La mia Africa: tra Blixen e Pasolini

A few years ago, within the Architecture/World section of the Festival dell'Architettura of Parma, in its second edition of 2005 titled Architecture: richness and poverty[1]  we went in search of figures and projects, native or allochthonous, that seemed to us worthy of attention for how they dealt with the theme of architecture in the so-called developing countries. Under the apparently general title there was the precise desire to invert the two words in polemical and reflective terms with the aim of arguing that so-called poor architecture was actually rich and authentic, even in meanings, while on the contrary rich architecture was often only a trivial display of wealth. Renato Pallavicini (2005), architect and journalist, accompanied an article in L’Unità, had juxtaposed the image of an agglomeration of straw houses in the Hidalgo valley in Mexico with the image of the skyscrapers of City Life in Milan. The contrast was not simply between architecture without architects, to quote Rudofsky, and designer architecture, but above all between authenticity and falsification.
On that occasion, a young Diébédo Francis Kéré came to Parma who, almost twenty years later, would be rightly consecrated with the Pritzer Prize for Architecture (the Nobel Prize for architecture), the Indian architect Raj Rewal, unknown to most but a figure of great interest in architecture and former professor at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi; we published projects by Kéré, ADAUA/Fabrizio Carola Group,  Patrick Dujarric, Abdalla Mohammed Sabbar, Demas Nwoko, Abderrahim Charai and Abdelaziz Lazrak, just to stay in Africa.
This was before a general interest in African architecture broke out, as evidenced by a considerable number of research and publications developed especially since the beginning of the new millennium – the exhibition at the Triennale Africa is worth mentioning Big change, big chance by Benno Albrecht (2014) – culminated with the entrustment of the direction of the 2024 Venice Architecture Biennale to the Ghanaian-born architect Lesley Lokko.
More recently, within a network of intercultural academic exchanges between European universities including the University of Parma and the University of Rwanda (Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education) I had the opportunity to confront myself with a young Dean who submitted to me the study structure of the courses of the School of Architecture and Built Environment of the Kigali RU. If in the print of more than three hundred sheets there had not been written at the foot of the page “University of Rwanda, Department of Architecture”, that order of studies with the relative contents of the individual courses, educational objectives, reference bibliography, etc., could have been mistaken for any university course of study in Europe or perhaps in the world, so general was it, international and little characterized with respect to the territory in which it stood. I learned that the School of Architecture was born in 2009 with a European approach, not because of yet another act of cultural colonialist imposition, but because the leaders of the University of Rwanda at the time saw in the international generalist approach the possibility of inserting itself into a global circuit of university education in architecture and architecture in general, which was well framed in the broader phenomenon of Globalization.
On the contrary, a counter-colonial movement was emerging to export a thought on architecture that recovered local building and linguistic traditions, modernizing them without imposing “out of place” techniques (interpreting this term in both a literal and metaphorical sense) that laid the foundations of an awareness as a cultural conquest that began to generate interesting results such as those we witnessed in that edition of the Architecture Festival,  unfortunately the only one not to have seen a printed catalog published.
Nothing more came of that project to reform the educational system – the shared idea was to characterize the training course according to the principles of architecture and cities of tropical places – but from the discussions with Manlio Michieletto, former professor at the Institute Superiore d’Architecture et Urbanisme in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then Dean of the School of Architecture and Built Environment of the University of Rwanda the idea of deepening the theme of sub-Saharan tropical architecture remained. It can be said, therefore, that the idea of the monographic issue of FAM was born on that occasion.
Within the magazine we had already delved into the themes related to the critical Regionalism of Framptonian memory – to which the theme of African tropical architecture is evidently linked – within which Anna Bruna Menghini (2022) speaking of Sub-Saharan Africa in an article, to which we refer for a concise but exhaustive historical-architectural historical-critical analysis of Africa, posed the problem of the cultural identity of a vast and complex continent with a difficult history.
This aspect of contrasting characters is emphasized by many: Africa is a variegated continent made up of “vast prehistoric landscapes, its miserable villages inhabited by a peasant and primitive humanity, two or three very modern cities that were already industrial and proletarian.” These are the words of Alberto Moravia who shares with Pasolini and Elsa Morante the journey first to India and then to Africa in search of cinematographic settings. This crude contrast, which recalls the Pallavicini approach reported above, was the basis of Pasolini’s idea of constructing a Poem on the Third World in the form of an episodic film. (Chiacchiararelli 2013)

The episode shot in Africa will have as its specific theme the relationship between “white” culture (Western: i.e. rationalistic and typical of a bourgeois and already completely industrialized world) and “colored” culture, i.e. archaic, popular, pre-industrial and pre-bourgeois (with the conflict that follows, and all its dramatic ambiguities, its insoluble knots). (Pasolini 1968)