Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973 by Ayala Levin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973 by Ayala Levin Kwaku Nti Levin, Ayala. Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Ayala Levin projects the otherwise obscure role of Israeli technical aid amid the crucial African political elite efforts in preferring other countries as alternatives to erstwhile colonial powers in the development of the built environment across the continent. This kind of collaboration that amounted to a transgression of [End Page 215] old colonial hierarchies thrived on official Israeli overtures preceding African independence much to the objection of Britain. Accordingly, Levin points out that Israeli officials offered the emerging African governments "the services of the Israeli construction company Solel Boneh, as well as those of other governmental companies … a cooperative organization established in 1920 that laid the foundation for the Israeli state's institutional infrastructure and political leadership in its first decade of statehood" (2). Levin consequently challenges prevailing understanding of development discourses as homogeneous with the technocrats thereof as incorporeal. Again, this book draws attention to oblivious issues in the broader development scholarship as the author introduces the trope of competition. She avers that "in the competition over development aid in Africa, incited by decolonization and the global Cold War, new centers of knowledge production emerged and, with them, the opportunity for African governments to negotiate with various aid donors and choose the forms of aid … the competition over aid allowed room for sophisticated maneuvering even between countries associated with the same bloc" (3). These manipulations in this increasingly competitive development market saw old and new international actors joggling with each other, tearing down colonial monopolies as the latter acted as proxies for the new superpowers or assumed independent positions per Non-Aligned Movement interventions. In this context, then, Israel as a "developing country" becomes an unrelenting major actor on the African continent. This scenario introduces another category "between the global North and the global South that complicates existing narratives of development and directs attention to the diverse social and political stakes that undergirded north-south exchanges" (3). Architecture, therefore, in the estimation of Levin, becomes a discipline that offers an unassailable possibility for the exploration of this complicated historical phenomenon. Israel, in these endeavors, developed a self-fashioned geopolitical position in its dealings with African governments, structuring its various aid offers as cooperation given their perceived shared historical experiences. All these things happened amid the subtle facilitation of Israeli interests and avowed national ideologies, both of which hardly ruled out nuanced occurrences and cases of inconsistences as well as contradictions. According to Levin, the epistemological framework for the Israeli approach to Africa hinged on Theodor Herzl's 1902 utopian novel, Altneuland. The imagined forms of knowledge production in this novel utilized the Jewish colonial experience that would prove beneficial to the [End Page 216] African continent. To this end, then, "Herzl, the visionary of political Zionism, shifted the center of colonial knowledge production from European metropoles to the Jewish settlements in Palestine" (13). At best, in application to the African continent, this knowledge comprised "labor-pioneer … and concrete in the harsh conditions of the field" (13). In putting this book together, Levin develops a conceptual framework of development theater explains the dramatization of aid among donor and recipient countries and upholds the role of what she calls architectural modernism. All these ideas are beautifully developed in five highly informative chapters with an introduction and a postscript as well as copious endnotes to boot. Chapter 1 is set in Sierra Leone, where an Israeli father–son architectural team relied on the experience of designing and building the Knesset to do the same for the parliament of this African country. As the local media highlighted the visibility of the project and the performance of labor, it equally emphasized the entire process as well as the agency of the citizenry. Aryeh Doudai's national urbanization plan, again for Sierra Leone, takes center stage in chapter 2. In this project, his redefinition of the entire country in identifying potential future urban centers in its interior, also an idea...