PS30 Building Non-Alignment: Cooperation in the Global South, 1950s–80s

After its independence in 1956 from British colonization that had followed the Ottoman-Egyptian rule, Sudanese cities became the target of both power blocks of the cold-war, through “American aid” and “Chinese gifts.”  In this context, Sudanese architect Abdel Moneim Mustafa achieved a sophisticated practice that translated locally and globally produced climate-specific and modernist know-how, while designing residences for the new Sudanese political leaders, as well as office and education buildings in Khartoum. Bringing new materials from Mustafa’s abandoned archive and personal collections of his clients, students and co-workers, as well as the author’s on-site analysis, this paper will discuss the architect’s buildings through the lens of questions on healing from colonization. It will situate Mustafa’s practice in relation to local architectural centers and international networks in Khartoum, such as Alick Potter and Adil Mustafa Ahmad in the Department of Architecture at the University of Khartoum, and architectural and planning practices such as those of Constantinos Doxiadis, Petermüller and George Stafinidis. By thinking with Mustafa’s architectural approach, the paper will theorize on decolonization and redistribution as two non-exclusive but different models of post-colonial right-to-heal in the context of cold-war bi-polarities.  The theoretical framework of transitional justice and the reparations debate will help give a new comparative push to understanding architecture’s place in the making and unmaking of geopolitical domination. 

This paper argues that the principle of non-alignment was central to the process of decolonization of the construction industry in Ghana after its independence in 1957, or the emergence and emancipation of indigenous actors and institutions in charge of design and construction. While so understood decolonization was prepared in Ghana during the late colonial period (1949-57), its dynamics shifted in the wake of Ghana’s independence, when the country became one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

While from the colonial archives decolonization often looks as the closure of the former colonial markets, this paper shows that it meant just the opposite: a radical opening towards multiple sources of expertise. Accordingly, the development of architecture and construction in Non-Aligned Ghana was facilitated by resources and knowledge coming from Yugoslavia, India, and other NAM countries, but also from Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European socialist countries. I argue that this opening defined the dynamics of decolonization of the Ghanaian construction industry during the country’s first decade of independence. 

This argument will be developed by foregrounding African agency both in the sense of taking over positions of authority in design and construction, and as an ability to think architecture beyond the colonial precedents. This includes, first, focusing on the negotiation between the policies of supporting Ghanaian contractors and the establishment of state-owned construction industry, facilitated by non-aligned and socialist countries. Second, studying the decision-making processes of Ghanaian administrators, such as architect Vic Adegbite, largely based on comparison of architectural resources from within and across Cold War divides in order to adapt them for the purposes of Ghana. By discussing the emancipatory potential of these practices and the risks involved, this paper reconceptualizes decolonization as deeply entangled with, and dependent on, non-aligned internationalism.

The contours of the future Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) were laid at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 as an alternative geopolitical bloc of developing and newly independent nations. Unlike adherents of the dominant mutually opposed blocs, these states hoped to “stand alone” while cherishing a “unity in desire.” However, by appropriating older Dutch colonial buildings, the host neither stood alone nor celebrated its own diverse culture directed towards a new progressive, nationalist vision, falling instead upon familiar tropes.

This paper reads a narrative of NAM by looking at the conference venues where the non-alignment was performed, to argue that their conception as expressed by the articulation of the plenary hall questioned the founding hopes of the movement. While the movement itself attempted to challenge the world system and international politics, it remained largely unable to reshape the modern spatial norm of international venues by failing to consider constraints of resources, time and construction skill. The conferences of the 1970s hosted by the African countries, took place in new venues, some hurriedly built by the Yugoslav construction company Energoprojekt, aimed at responding to international and not local expectations. In 1983 India refurbished the plenary at an existing facility representative of revivalism in Indian Modernist architecture instead of engaging with its stated quest of forging new identities. This arc continued through Zimbabwe in 1986, when its new convention centre, also by Energoprojekt, took inspiration architecturally from the British Parliament, signaling a return to the symbols of the same colonial power that these countries had hoped to shun.

This itinerary of representation of these ‘constructed venues’ and a continuous struggle between decolonization and recolonization, is reported from the historically distinct backgrounds of Indonesia, Yugoslavia and India.

When the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria was officially inaugurated in July 1962, following a nearly decade-long war that ensured, among other things, the systematic forced displacement of millions of Algerians, Algiers became a self-proclaimed capital of burgeoning transnational liberation movements, many directly inspired by or engaged with the non-aligned movement. Under President Ahmed Ben Bella, these commitments were articulated most forcefully through the new policies of autogestion, or self-management. Often dismissed as simply the incomplete importation of economic reforms first instituted in Yugoslavia, Algeria’s embrace of autogestion had significant implications for architectural training, design practice, construction processes, and workers engaged in the building industry. Nowhere was this more evident than in a series of early housing experiments that were undertaken to renovate existing bidonvilles, or shantytowns, on the outskirts of Algiers and Oran. 

While Algeria’s distinctive architecture of autogestion has begun to be reexamined, the transnational networks through which these ideas circulated remain to be fully excavated. Révolution Africaine, the weekly magazine focused on politics and culture that was published by Ben Bella’s government and the FLN (National Liberation Front) provides powerful traces of these broad-ranging networks that built upon the legacies and the active rearticulation of the non-aligned movement. While focusing especially on experiments in housing that were informed by new structures for self-management in Algeria, Cuba, and Yugoslavia, this paper aims to reposition post-independence Algeria more broadly within previously overlooked transnational networks of decolonial solidarity and exchange across the global south.

At the 1963 First International Meeting of Architecture Professors and Students in Havana, Ernesto “Che” Guevara proclaimed a call to arms, literally calling architecture a weapon to be used in service of a global communist society. Guevara’s emphasis on the architect’s social duty above all else encapsulates the radical reconfiguring of architecture in Cuban society to serve the revolution’s political and social goals. While strongly tied to Moscow and fervently committed to communism, Cuba was also the most vocal Latin American member of the Non-Aligned Movement, which it joined in 1961. This paper explores the complex relationship between Cuba, its architecture, and the non-aligned movement, and in doing so points to the tenuousness of “non-alignment.”

Through examples of 1970s leisure structures, this research articulates the relationship between Cuban architectural projects and the state’s ideology and policy regarding non-alignment. It looks at the 1975 Hotel Dong Hoi in Hanoi, “gifted” to Vietnam by Cuba, to illustrate architecture’s role as a means of building international solidarity amongst the Global South. It interrogates how architecture was instrumentalized, for example, when the very system used to design the Hotel Dong Hoi, described as adapted to Vietnamese structural traditions, was also used across Cuba in numerous hotels described as characteristically Cuban. Finally, the 1975 House of the Astronauts, built in Cuba as a place of rest for Soviets returning from space, discloses the conflicts that Cuba was maneuvering between their strong relationship with Moscow and their desire to be a leader of the non-aligned community. The strikingly idiosyncratic design of the House of the Astronauts, compared with the repetitive and rather banal appearance of the other hotels under study in this paper proposes one reading of architecture’s implication in the complex climate of non-alignment in the 1960s and 1970s.