A is for Architecture Podcast Itohan Osayimwese: Africa, ornament and architecture.
Mar 5, 2026
Itohan Osayimwese, Professor at Brown and author of Africa's Buildings, explores how colonial powers dismantled African architecture and reframed fragments as curiosities. She traces the practice from Roman Egypt to Benin 1897. Conversations cover ornament versus structure, museum alienation, teaching decolonial history, and creative approaches to restitution and reintegration of displaced architectural elements.
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Museum Fragments Skew African Architectural History
- Colonial-era museum photos often show only architectural fragments, obscuring whole-building contexts and skewing architectural history.
- Itohan Osayimwese discovered repeated museum holdings of veranda columns and carved fragments that replaced images of intact African buildings in archives.
Balance Canonical Training With Situated Global Histories
- Architectural education must balance disciplinary core (e.g., modernism) with global, situated histories that challenge teleological narratives.
- Itohan argues for experimenting with curricula to include non‑Western modernisms without erasing foundational disciplinary knowledge.
Benin 1897 Attack Used Looting As Political Weapon
- The 1897 British punitive attack on the Kingdom of Edo‑Bini removed thousands of cultural objects and burned the city, intentionally dismantling power and memory.
- British diaries explicitly linked seizure of art to disempowering Edo people by erasing material archives like Benin bronzes.
