and controlled twice the voting rights as those owned by the government in Freetown, thereby ensuring that hotel profits accrued in a higher share to the British Government.51 The loans covering the hotel construction were also to be repaid, regardless of the commercial success of the hotel, over 25 years at an interest rate of 1.5% over the Sierra Leonean Government’s annual equivalent borrowing rate.52 The actual hotel itself was therefore carefully constituted to appear on both the British Treasury’s revenue accounts and its balance sheet of financial assets. Kwame Nkrumah noted that “aid […] to a neo-colonial state is merely revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial state and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profit.”53 The Paramount Hotel is paradigmatic of this flow of aid as credit and profit.54
- 55 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation Sierra Leone—Polic (...)
- 56 These were described as “charming” in the 1950s. Roy Lewis, Sierra Leone: A Modern Portrait, London (...)
28But the use for which the hotel was intended seems to have been the most significant factor in securing Treasury backing for the project. The hotel received its final sign-off from the Treasury after the CDC’s package of investments in Sierra Leone was justified by the Colonial Office to the Treasury as “a useful continuing finger in the Sierra Leonean pie.”55 This is a phrase that reveals much about how the Colonial Office envisioned continued British economic supremacy in a post-independence Sierra Leone. Under colonial rule, the human agents of British companies involved in resource extraction lived in bungalow reservations that spread up the hillsides beyond Freetown, or on sites of extraction in the interior. DELCO and the UAC built company housing in bungalow reservations near Freetown at Belair and Wilberforce Spur, while the SLST built air-conditioned bungalows for its British managers on the diamond fields at Yengema, with the housing arranged around a golf course.56
- 57 Port Sunlight (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, UAC Board minutes, 18 January 1965, UAC/1/1/2/1/ (...)
- 58 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, CO852/1800, Colonial Development: Hotels Nigeria, L (...)
- 59 Anon, “The Bristol Hotel,” op. cit. (note 10), p. 62.
- 60 Anon, “Ikoyi Hotel,” op. cit. (note 10), p. 44.
29But following independence, these representatives of expatriate capital in West Africa were, as one firm active across the region noted, “becoming more transient.”57 It was for this reason that the Paramount Hotel received its capital sign-off from the British Treasury, as a space that would serve the needs of a business elite who no longer required a bungalow for permanent residence, but instead expected a comfortable hotel for short, transient visits. Although this is stated obliquely in the Colonial Office’s justifications to the Treasury for its continued investments in Sierra Leone quoted above, it was explicitly acknowledged by the CDC in its financing of two hotels in Lagos—the Bristol Hotel (Architects Co-Partnership, from 1955—see figs. 5-6) and the Ikoyi Hotel (Ronald Ward & Partners, from 1961—see figs. 7-8) built as a response “to the greatly increased tempo of Business activity especially in the Lagos region.”58 This was not lost on the architectural press, which noted that the Bristol Hotel was built “to cater mostly for visiting business executives and commercial representatives.”59 That the fixed architecture of colonialism was giving way to a new architecture of transience was made concrete in the Ikoyi Hotel, a 130-room “economy class” hotel, built as the redevelopment of an early 20th-century bungalow within the former “Government Reservation Area” where European officials were housed during the colonial period.60
Figure 5: The Bristol Hotel, Lagos, exterior.
Source: “Bristol Hotel Lagos, Architects: Architects Co-Partnership,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 3, no. 4, July/August 1963. Original copyright holder unknown.
Figure 6: Interiors of the Bristol Hotel, Lagos.
Source: “Hotel at Lagos. Architects: Architects Co-Partnership,” The Architectural Review, vol. 117, no. 699, March 1955, p. 184.
Figure 7: The Ikoyi Hotel, Lagos.
Source: From an original in a private collection. Copyright holder unknown.
Figure 8: Poolside, the Ikoyi Hotel, Lagos.
Source: “Ikoyi Hotel: Ronald Ward & Partners,” The West African Builder & Architect, vol. 6, no. 3, May/June 1966. Original copyright holder unknown.
30Seen in this light, the Paramount Hotel’s lobby and bar take on new meaning. More than an interstitial zone between the privacy of the hotel rooms and the city outside, this sequence of spaces also formed a transactional space for business. The groupings of armchairs and sofas furnishing the lounge and bar were configured to facilitate the social transactions necessary to the smooth function of transactional extractive capitalism in Sierra Leone. British officialdom saw the Paramount Hotel as a necessary investment to ensure Sierra Leone’s transition from colony to neo-colony, viewing the hotel’s lobby and bar as a necessary linkage in a transnational chain of extraction that profited British capital.
The Client (II): Sir Milton Margai and the Sierra Leone People’s Party
- 61 Anon, “Paramount Hotel, Freetown” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst (...)
- 62 Ibid.
- 63 Anon, “The Bristol Hotel,” op. cit. (note 10), p. 62.
- 64 Ibid., p. 65.
- 65 See Iain Jackson, Erhabor Ogieva Emokpae (1934-1984) and the Timber Carving at Unilever. URL: https (...)
- 66 Manuel Herz, African Modernism, op. cit. (note 3), p. 387.
- 67 Roy Lewis, Sierra Leone, op. cit. (note 56) p. 191. Here Lewis is referring to a middle-class shopp (...)
31Below the lobby and bar, the visitor could descend to the hotel’s restaurants. Two dining rooms were available—a larger one with 80 place settings and a smaller, more intimate restaurant for 30. Both were served by an adjacent bar and gave access to a terrace shaded by a canopy.61 A removable screen partition between the two spaces made it possible to unite them for the purposes of “banqueting up to 110 persons.”62 In this, Cubitt may well have looked to the Bristol Hotel in Lagos, which included “a restaurant for 130 which can be combined with a banqueting room which seats 80 people.”63 The design of the Bristol included elaborately detailed carved wooden and mosaic tile decoration influenced by Yoruba forms, including “a mural consisting of sculpted ceramic tiles mounted on a curved wall behind the lounge bar,” by Linnea Oshosanya (see fig. 6).64 Smilarly, the Ikoyi Hotel featured decorative artwork sourced from local artists, including the prominent sculptor Erhabor Ogieva Emokpae (see fig. 8).65 As projects of national importance, the West African luxury hotel was often a site of aesthetic experimentation that blended “daring Modern aesthetics with what was perceived to be traditional and ‘ethnic’ architecture.”66 By comparison, the Paramount Hotel’s interiors featured simple finishes of terrazzo, geometric-patterned tile, and timber cladding, with little attempt to reference local artistic traditions. The hotel’s furnishings, produced by government- owned timber plantations at Kenema, recall contemporary British furniture of the 1950s, such as the “G-Plan” range. Indeed, one contemporary noted that the Kenema timber works was known for its “somewhat standardized Edgware Road style” of furniture (see fig. 3 and fig. 4).67
Figure 9: The Chairman of Sierra Leone Development Company.
“The Chairman Of Sierra Leone Development Company, Mr SA Field and the Managing Director of the Company Mr James Campbell […] attended a reception at the Paramount Hotel. The Party which was given by the Resident Director of the Company in Sierra Leone, Mr TW Harvey to mark the 30th Anniversary of DELCO’s first shipment of Iron Ore from Pepel.”
Source: I am grateful to Nafisatu Koroma for sharing this image and granting permission for its publication.
32Nevertheless, a photograph of a reception at the Paramount Hotel taken shortly after independence suggests that the hotel did function as its architect intended, as a setting for elite banquets. The photograph shows a reception held to mark the 30th Anniversary of DELCO’s first shipment of iron ore from Sierra Leone: the company Chairman, Managing Director, and Resident Director all stand next to the Prime Minister of Sierra Leone, Sir Milton Margai (see fig. 9).
- 68 See John Cartwright, Political Leadership in Sierra Leone, London: Croom Helm, 1978, for an account (...)
- 69 Ibid, p. 93.
33Margai had been involved in Sierra Leone’s government since 1953, when a power-sharing arrangement between the colonial civil service and a democratically elected cabinet, largely drawn from the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), was established. The SLPP was a moderate political force supported mainly by the traditional leaders of the rural interior. As its leader, Margai was a steady, even conservative, politician; notable for the pro-British rhetoric that set him apart from his generation of African leaders.68 On independence, Margai was maneuvered by the British into the country’s Prime Ministership.69
- 70 For the architectural ramifications of this in nearby Ghana, see Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Glo (...)
- 71 Port Sunlight (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, papers of the United Africa Company, Report on C (...)
- 72 Port Sunlight (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, papers of the United Africa Company Sierra Leone (...)
34Although some West African leaders used independence as an opportunity to pursue the decolonization of their economies through new ties with the Soviet Union and other socialist states, Margai instead pursued an “open-door policy” of investment from Britain.70 At a time when Africa was increasingly an arena of Cold War-inflected geopolitical competition for proxy power, Sierra Leone at independence firmly sided with the capitalist world. As a report on “Communist Penetration” in Africa penned a year after Sierra Leone’s independence noted, “there is nothing that could be called a socialist movement yet in Sierra Leone.”71 To underscore this, independence celebrations were carefully choreographed to reassure visitors that Sierra Leone, post-independence, would remain a safe and hospitable home for British investment. Independence was marked by a speech given by Margai to the Freetown Chamber of Commerce in which he assured an assembled audience of British businessmen that “all who want to invest in Sierra Leone are welcome,” and that his government had “no intention, now or in the future, of nationalizations or limiting profit repatriations.”72
- 73 Freetown (Sierra Leone), Sierra Leone National Archives, Negotiations for an Hotel, “Tourism in Sie (...)
35For Margai, the luxury hotel played a central role in Sierra Leone’s open-door policy of investment from the capitalist world. Margai was determined to develop Sierra Leone as a tourist destination, as the “Monte Carlo of West Africa,” specifically because of tourism’s potential to facilitate inward investment from the former colonial metropole.73 A briefing paper written for the SLPP government noted that:
- 74 Freetown (Sierra Leone), Sierra Leone National Archives, Hotel and Tourist Development, Brian LEVY, (...)
Tourism is an industry that earns valuable foreign exchange […] in the case of an emergent nation, tourism encourages investment from developed countries. In the specific case of Sierra Leone, the country’s stable government, liberal tax laws, and ample fund of political goodwill will help to capitalize this highly important work of capital attraction.74
- 75 Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism”, op. cit. (note 11), p. 1438.
- 76 Panayiota Pyla, “Leisure and Geo-Economics: The Hilton and Other Development Regimes in the Mediter (...)
- 77 Ibid. See also, Davide Spina, “Grand Hotel,” gta Papers, no. 4, 2020, p. 127-151.
- 78 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, [First published as Les Damnés de la Terre, Paris: Françoi (...)
36The references to liberal tax regimes and the invocation of Monte Carlo are strongly suggestive of the government in Freetown’s awareness of the growing importance of tax havens and other sites of “archipelago capitalism” emerging from “dissolving empires,” and suggest that Margai harbored an ambition to develop Sierra Leone along the lines of the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, or Singapore.75 But beyond this, tourism was often “a mode of development that dominated parts of the Global South after the end of colonialism, shaping the aesthetics/architectures of leisure with standardized infrastructural demands (airports, roads, charter fights) and benchmarks for replication,” such as the luxury hotel.76 Tourist development was used by governments in Europe as a source of invisible dollar earnings, while governments in former colonies were well aware of the potential for economic development as a result of tourist-based investment.77 But this was a mode of development that was not without critics. No less an authority than Frantz Fanon had noted how little the “casinos of Havana and Mexico City” had contributed to the overall project of Latin American decolonization.78
- 79 “Tourism in Sierra Leone,” op. cit. (note 73). The last phrase is likely a quotation from a speech (...)
- 80 Panayiota Pyla, “Leisure and Geo-Economics,” op. cit. (note 76), p. 385.
- 81 “Tourism in Sierra Leone,” op. cit. (note 73).
37Perhaps with this in mind, Margai’s government was explicit in its ambition to tightly control the ownership of tourist infrastructure in Sierra Leone. A briefing document on hotel development prepared for his government noted that “it is fundamentally wrong for [hotel] development to be anything other than state owned. It is useless to ‘exchange colonialism for exploitation by foreign capital.’”79 So for Margai and his ministers, the luxury hotel was more than just a potent symbol of Sierra Leone’s developmental potential; it was an active agent of decoloniality, reversing the usual dynamics of colonial racial capitalism from Africa to Europe by shifting the ownership of productive capital to the African state itself. 80This was stridently stated in a government memo, possibly authored by Margai himself, which read, “it is not my intention that the Sierra Leonians of the next generation should see casinos, hotels, etc., along the wonderful waterfront all owned by overseas investors.”81
- 82 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Marketing of Diamonds in Sierra Leone 1964-1966, Le (...)
- 83 Margai’s government gave at least implicit support to the Paramount Hotel project—the hotel receive (...)
38Margai’s commitment to a state-controlled tourist industry should be read alongside the colonially configured financial and legal structures controlling Sierra Leone’s extractive economy that he inherited on independence—in which the extraction of minerals and ores was firmly controlled by British-owned mining interests. While opposition politicians in Sierra Leone had called for the nationalization of these interests “as Britain has done with its mines and railways, etc.,” this was not a practical option for the government, given the high cost of compensation for lost monopoly rights.82 Therefore, tourist infrastructure was intended to facilitate further inflows of Western capital to a country where the key resources were already firmly enmeshed in business and financial structures controlled in Europe. At the same time, the construction of state-backed tourist infrastructure was intended to create a sector of the Sierra Leonean economy in which the government itself would own and directly control productive capital, in contrast to Sierra Leone’s otherwise extractive economy. In this way, the luxury hotel’s seemingly contradictory role in the economic imaginary of Sierra Leone’s political class resolves itself: it was to be both an exercise in capitalist pump priming and an agent in the decolonization of capital.83 The CDC’s framing of the Paramount Hotel’s ownership with the government in Freetown as the apparent majority shareholder may have been a gesture of deference to these ambitions. But whereas Margai had privileged the state ownership of hotel infrastructure as a tool to promote inward investment into Sierra Leone, the financial apparatus surrounding the Paramount Hotel in fact did the very opposite, as we have seen, channeling profit and loan interest back to the British state.
- 84 Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism, op. cit. (note 6), p. 31.
- 85 Ibid.
- 86 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched, op. cit. (note 78), p. 122.
39To return to the photograph of the DELCO reception taking place in the banqueting hall of the Paramount Hotel, this image is revealing of the spatial forms that neo-colonialism took. For Kwame Nkrumah, neo-colonialism amounted to a change in the political “form” but not the economic content of the relationships between the new sovereign states and their erstwhile colonial masters.84 Nkrumah defined neo-colonialism as something directed from imperial centers, by and through expatriate businesses: mining consortia, banks, shipping firms. These, for Nkrumah, were the “carpet-baggers of the African revolt against colonialism.”85 Nkrumah’s ideas developed in dialogue with the writer and anti-colonial freedom fighter Frantz Fanon. But the key difference between Fanon and Nkrumah’s readings of neo-colonialism was where they laid the agency—or blame—for the phenomenon. Fanon maintained that neo-colonialism developed as a result of the complacency of the local bourgeoisie who, he stated, acted as the “transmission line” of international capitalism’s control of independent states.86 If the Paramount Hotel’s lobby and bar facilitated social contact, and thereby deal-making, between expatriate businessmen, its restaurants, as the setting for banquets and receptions, facilitated meeting between expatriate businessmen and the local political elites upon whom the neo-colonial system relied. The image of Sir Milton Margai, standing alongside the Chairman, Managing Director and Resident Director of DELCO, celebrating the 30 years of DELCO’s extraction of iron ore from Sierra Leone, brings these two theories of neo-colonialism into alignment within the banqueting hall of the Paramount Hotel. Nkrumah’s “carpet-baggers” are represented by DELCO’s directors, while Fanon’s “through-line” is personified in the figure of Sir Milton Margai. For whatever Margai’s ambitions for a state-owned tourist industry, the Paramount Hotel was conceptualized by its British backers as a linchpin in a quite different economic future for Sierra Leone.
Conclusion
- 87 Liverpool (United Kingdom), University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives, Papers of Jam (...)
40The shining white concrete walls of the Paramount Hotel, gleaming on the sides of Tower Hill adjacent to the Sierra Leone State House, are revealed here as a far from straightforward symbol of independence. While the architectural press hoped that Cubitt’s West African buildings would inculcate “a loyalty to a departed sovereign unique in the annals of empire,” the Colonial Office bluntly defended its investments in Freetown as necessary to ensure British access to Sierra Leone’s natural resources in a post-independence world.87
41The Paramount Hotel stands as evidence for the equivocal, uneven, and fraught processes of political and economic decolonization that accompanied the ends of British imperial rule. For its architect, the commission was a profitable one in a swathe of global, or at least imperial, commissions derived from late colonial development projects—and private sector work in colonies and former colonies. For politicians in Freetown led by Sir Milton Margai, the Paramount Hotel was freighted with importance as evidence for a viable future, and a technology that would achieve that future, by facilitating both future inward investment and as an agent in the decolonization of a foreign-dominated economy, since it would theoretically carve out an economic sector where the African state could own productive capital. For its British backers, I argue, the building was conceptualized as a tool in enacting an entirely different kind of future, as a facilitatory space in the new post-imperial world of British-owned capital and its newly transient human agents. Anthony King described the bungalow in Africa as being a tool of colonialism as valuable as the Enfield Rifle and the Railways: all three technologies acted together to allow a small number of permanent resident staff to rule over large swathes of territory. Neo-colonialism didn’t need this kind of permanence. Instead, it relied on architectures of transience, like the international airport and the luxury hotel.
- 88 Vanessa Ogle, “Funk Money,” op. cit. (note 11), p. 216.
- 89 Manuel Herz, African Modernism, op. cit. (note 3), p. 387.
- 90 See the extensive scholarship on tropical modernism cited in footnote 12. This position is also cri (...)
- 91 See Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra and Claire Tunstall, Architecture, E (...)
42To understand “decolonization as an economic and financial event,” we must rethink architectural modernism in mid-century West Africa.88 The historiography of modernist architecture as practiced by European emigres in West Africa has tended to frame modernism as either an expression of independence itself,89 or a product of the developmental turn in late colonial management.90 But in West Africa, as imperial rule gave way to independence, modernist architecture was also used to mask the continuation of colonial patterns of capital and resource extraction by the interests of British capital: warehouses, factories, department stores, and housing developments built by British firms in modernist forms were used to suggest that foreign capital was making a contribution to the modernization and “development,” even the “decolonization” of West African states.91 Here, I have presented a connected but different argument: that the project of independence brought with it entirely new typologies of modernist architecture in the luxury hotel, which moreover furthered contradictory imagined economic futures. Modernist architecture could then serve both the interests of the African state remaking itself on independence, and policymakers in the former colonial metropole pursuing the neo-colony.
Notes
1 Liverpool (United Kingdom), University of Liverpool Special Collections, Papers of James Archibald Cubitt, James Cubitt & Partners Publicity Material, Practice Brochure, JWC/2/1/1.
2 Starting with the Hotel Conakry, completed in Conakry in 1954 to designs by Atelier LWD with interiors by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé, and up to and including the Hotel Abidjan built 1960-70, the 1950s and 1960s saw a proliferation of new luxury hotels across the region.
3 Manuel Herz, African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence: Ghana, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, Zurich: Park Books, 2015, p. 385. Beyond the straightforwardly celebratory account given by Herz, the small body of writing on the luxury hotel in the region has contrasts the scale of these ambitions with the subsequent troubled trajectory of post-colonial West Africa, framing the luxury hotel as something of a failed telos. The Hotel Africa in Monrovia has been especially instrumentalized in this regard. See: Danny Hoffman, Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017; and Malkit Shoshan (no date), “Hotel Africa and the Crumbling of Modernity,” Canadian Centre for Architecture. URL: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/74058/hotel-africa-and-the-crumbling-of-modernity. Accessed 27 November 2024.
4 For the place of the hotel lobby in the imaginary of the global north, see: Siegfried Kracauer, “The Hotel Lobby,” first published in 1925, republished in translation in 1999 Postcolonial Studies vol. 2, no 3, 1999, p. 289-297; and Tom Avermaete, “The Architectonics of the Hotel Lobby: the Norms and Forms of A Public-Private Figure” in Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey (eds.), Hotel Lobbies and Lounges: The Architecture of Professional Hospitality, London: Routledge, 2013 (Interior Architecture), p. 59-71. For how luxury hotels were narrated as nationally significant projects in West Africa, see Nate Plageman, “‘Accra is Changing, isn’t it?’: Urban Infrastructure, Independence and the Nation in the Gold Coast’s Daily Graphic, 1954-1957,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2010, p. 137-159. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25741400. Accessed 27 November 2024.
5 See Mike Cowan, “Early Years of the Colonial Development Corporation: British State Enterprise Overseas during Late Colonialism,” African Affairs, vol. 83, no. 330, 1984, p. 63-75. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/721459. Accessed 27 November 2024. Michael McWilliams, The Development Business: A History of the Colonial Development Corporation, London: Palgrave MacMillan 2001. Charlotte Lydia Riley, “The Winds of Change are Blowing Economically: The Labour Party and British Overseas Development 1940s-1960s” in Andrew Smith and Chris Jeppesen (eds.), Britain, France and the Decolonisation of Africa: Future Imperfect, London: UCL Press, 2017, p. 43-61. The role that the CDC played as an architectural agent is, however, largely absent from these accounts, a lacuna this article sets out to fill. Cubitt’s career and body of work await a full academic appraisal.
6 Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Bedford: Panaf, 2004, p. ix. For an account of the shifting readings of neocolonialism over time, see Godfrey N. Uzoigwe “Neocolonialism Is Dead: Long Live Neocolonialism,” Journal of Global South Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2019, p. 59-87.
7 Poppy Cullen, Kenya and Britain after Independence: Beyond Neocolonialism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series), p. 8.
8 VY Mundimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988 (African Systems of Thougt), p. 14.
9 See: Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017 (Culture, Politics and the Built Environment); Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, London: Routledge, 1997 (Planning, History and the Environment series); and Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, London: Routledge, 1984.
10 Anon, “The Bristol Hotel, Lagos” The West African Builder & Architect, vol. 3, no. 4 July-August 1963, p.62-65; and Anon, “Ikoyi Hotel: Ronald Ward & Partners,” The West African Builder & Architect, vol. 6, no. 3 May-June 1966, p. 44-47. For more on the planning of the Bristol Hotel see Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, “The Lagos Hotel Affair: Negotiating Modernism in the Late Colonial Domain,” DOCOMOMO Journal, vol. 28, 2003, p. 58-61. The British government also funded the construction of the Ambassador Hotel in Accra, papers related to this suggest that the Ghanaian government primarily viewed the hotel as a locus of diplomacy. Accra (Ghana), Public Records and Archives Administration of Ghana, Works: Ambassador Hotel, Construction of, RG5/1/63. In addition, the CDC contributed to the extension of the Central Hotel in Kano. See: London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development: Hotels Nigeria, CO852/1800.
11 Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s-1970s,” The American Historical Review, vol. 122, no. 5, 2017, p. 1431-1458, p. 1438. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1431. For more work in this vein see also, Idem, “Funk Money: The End of Empires, The Expansion of Tax Havens and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event,” Past & Present, vol. 249, 2020, p. 213-249. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa001.
12 Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, London: Routledge 2003 (British Art and Visual Culture since 1750), p. 127. See also: Hannah Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Modernism,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, 2003 p. 337-354. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1360236032000134835; Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa. The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew 1946-1956,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 65 June 2006, p. 188-215. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/25068264. Iain Jackson and Jessica Holland, Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics, London: Ashgate, 2014 (Ashgate Studies in Architecture); Jiat Hwee-Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience, London: Routledge, 2016 (The Architect series); Daniel Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.
13 Bruce Berman, quoted by Poppy Cullen, Kenya and Britain, op. cit. (note 7), p. 8.
14 Ruth Craggs, “Towards a Political Geography of Hotels: Southern Rhodesia, 1958-1961,” Political Geography, vol. 31, 2012, p. 215-224. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.02.002.
15 For the idea of the future in relation to decolonization see Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021, p. 4 and p. 44. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/mbem16028. Accessed 6 December 2024.
16 The hotel was subsequently extended by Cubitt in the mid-1960s. It was severely damaged during the Sierra Leone Civil War and was rebuilt as the Ministry of Defense.
17 In a move that strongly suggests how Cubitt envisioned the hotel would be run, segregated accommodation for “European” and “African” personnel was provided on separate floors.
18 See footnote 12 for the scholarship on tropical modernism.
19 Anon, “James Cubitt: Recent Buildings in the Gold Coast,” Architectural Review, vol. 119, no. 742, May 1956, p. 230-241, p. 230.
20 Alan Powers, “James Cubitt,” in Muriel Emmanuel (eds.), Contemporary Architects, London: St James Press, 1994, p. 211-212.
21 Ibid.
22 An office in Libya was later established in 1965-1971 to oversee the construction of Garyounis Universityin Benghazi—showing how imperial experience could be parlayed into general “development” expertise beyond the boundaries of the empire.
23 The extensive literature on colonial development is summarized in Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, p. 5-23. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26265901. Accessed 6 December 2024.
24 Alan Powers, “James Cubitt,” op. cit. (note 20), p. 211.
25 Ibid.
26 Anon, “Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects: James Cubitt & Partners.” URL: https://architecture.arthistoryresearch.net/firms/cubitt-james-partners. Accessed 15 May 2024.
27 Daniel Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, op. cit. (note 12), p. 102.
28 Jessica Lynn Pearson, “Decolonizing the Skies: Global Air Travel at the End of Empire,” Humanity, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2023, p. 68-84, p. 73. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hum.2023.a902631.
29 G.J. Williams and D.F. Hayward, “Recent Development of the Sierra Leone Airways System,” Geography, vol. 58, no. 1, 1973, p. 58-61.
30 For more on the colonial history of Sierra Leone, see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
31 Selection Trust was a clearing house registered on the London Stock Exchange for the sale of shares in mining interests, which also actively prospected for minerals in a global business empire that was “sheltered but not confined by colonial rule.” A.G. Hopkins, “Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870-1945,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 38, no. 2, 2010, p. 348-350. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03086531003744120. In point of fact, the entity to be credited for the discovery of Sierra Leone’s diamonds was a contentious issue, with both the government’s mining department and the SLST claiming responsibility. London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Sierra Leone Selection Trust 1951-1958, Record of a Meeting held in the colonial office with representatives of the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, 6 August 1953, CAOG14/153.
32 Ibid.
33 See correspondence in file, London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Diamonds: Formation of the Sierrea Leone Selection Trust 1936-1950, CAOG 14/152.
34 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation: Policy on Activities in Sierra Leone After Independence, Memo from Lee to Kisch, 5 July 1960, T 296/6.
35 For contemporary accounts of Freetown see Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps, London: Heinemann, 1935; Elspeth Huxley, Four Guineas: A Journey Through West Africa, London: Chatto and Windus, 1954; Iain Fleming, The Diamond Smugglers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1957.
36 Port Sunlight, (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, papers of the United Africa Company Sierra Leone Relations with Government file, Letter from Pedler to William Brown of Boston University, 8 April 1957. Also A.H.M. Kirke-Green, “Dorman, Sir Maurice Henry (1912-1993),” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. URL: https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-51841. Accessed 6 December 2024.
37 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Hotel Development by CDC in Colonies in West Africa, Letter from Sir Maurice Dorman to Lord Reith, 14 June 1958, CO852/1604.
38 Joao Sarmento and Denis Linehan, “The Colonial Hotel: Spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique,” Environment and Planning, vol. 37, 2019, p. 276-293, p. 276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818800719.
39 London, (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Hotel Development by CDC in Colonies in West Africa, Letter from Sir Maurice Dorman to Lord Reith, 14 June 1958, CO852/1604.
40 Ibid. Rather desperately, Dorman invoked an upcoming royal visit as justification for the new hotel.
41 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, op. cit. (note 15), p. 44.
42 Tom Avermaete, “The Architectonics of the Hotel Lobby,” op. cit. (note 4), p. 60.
43 Mike Cowan, “Early Years,” op. cit. (note 5), p. 68.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Tourist Development in East Africa, “Holiday Lands at All Points of the Compass” CO822/153/3.
47 More work is needed to flesh out this aspect of planning at the ends of empire, but the movement of money from East Africa to emergent tax havens in the Caribbean as white settlers left the Kenya and Uganda colonies cannot be co-incidental. See Vanessa Ogle, “Funk Money”, op. cit. (note 11).
48 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Commonwealth Liaison Committee Report by the Working Group on Tourism, Tourist Development in East Africa, CO 822/153/3.
49 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation Hotels West Africa, Memo from Harris to Davies, 15 October 1958, CO852/1604.
50 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation: Policy on Activities in Sierra Leone, Memo from Lee to Kisch, 5 July 1960, T 296/6.
51 London (United Kingdom), the National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation: Hotels West Africa, Application for Capital Sanction, CO852/1604.
52 Ibid.
53 Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism, op. cit. (note 6), p. xv.
54 This can also be seen in the contract to construct the hotel which was awarded to Taylor Woodrow Sierra Leone, a locally registered subsidiary of a British contracting giant. For more on Taylor Woodrow in West Africa see Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra and Iain Jackson, “Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa,” Architecture Beyond Europe, no. 23, 2024, p. 1-38. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12ebk; and Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra and Claire Tunstall, Architecture Empire and Trade: The United Africa Company (Forthcoming).
55 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Colonial Development Corporation Sierra Leone—Policy, Memorandum from Galsworthy, 13 June 1960, CO/853/1806.
56 These were described as “charming” in the 1950s. Roy Lewis, Sierra Leone: A Modern Portrait, London: HMSO, 1954, p. 198.
57 Port Sunlight (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, UAC Board minutes, 18 January 1965, UAC/1/1/2/1/3/11.
58 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, CO852/1800, Colonial Development: Hotels Nigeria, Letter from Totman to Burr, 30 November 1962.
59 Anon, “The Bristol Hotel,” op. cit. (note 10), p. 62.
60 Anon, “Ikoyi Hotel,” op. cit. (note 10), p. 44.
61 Anon, “Paramount Hotel, Freetown” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962, p. 70-73.
62 Ibid.
63 Anon, “The Bristol Hotel,” op. cit. (note 10), p. 62.
64 Ibid., p. 65.
65 See Iain Jackson, Erhabor Ogieva Emokpae (1934-1984) and the Timber Carving at Unilever. URL: https://transnationalarchitecture.group/2024/01/18/erhabor-ogieva-emokpae-1934-1984-and-the-timber-carving-at-unilever/. Accessed 15 May 2024.
66 Manuel Herz, African Modernism, op. cit. (note 3), p. 387.
67 Roy Lewis, Sierra Leone, op. cit. (note 56) p. 191. Here Lewis is referring to a middle-class shopping street in London’s West End.
68 See John Cartwright, Political Leadership in Sierra Leone, London: Croom Helm, 1978, for an account of Margai’s ideology.
69 Ibid, p. 93.
70 For the architectural ramifications of this in nearby Ghana, see Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.
71 Port Sunlight (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, papers of the United Africa Company, Report on Communist Penetration in Africa, (1962), UAC/1/9/1/6/14.
72 Port Sunlight (United Kingdom), Unilever Archives, papers of the United Africa Company Sierra Leone Relations with Government file, transcript of a speech by Sir Milton Margai, UAC/1/3/5/3/1-3.
73 Freetown (Sierra Leone), Sierra Leone National Archives, Negotiations for an Hotel, “Tourism in Sierra Leone,” 7 April 1961, Box 659.
74 Freetown (Sierra Leone), Sierra Leone National Archives, Hotel and Tourist Development, Brian LEVY, Sierra Leone: How to Activate the Tourist Industry, Box 659.
75 Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism”, op. cit. (note 11), p. 1438.
76 Panayiota Pyla, “Leisure and Geo-Economics: The Hilton and Other Development Regimes in the Mediterranean South,” in Aggregate, Architectural History Collaborative (Arindam Dutta , Ijlal M. Muzaffar, and Fabiola López-Durán), Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South, London: Routledge, 2022, p. 381-400.
77 Ibid. See also, Davide Spina, “Grand Hotel,” gta Papers, no. 4, 2020, p. 127-151.
78 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, [First published as Les Damnés de la Terre, Paris: François Maspéro, 1961 (Cahiers libres, 27-28)], London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001, p. 123.
79 “Tourism in Sierra Leone,” op. cit. (note 73). The last phrase is likely a quotation from a speech by Kwame Nkrumah.
80 Panayiota Pyla, “Leisure and Geo-Economics,” op. cit. (note 76), p. 385.
81 “Tourism in Sierra Leone,” op. cit. (note 73).
82 London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Marketing of Diamonds in Sierra Leone 1964-1966, Letter from Rutherford to Davies, 4 November 1966, DO221/17.
83 Margai’s government gave at least implicit support to the Paramount Hotel project—the hotel received its final sign-off during a summit of Sierria Leonean ministers and British officials held in London to agree financial arrangements alongside the timetable for Sierra Leone’s independence. See correspondence in file London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Hotel Development by CDC in Colonies in West Africa, Letter from Sir Maurice Dorman to Lord Reith, 14 June 1958, CO852/1604.
84 Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism, op. cit. (note 6), p. 31.
85 Ibid.
86 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched, op. cit. (note 78), p. 122.
87 Liverpool (United Kingdom), University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives, Papers of James Cubitt & Partners, Publicity and News Clippings JWC/2/1/2 and London (United Kingdom), The National Archives, Memorandum From Galsworthy, 13 June 1960, CO 852/1806.
88 Vanessa Ogle, “Funk Money,” op. cit. (note 11), p. 216.
89 Manuel Herz, African Modernism, op. cit. (note 3), p. 387.
90 See the extensive scholarship on tropical modernism cited in footnote 12. This position is also critiqued by West African scholars, who suggest that there are multiple forms of modernism that originated from within West Africa itself. See Ikem Steve Okoye, “Where Was Not Modernism?”. URL: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/77238/where-was-not-modernism. Accessed 6 December 2024.
91 See Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra and Claire Tunstall, Architecture, Empire and Trade, op. cit. (note 54). Chapters 11 and 12.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
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| Titre | Figure 1: The Paramount Hotel Exterior. |
| Crédits | Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 516k |
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| Titre | Figure 2: The Paramount Hotel Ground Floor and Basement Plans. |
| Légende | Key: Basement Floor Plan: 1 African Staff, 2 Laundry, 3 Boiler House, 4 Cooking Areas, 5 Stores Area, 6 Large Restaurant, 7 Small Restaurant, 8 Bar, 9 Terrace, 10 Plant Room, 11 Water Storage Tank. Ground Floor Plan: 1 Entrance, 2 Lounge, 3 Breakfast Room, 4 Main Bar, 5, Terrace, 6 Reception, 7 Accounts Office, 8 Manager’s Office, 9 Managers Suite, 10 Public Lavatories, 11 Concessions, 12 European Staff Quarters, 13 Open Court. |
| Crédits | Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 159k |
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| Titre | Figure 3: The Paramount Hotel Lobby. |
| Crédits | Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-3.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 271k |
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| Titre | Figure 4: The Paramount Hotel Bar. |
| Crédits | Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-4.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 272k |
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| Titre | Figure 5: The Bristol Hotel, Lagos, exterior. |
| Crédits | Source: “Bristol Hotel Lagos, Architects: Architects Co-Partnership,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 3, no. 4, July/August 1963. Original copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-5.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 96k |
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| Titre | Figure 6: Interiors of the Bristol Hotel, Lagos. |
| Crédits | Source: “Hotel at Lagos. Architects: Architects Co-Partnership,” The Architectural Review, vol. 117, no. 699, March 1955, p. 184. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-6.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 549k |
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| Titre | Figure 7: The Ikoyi Hotel, Lagos. |
| Crédits | Source: From an original in a private collection. Copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-7.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 377k |
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| Titre | Figure 8: Poolside, the Ikoyi Hotel, Lagos. |
| Crédits | Source: “Ikoyi Hotel: Ronald Ward & Partners,” The West African Builder & Architect, vol. 6, no. 3, May/June 1966. Original copyright holder unknown. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-8.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 515k |
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| Titre | Figure 9: The Chairman of Sierra Leone Development Company. |
| Légende | “The Chairman Of Sierra Leone Development Company, Mr SA Field and the Managing Director of the Company Mr James Campbell […] attended a reception at the Paramount Hotel. The Party which was given by the Resident Director of the Company in Sierra Leone, Mr TW Harvey to mark the 30th Anniversary of DELCO’s first shipment of Iron Ore from Pepel.” |
| Crédits | Source: I am grateful to Nafisatu Koroma for sharing this image and granting permission for its publication. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16767/img-9.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 189k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Ewan Harrison, « The Paramount Hotel, Freetown: Neocolonial Investment and the Business of Tropical Modernism in Sierra Leone », ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 13 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16767 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1393b
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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
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