Ruins of the Yet-to-Come
Consider these two events, some 50 years apart. The first: the opening of Sierra Leone’s House of Parliament on the occasion of the country’s first Independence Day on April 27, 1961. The second: the holding of a Sunday mass in a grandiose Baptist church in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 2013. In both cases, the ceremonial happenings occurred in incomplete structures that could have been mistaken for abandoned ruinous buildings. These functioning half-built structures signify a specific form of temporality; they are caught between their ruin-like semi-functioning present and their arrested future aspirations. I encountered the church among such many half-built structures while doing research in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia in 2011-2013 for my book Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958-1973. The essay that follows tries to come to terms with the vertiginous effect of researching sub-Saharan African states’ archive of decolonization and independence as experienced from the vestiges of their unfulfilled promises and the contemporary precarity of African cities.
1961: The Sierra Leone House of Parliament, a result of hasty construction that began just a few months prior to independence, had a fully furnished and air-conditioned assembly hall complete for the opening ceremony (Figure 1). While the local media lauded the completion of the chamber in time for Independence Day as a constructional tour de force, it resembled nothing more than a concrete water tank when seen from the city. The walls were covered up with flags to mitigate their bareness, but they were also used to absorb the water of an unfortunate flood a week before Independence Day. In the original plan the assembly hall was enclosed by a concrete and glass envelope, to which was attached an additional office wing for the Members of Parliament. But at the time of independence, this structure was still underway, and the honorary guests and dignified MPs had to carefully manage their steps as they approached the chamber. As if to compensate for the deficiency, a model of the complete building welcomed them as they passed underneath the scaffolding (Figure 2).
Figure 1. The Sierra Leone House of Parliament assembly hall interior, Freetown, Sierra Leone, April 1961. Reproduced with permission by Zvi Meltzer.
Figure 2. Architect Dov Karmi (second from the left) presents the model of the parliament to Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, with Sierra Leone prime minister Sir Milton Margai on the right, Freetown, Sierra Leone, April 1961. Reproduced with permission by Zvi Meltzer.
2013: In a visit to Ibadan in Oyo State, Nigeria, I passed by a church structure in a curving street facing what seemed like a military headquarters. I took pictures through the cab’s window in a fortuitous (but not so rare) occasion when a convoy of dignitaries passed through the narrow street, and the cab was relegated to the side of the road. This allowed me to photograph in a location that would usually draw the guard’s unfavorable attention across the street. It was not merely the bare concrete frame of the church’s grand and elaborate structure that triggered my curiosity– as half-built structures or completed but uninhabited buildings are a common sight in Nigeria – but it was rather the furniture inside (Figure 3). The plastic chairs, the tablecloth covering a table, the garbage bin outside, as well as the adjacent signboard stating the name and function of the structure, all conferred a sense of proud occupancy of a building that would otherwise appear abandoned.
Figure 3. Mokola Baptist Church, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, 2013. Photography by the author.
In this alone, this church is no different from the many other buildings left incomplete, but not unattended, in the region. Incomplete structures are the most visible and physical manifestations of the state of crisis and its entailing forms of subjecthood in African societies over the last few decades -- especially since the 1980s as a result of the neoliberalization of African economies through structural adjustment programs. Incomplete structures have the potential to represent the changing conditions of their becoming, as traces of the administrative and financial mechanisms that set the ground for their incompletion. Yet the temporality experienced in a state of crisis eclipses historical perspective or accountability.
“These functioning half-built structures signify a specific form of temporality; they are caught between their ruin-like semi-functioning present and their arrested future aspirations.”
Figure 4. Obafemi Awolowo University Guest House, Ife, Osun State, Nigeria, 2013. Photography by the author. The first two floors of the incomplete wing are semi-operational with laundry facilities and cheaper hostel rooms.
With no historical outlook, the future is blocked, and so is the horizon of possibilities that could transcend the system of constraints imposed by this constant state of crisis. For lack of foreseeable better options, people resort to an improvisatory mode of inhabiting these spaces. In this process, these structures’ incompleteness becomes normalized and incorporated into the daily living experience. For example, a walk on a central street in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, might include the bypassing of a concrete staircase projected towards the sky, which was supposed to be linked to a pedestrian bridge that was never built. This monumental piece of exposed concrete takes away from the already narrow non-paved road margins pedestrians use in the dusty crowded streets. But there are also aesthetically pleasing moments among such street-life prosaic challenges. Such, for example, is another incomplete edifice in Ibadan, whose spacious foyer is used for the display of sofas for sale. The unplastering serves as foil for the sofas’ shimmering colorful scheme, enhancing their attractiveness.
Unlike the limited use of these incomplete structures or their adaptation for other uses as in the case of the makeshift furniture store, the incompleteness of the church offers a different logic. Rather than an adjustment to the state of crisis, the church embraces it, using it as its motivating force. The building’s incompleteness is employed as a tool to form and fortify the congregation, as its members are asked to serve not only in its spiritual, but also physical formation. Holding ceremonies underneath the bare structure emphasizes the need for the community of believers to continue their monetary contribution. Built piecemeal, congregants witness the coming into being of their own financial and spiritual investment, while the ever-continuous construction serves to perpetuate the solicitation of funds.
The church’s logic of construction echoes that of the Sierra Leone House of Parliament five decades earlier. The curious inversion, in which the assembly hall’s interiors were fully furnished and operational before the building was completed, was the result of the pressing deadline of Independence Day, which was decided in London with less than a year’s notice. Solel Boneh -- the Israeli construction company that upon this commission set up the Sierra Leone National Construction Company (SLNCC) in a local partnership with the Sierra Leone government – won the commission because it agreed to a fast timetable of seven months. However, the partial construction of the parliament was not a breach of contract or a failure to deliver on time. The contract stipulated that the construction take place in three phases: The first phase included “The Chamber, with such other work as the Contractor is able to complete but at least sufficient to give access to the various levels of the Chamber by Independence Day.” Stage two included the remaining structural work, and stage three the finishing work. In a reversal of typical construction procedures, the schedule prioritized the operational capacity of the building over its completion.
The hastiness with which the building was designed and constructed resulted in a large expenditure that the government could not control or foresee. For this reason, the government ordered to slow down construction after the celebrations were over. No more a pressing concern after independence, the construction company finished part of the plan, while abandoning less visible areas such as the basement, and leaving the MP offices’ wing unrealized.
Preempting possible local criticisms of the postcolonial government over the failure to complete the building in time for independence, the Sierra Leonean leadership turned it into a symbol of national becoming. On the occasion of the building’s inauguration, the Speaker of the House declared: “It is symbolical that at Independence only the chamber of our Parliament Building is as yet in a state of readiness and that vast amount of work has still to be done before the entire structure will be complete. This reminds us that as a new nation the attainment of Independence is only a start on the road, probably hard and long...” As in the case of the church’s congregation, in this address to the young Sierra Leonean nation the figure of incompleteness served as a vehicle for mobilization. The fact of independence was not enough, it was implied, to guarantee development and modernization, and neither was foreign aid: the responsibility for that was relegated from the government to the citizens themselves.
“With no historical outlook, the future is blocked, and so is the horizon of possibilities that could transcend the system of constraints imposed by this constant state of crisis. For lack of foreseeable better options, people resort to an improvisatory mode of inhabiting these spaces.”
In both cases, the church and the parliament, the unfinished structures are performative through their functioning interiors, unlike Potemkin towns that operate through their facades. In contrast to such empty shells – like the high rises built without infrastructure for water and electricity in the outskirts of Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, to legitimize governmental petrodollar expenditure -- the House of Parliament’s spectacular effect was reserved for the fully operational interiors. The chamber’s interiors were elaborately designed and executed with custom-made desks and imported built-in rotating leather chairs. The walls and ceiling were coated with grooved patterned timber plates designed for acoustics, and a gigantic generator ensured that no outside disturbances would compromise the air-conditioned event. The facilities of the parliament’s interiors were reserved for a privileged few. It was from this comfortable chamber that the call to engage in the “long and hard” work was addressed to the masses.
1967, the year that Israel occupied the Palestinian territories and its diplomatic efforts began to lose favor in Africa, also marked the beginning of a long, turbulent period in the history of Sierra Leone, including military coups, a dictatorship, and a bloody civil war. In 1996, during a cease-fire, Sierra Leone held its first multiparty elections since 1978. One of the tasks the elected president determined to pursue as part of the rehabilitation of democracy in the country was the parliament’s completion. The government approached a descendant of Sonitra, the joint company Solel Boneh established in Cote d’Ivoire, with the expectation that it would finish the work that SLNCC had begun more than thirty years ago. A year later a military coup disrupted this plan yet again. In 2004, a Chinese construction company volunteered for the job. They built a new MPs’ office building and refurbished some parts of the original chamber. They could not, however, locate the source of some major leaks.
This case is a clear example of how construction is entangled in the long histories of international competition over diplomatic and commercial ties in the continent. Spanning across time and space from the colonial to the postcolonial, many foreign actors have been taking part in the piecemeal and discontinuous planning, construction and maintenance of the built environment in Sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a patchwork filled with redundancies and shortcomings as companies of differing nationalities work according to incompatible standards and measuring systems. As a Malabo city planner explained, “one company lays one cable. Later another company lays another cable. They cross... Another company comes in to fix it and another one collapses. It’s a repeating cycle.
This perception of history as a repeating cycle – as experienced by the subjects of crisis – points at an incomplete job, not only in terms of this or other construction project, but as an historical debt that cannot be completely redeemed. Following Ann Stoler, I suggest that it is the task of the historian to break away from this pessimistic teleology by turning “to ruins as epicenters of renewed claims, as history in spirited voice, as sites that animate new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected political projects.” When applied to postcolonial modernization projects, what is at stake is not the unfinished project of Modernity in the grand historical sense, but the various promises “development” held for African societies with decolonization and independence.
As premature ruins, incomplete structures stand more broadly for the dialectic tension the architecture of independence embodies between its dilapidated yet semi-functioning present and its claims on the future. Although a product of the geopolitical and economic constraints that limited post-colonial worldmaking, it also represents potentialities, or what Okwui Enwezor has called the “yet-to-come-modernity” of the African “aftermodern.” To break the teleology of crisis is to think of incomplete structures as vehicles signaling and carrying forward other, undreamt-of futures yet to come.
