Böcker av Nnamdi Elleh

Explores how, in the era of decolonisation, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance.

Two of the most ambitious religious edifices of the 20th century are the Our Lady of Peace Basilica in the West African country of the Ivory Coast and the Hassan II Mosque in Morocco. Nnamdi Elleh not only provides a substantial architectural and pictorial analysis of the buildings themselves. Using these two buildings as case studies, he also investigates questions of national memory, urban form, architectural styles, concepts of democracy, social hierarchies as well as the elites who make the decisions to build Africa's post-independence monuments and capital cities. His book is an exciting synthesis of theoretical and empirical analysis that is bound to stimulate debate about the form and content of post-colonial identities in Africa.