The Foreign and the Local in Architectural Education in Late Colonial and Post-Independence East Africa

Abstract

This paper delves into the development of architectural education in East Africa—current-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—and the underlying socio-cultural, economic, and political factors that contributed to this during the latter half of the twentieth century. The establishment of architectural training in the region after the Second World War responded to a need for technical expertise to work on the increasing number of projects across the region. While political independence was attained in the 1960s, architecture as a profession with ideas deeply rooted in historical antecedents, the education of architects continued largely unchanged, transcended this milestone. This apparent contradiction in contemporary architectural education is the point of departure for this paper which examines the origins of architectural education in East Africa, continuing to discuss the key factors that influences the developments in education and practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the emergence of winds of change emerging from practice, a shift in the role of architecture in addressing the “African condition” and in so doing influencing the direction of architectural education. The paper is developed as a broad historical investigation, acknowledging the lack of readily accessible documentation across the region, making use of creative ways of gathering material, constructing evidence from often fragmented knowledge sources.