Author:

Keywords:

Kinshasa, urban anthropology, architecture, Africa

Abstract:

The ‘tower’ project proposes a reflection, in the form of a visual essay, on the legacy of colonial modernist architecture in Kinshasa, the social afterlives of colonialist infrastructure, and different historical and contemporary utopian visions of the city. Through its architecture, colonial modernity introduced the notion of the vertical in the emerging urban landscape of the 1940s and 1950s. One of the early landmarks of Belgian colonial urban architecture was the Forescom tower. Built in 1946, it was Leopoldville’s first skyscraper, and one of the first high rise buildings of Central Africa. Pointing towards the sky, it also pointed to the future. It embodied and made tangible new ideas of possible futures, and as such the tower materially translated and emblematically visualised colonialist ideologies of progress and modernity (while simultaneously also embodying the darker repressive side of colonialism, with its elaborate technologies of domination, control and surveillance. The tower therefore also forcefully reminds us of the fact that the urban landscape largely came about as the result of a very intrusive history of (physical and symbolical) violence, marked by racial segregation, as well as by violent processes of dispossession and relocation). Today, however, rather than referring to the ideal of the vertical, Kinshasa’s inhabitants often seem to resort to the concept of ‘hole’ to describe the urban infrastructure in which they live. On a first level the notion of the hole (libulu in Lingala) refers to the physical holes and gaps that mark the urban surface (potholes in the road, the many erosion sites that characterize Kinshasa’s landscape), but libulu also refers to the site of the prison, for example, and more generally it has become a meta-concept to reflect both upon the material degradation of the colonial infrastructure, and upon the closures and the often dismal quality of the social life that puctuates the material ruination of the colonial city. How is the gap between colonial tower and postcolonial hole filled in the experience of Congolese urban residents? How liveable is the legacy of colonialist modernity in the contemporary urban setting? What are the social afterlives of the colonial infrastructural heritage, and what dreams and visions of possible futures, if any, does that colonial legacy still trigger for the residents of Kinshasa today? And how are these older visions replayed and reformulated in the age of a global neoliberal capitalism that has (once again) turned the city into a huge building site? Focusing on a number of specific historical and contemporary built sites in Kinshasa, the photos and video-installation reflect upon colonial modernity’s promises, its visions of possible futurities, and the way in which these visions continue to inspire (or not) urban life in Central Africa today. We do not only comment upon the degradation of colonial infrastructures but also explore the ways in which the city continues to reformulate these earlier propositions and to read new openings, possibilities and alternative utopian visions into the very ruination of its material fabric. The ongoing transformation of towers into holes, and holes into towers, is also what the proposed video installation illustrates. This video offers a guided tour by ‘Docteur’, the owner of a remarkable building that is situated in the municipality of Limete. Conceived and realized by ‘Docteur’ without the help of any professional architects, the construction of this as yet unfinished tower was started in 2003. In many ways, this postcolonial tower forms a contrapuntal comment on the 1946 Forescom building and everything it exemplified at the time, while also illustrating the various ways in which the colonialist legacy continues to be reformulated and reassembled today.