Monuments men
When I was browsing flight logs, some time back, what I remarked was, most of those representative images of each destination, which is often a monument, a known building or in rare cases an iconic land feature. What all those monuments and places shared were how old they were, most were built between the 60s and 70s. From Accra black star square, passing by Yamoussoukro cathedral to Kinshasa Leopold statue etc almost all african monumental buildings and places are old, which is wild given most of african urbanisation and construction boom happened in early 00s to mid 2010s while other places are still in middle of the boom. So what explains the lack of new monuments, it seems like a crucial avenue to neglect when you are building a city from the ground up.
Monuments can be categorised into 2 categories, there are monuments (this of course include buildings, squares etc) made in glory of heroes and powerful individuals, those are usually sponsored either by one individual or commissioned by one megalomaniac ruler. The second category is monuments of national identity, most raised to commemorate events, traditionals or make a statement on behalf of a very large identity. In this category we can find the renaissance monument in Senegal, 3 dikgosi in Botswana while in the first category I can cite any work ever done by Felix Boigny.
The construction boom of the past 20 years has most focused on building malls, apartment complexes and high end tourism and business space. Few monuments that arose during this time were very tacky, unimaginative and in most cases forgettable. Most of those that stood the test of time share the same contractor, the same North Korea firm specialising in creation of monuments.The communist realism influence can be felt and seen on most of those statues and most never achieved the desired goal of being the vitrine of their respective urban centres.
My own theory on why the construction boom produced few monuments compared to 60s- early 80s is the reduction in both men(yes almost all African leaders are men) of great ambition and ego which used to be not so rare in the post independence period. Second reason is the lack of faith in civic projects.The 80s and 90s were hard times for most African countries and removed the taste of unitary civic nationalism in favour of rootless cosmopolitanism or seclusive ethnomasochism.
Reduction in African type “strongman caricature" in favour of transitory bureaucrats meant those bigger than life projects which were in praise of single individuals be it direct or otherwise were abandoned as the kleptocracy set in. Those new bureaucrats are neither strong in terms of national control nor enjoy particularly strong popular support to embark on such a journey. Funds are better used for other projects or outright embezzled. This lack of ambition and control means public architecture has taken a massive hit, few fully indigenously sponsored public buildings ever turn out to be that impressive unless China takes the lead.
To remedy this lack of taste or may I say lack of ambition is even harder as taste and aesthetics are based on faith and feelings. People have lost both of those elements when it comes to their countries. Architecture and great public works are a window into the soul of a nation and whenever the soul is in distress or non existing, it reflects into how they build and how they occupy the public space