Exporting Zionism

Home , 1947 Aden riots, Alfred Mansfeld, Arada (Addis Ababa), Arieh Sharon, Aryeh Levin, Aryeh Levin (diplomat)

Exporting Zionism:

Architectural Modernism in Israeli-African

Technical Cooperation, 1958-1973

Ayala Levin

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015

Ayala Levin

ABSTRACT

Exporting Zionism: Architectural Modernism in Israeli-African Technical

Cooperation, 1958-1973

Ayala Levin

This dissertation explores Israeli architectural and construction aid in the 1960s – “the

African decade” – when the majority of sub-Saharan African states gained independence from colonial rule. In the Cold War competition over development, Israel distinguished its aid by alleging a postcolonial status, similar geography, and a shared history of racial oppression to alleviate fears of neocolonial infiltration. I critically examine how Israel presented itself as a model for rapid development more applicable to African states than the West, and how the architects negotiated their professional practice in relation to the

Israeli Foreign Ministry agendas, the African commissioners' expectations, and the international disciplinary discourse on modern architecture. I argue that while architectural modernism was promoted in the West as the International Style, Israeli architects translated it to the African context by imbuing it with nation-building qualities such as national cohesion, labor mobilization, skill acquisition and population dispersal.

Based on their labor-Zionism settler-colonial experience, as well as criticisms of the mass construction undertaken in Israel in its first decade, the architects diverged from technocratic "high modernism" to accommodate the needs of African weak governments.

Focusing on prestigious governmental and educational buildings such as the Sierra Leone parliament, Ife University in Nigeria, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ethiopia, as well as urban and national planning schemes, this study brings to the fore the performative capacities of these projects in relation to the national and international audiences they addressed as vehicles of governance and markers of a desired modernity.

In other words, this study examines the role these projects played in the mobilization of workers, funds, lands, infrastructure and policy making. Cutting across North-South and

East-West dichotomies, the study of this modality of transnational exchange sheds new light on processes of modernization and globalization and exposes their diverse cultural and political underpinnings.

Contents

List of Figures ii-v

Acknowledgments vi-vii

Introduction: The Architecture of Development -- Between Arms and Words 1-40

Part I: Sierra Leone

1.1 A Knesset in the Jungle: Designing the Sierra Leone Parliament 42-83

1.2 Fast-Tracking the Nation-State:

The Construction of the Sierra Leone Parliament 84-119

2. Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan 120-179

Part II: Nigeria

3. Planning a Postcolonial Regional University Campus: The University of Ife 181-230

4. Designing a Postcolonial University in the Tropics: The University of Ife 231-310

Part III: Ethiopia

5. Zalman Enav in Addis Ababa: An Aid Entrepreneur 312-378

6. The Modernity of Imperial Benevolence: Haile Selassie’s Addis Ababa 379-414

Conclusion 415-422

Postscript 423-438

List of Sources 439-468

Appendix: Figures 469-484

i List of Figures

Fig. 01: Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by Prince Edward, discussing the Sierra Leone Parliament Building model with Zvi Meltzer, November 1961. Source: Zvi Meltzer private collection. Fig. 02: Joseph Klarwein’s winning entry, Knesset Building design competition, 1956-7. Source: Hettis-Rolef. Fig. 03: Joseph Klarwein’s winning entry, Knesset Building design competition, 1956-7. Source: Hettis-Rolef. Fig. 04: Joseph Klarwein and Shimon Povsner’s Knesset revised design, 1959. Source: Hettis-Rolef. Fig. 05: Ram Karmi and Bill Gillit, Knesset revised design, 1960. Source: Hettis-Rolef. Fig. 06: The Knesset under construction, 1964. Source: Hettis-Rolef. Fig. 07: View of the Knesset upon completion, 1966. Source: Hettis-Rolef. Fig. 08: Ram Karmi, Sierra Leone Parliament, Freetown, 1960, perspective. Source: Ram Karmi private collection. Fig. 09: Ram Karmi, Sierra Leone Parliament, Freetown, 1960, model. Source: Ram Karmi Private Collection. Fig. 10: Sierra Leone Parliament, Freetown, 1960, under construction. Source: Ram Karmi private collection. Fig. 11: Sierra Leone Parliament, Freetown, 1960, under construction. Source: Ram Karmi private collection. Fig. 12: Sierra Leone Parliament, Freetown, 1960. Source: Ram Karmi private collection. Fig. 13: Knesset North façade and Main Entrance, Jerusalem, contemporary view. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 14: The Sierra Leone Parliament under construction, Tower Hill, Freetown, 1961. Source: Zvi Meltzer, private Collection. Fig. 15: Queen Elizabeth’s visit to independent Sierra Leone, November 1961. Source: Zvi Meltzer private collection. Fig. 16: Nigersol, Premier Hotel construction, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1962. Source: Efrat, 608. Fig. 17: Sierra Leonean trainees in Israel. Source: Daily Mail, December 15, 1961. Fig. 18: Wall and Tower settlements, Palestine 1936-1939. Source: Zultan Kluger Tzalam Rashi, 1933-1958. Fig. 19: Conquering of the Wasteland Exhibition, 1953, Binyanei Ha’Uma, Jerusalem. Source: Efrat, 733. Fig. 20: Israel government’s planning team surveying the Negev Desert. Arieh Sharon in the middle holding a camera, next to Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. Source: Sharon, Kibbutz+Bauhaus, 81. Fig. 21: A neighborhood in the town of Yokna'am, under construction by immigrants living in provisional shacks along the road. Source: Efrat, 814. Fig. 22: Rural settlements, mid 1950s, Lakhish Region, Israel. Source: Efrat, 697. Fig. 23: Diagram for Lakhish Region, mid 1950s. Source: Smadar Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 68. Fig. 24: Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan: Population Movements. Fig. 25: Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan: Regional Pattern; Social Fig. 26: Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan: Urban Framework

ii Fig. 27-30: Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan: use of trace paper for data processing. Fig. 31: Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan: emergence of regions out of the controlled “chaos.” Fig. 32: Urban Centres: The region becomes a given fact, which now serves as a substrate for the superimposition of urban centers. Fig. 33: Egboramy, Campus Core, University of Ife, late 1970s (note that the building on the top right is a drawing pasted to the image. The building was never built). Source: OAU, Planning Department Archive. Fig. 34: Arieh Sharon, Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. Note the separation between the central yard, surrounded by residential units, and the work area (no. 5). Source: Sharon, Kibbutz+Bauhaus. Fig. 35: Arieh Sharon, School Community Kibbutz Beit Alpha, 1942, Source: Sharon, Kibbutz+Bauhaus. Fig. 36: Arieh Sharon, Ife University, academic core, perspective (no date). Source: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Fig. 37: Arieh Sharon, Ife University campus plan, 1962. Source: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Fig. 38-40: Ife University, faculty housing, contemporary views. Photographs taken by the author. Fig. 41: Arieh Sharon, Humanities Faculty, University of Ife, 1961. Source: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Fig. 42: Arieh Sharon, Humanities Faculty, University of Ife, 1962. Source: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Fig. 43: Arieh Sharon, Humanities complex, section. Source: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Fig. 44: Arieh Sharon, “Self Protecting Building Section” vs. “Applied Solar Shade Device.” Source: Egboramy, Ife University Master Plan, 1980-85, OAU Planning Department Archive. Fig. 45: Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, 1956. Fig. 46: “Acrobatics and Architecture.” Source: Habinyan Bamizrakh Hakarov, 1940s. (Reproduced in Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 161). Fig. 47: Arieh Sharon, Tel Aviv Architecture 1920s-1960s. Source: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Tel Aviv Museum. Fig. 48: Arieh Sharon, University of Ife, Humanities Faculty, c. 1966. Source: Amos Spitz private collection. Fig. 49: Eliezer Schreiber, Social Sciences and Administration buildings (c. late 1970s), and Harold Rubin’s Education building in the background (c. mid 1970s). Contemporary view. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 50: Social Sciences building: contemporary view of the open central mall and roof. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 51: Social Sciences, ground level. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 52: Harold Rubin, Faculty of Education (c. mid 1970s), view from the Humanities faculty. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 53: Harold Rubin, Faculty of Education (c. mid 1970s), hanging gardens. Photograph taken by the author.

iii Fig. 54: Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Wesley Girls’ Secondary School in Ghana, early 1950s. Source: Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, 1956. Fig. 55: Harold Rubin, University of Ife, Central Library, 1969. Source: Yael Aloni private collection. Fig. 56: View of Oduduwa Hall from the Secretariat, mid 1970s. On the right: the Opa Oranmiyan replica. In the back: the faculty of sciences, designed by James Cubitt. Source: Amos Spitz private collection. Fig. 57: Oduduwa Hall, foyer. Contemporary view. Photograph by the author. Fig. 58: Oduduwa Hall, textured murals. Contemporary view. Photograph by the author. Fig. 59: Adesoji Aderemi, The Ooni of Ife and governor of Western Region, Nigeria, 1960-67, with the famous Yoruba bronze and terracotta heads. Source: unknown. Fig. 60: Enav and Tedros, Shalom Shelemay Apartment Building, beg. 1959. Contemporary view. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 61: Enav and Tedros, Shalom Shelemay Apartment Building, section, 1959. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 62: Enav and Tedros, Haile Selassie I University, Classroom and Administration Building, 1962-1965. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 62: Enav and Tedros, Haile Selassie I University, Classroom and Administration Building, 1962-1965. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Figs. 63-4: Haile Selassie’s omnipresence in the students’ lives. From top left clockwise: Haile Selassie at a university graduation ceremony, Haile Selassie visiting the School for the Blind, and Haile Selassie with a young student. Source: The Ethiopian Multimedia Gallery, http://ethiograph.com/album/displayimage.php?pid=3398. Fig. 65: Addis Ababa, Street Map. Fig. 66: Ignazio Guidi and Cesare Valle: The first Italian plan for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1936. Note the old and new palaces (Ghebi) serve as reference points. The new Ghebi refers to the Guenete Leul Palace, that Haile Selassie turned into the Haile Selassie I University campus in 1961. Source: Fuller, 198. Fig. 67: Arturo Mezzedimi, Africa Hall, night view. Designed and built in 1959 across the street (Menelik II avenue) from the Jubilee Palace. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Image Archive. Record name: Fel_042147-RE. Fig. 68: Zalman Enav (second from left, Michael Tedros is third from right) explaining a plan to Haile Selassie. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 69: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, 82 Apartment Building, 1960-64. Designed to accommodate UN personnel. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 70: Illustration 9: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, 82 Apartment Building, plan, 1960. Note that Menelik II Avenue is called in the plan “Parade Street,” indicating that the avenue was created in conjunction with the buildings as a new monumental axis (an extension of the existing one that previously terminated in the Old Ghebi). Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 71: A recent view of the 82 Apartment Building from the Hilton. Facing north, the green hilly area is the location of the Old Ghebi. To the east, the slum area that has traditionally surrounded the palace. Photograph taken by the author. Fig. 72: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1962-65 Source: Zalman Enav private collection.

iv Fig. 73: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, night view, 1962-65. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 74: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1962-1965, second floor plan. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 75: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Filoha Baths, 1959-1964. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 76: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Filoha Baths, site plan, 1959-1964. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 77: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Filoha Baths, under construction, 1959-1964. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 78: Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, Filoha Baths, interiors, 1959-1964. Source: Zalman Enav private collection. Fig. 79: A traditional Ethiopian compound. The illustration appeared in Enav’s essay in Zede with no indication of the name and location of the settlement. Its semi- enclosed cluster inspired the Filoha Baths site design. Source: Enav, Zede 1. Fig. 80: Henri Chomette, National and Commercial Bank under construction, 1965. Source: The Ethiopian Observer 8, no. 4 (1965). Fig. 81: Warner, Burns, Toan, and Lunde, Hilton Addis Ababa, 1968-71. Located on Menelik II Avenue between Africa Hall and the 82 Apartment Building, across the street from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Source: Graham Hancock, The Beauty of Addis Ababa (Nairobi, Kenya: Camerapix Publishers, 1995).

v Acknowledgements

This project could not have been conceived and realized without the inspiration, advice, and support of my committee, Reinhold Martin, Gwen Wright and especially, my advisor, Felicity Scott. I am most grateful for sharing with me their intellectual breadth, uncompromised rigor, genuine interest and attentiveness during this project. Most of all, I am grateful for their faith in it despite the practical challenges it presented. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the rest of the PhD faculty at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, most notably Mary McLeod, who so generously shared with me her wealth of information and invaluable contacts.

Thanks to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) International Dissertation Research Fellowship I was able to visit archives in Israel, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University funded my research trip to Ethiopia, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture supported research trips for oral history interviews in Israel and the US. Among the many archivists and librarians who assisted me, I would like to thank especially Anat Drenger from Azrieli Architectural Archive at the Tel Aviv Museum, who has been particularly generous and enthusiastic in her assistance, and literally opened the doors of the archive to me before its official opening.

I am indebted to my friends and colleagues Ginger Nolan, Peter Minosh, Marta Caldeira, and Maria Pendas, among the rest of the architectural history doctoral community for their friendship, cleverness, and for sharing the hurdles of graduate student life. Outside of this community, but no less intimately engaged with my project were Shirly Bahar, Jessica Eisenthal, Martin Hershenzon, Eszter Polonyi, Abraham Rubin, Gabi Szalay, Yvonne Zivkovic, and Ran Zwigenberg. I could always count on their sound advice and astute insights, and for reading drafts of my chapters.

Numerous people have shared with me their knowledge and memories, or facilitated my safe travels in unfamiliar territories. In Nigeria, Cheta Elleh and his family, Cordelia and Tiwa Osasona, Otitoola Olufikayo, Joseph Ayodokun and Amos Spitz made my stay and travels not only safe and pleasant, but also very productive. In Sierra Leone my greatest thanks go to Rama Musa for sharing with me her invaluable journalistic resources. I thank also Shraga Israel, for lending me his driver, Abdul, who ensured that my Freetown excursions would be a happy adventure. In Ethiopia I am grateful to Alemayehu Teferra, Fasil Giorgis, Michael Maiwald, Habte G. Indrias, Girmay Kassa, Abraham Workeneh, and Temesgen Adnew and his family, for their time and knowldge.

I am especially indebted to my interviewees and their families: Michael Tedros, Zvi Meltzer, Zalman Enav, Ram Karmi, Zvi Szkolnik, Harold Rubin, Jack Shelemay, Rivka Feldhay, Yoram Feldhay, Zvi Dunsky, Joseph Mouna, as well as to Pe’era Goldman, for generously facilitating my very first contacts with Solel Boneh architects and engineers.

vi I have been fortunate to be surrounded by a scholarly community that both enriched and helped sharpen my arguments. Conversations with Hannah Hever, Mark Crinson, Dan Monk, Arindam Dutta, Brian Larkin, Eitan Bar Yosef, Neta Feniger and Anat Moorvile contributed to the consolidation of the overarching thematic of the project. Presentations in panels chaired by Meredith TenHoor and Jonathan Massey, Lukasz Stanek and Rachel Kallus, Andrew Herscher, Charles Davis, Tom Avermaete and Kim de Raedt have helped crystallize the main arguments in each chapter. I am thankful to Haim Yacobi, Ijlal Muzaffar, Smadar Sharon, Inbal Ben Asher Gitler, Nnamdi Elleh, Hannah Appel, and Roy Kozlovsky, for sharing with me unpublished manuscripts or notes.

Sadly, during the period of writing this dissertation, a few of my interviewees passed away. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to interview Michael Tedros, Ram Karmi, and Tamar Golan, and hope that this dissertation contributes to their legacy.

Lastly, and most importantly, the persistent care and affection of my family, Raia Levin, Ginadi Levin, Nathan Eden, Pnina Kreidman, Gili Levin, and Andrea and Itzik Klainer has ensured that the steps taken in this journey are steady and firm. My biggest thanks are to Niv, whose love and unrelenting support cannot be defined by continents and geopolitical alignments.

vii

To my parents, Raia and Ginadi

viii Introduction: The Architecture of Development -- Between Arms and Words

Locke: "How do you gain their confidence?" Robertson: "You come with words, images, fragile things. I come with merchandise, concrete things. They understand me straight away."\ Michelangelo Antonioni, Professione: Reporter, 1975

This conversation, an episode in a 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni movie, takes place somewhere in the Sahara Desert. Locke, a British-American journalist, tired and frustrated from interviewing cagey and despotic African rulers, learns how to “gain their confidence” from Robertson, a British arms dealer. Robertson’s advice is to come with “merchandise, concrete things,” which he contrasts with “words, images, fragile things,” the arsenal of the reporter. This fictive conversation reflects the radical change of heart in the West regarding post-colonial Africa. Only a decade earlier, Africa had been a continent full of promise and a bustling site of international investment. The “African decade,” as the 1960s were dubbed, marked British and French Africa’s transition to independence, and abundant faith— domestic and international—in their economic and social development, perceived as the interdependent and inevitable product of modernization.

During that short but intense period, many international players, old and new, came bearing gifts of development aid as part of the Cold War competition over exerting influence on the continent. This dissertation deals with one such gift, the gift of architecture, which is perhaps the most visible and durable form of aid. Facilitating the African states’ institutions of independence, the public buildings, constructed with foreign funds, technology, and design acted both as vehicles for and an aesthetic representation of the internationally

1 mediated formation of African states. Through a critical analysis of the confluence of aesthetics and governing politics that took shape as part of this transnational aid market, this dissertation offers an architectural history of development aid, and a development aid reading of architecture.

Not nearly as “concrete” as arms, nor entirely as “fragile” as words and images, architectural objects act as an intermediary category between “concrete” aid and diplomatic rhetoric, or realpolitik and ideology. Claiming that as an imperial force, words may be more powerful than arms, literary scholar Shaden Tageldin warns against “reading cultural imperialism through resolutely instrumentalist lenses,” and mystifying the exchange value of cultural production as use-value. “In doing so,” she argues, “we fail to understand how colonial powers and their (post)colonial interlocutors have mystified the use-value of culture as exchange-value,” and “how they have converted instruments of coercion into those of seduction and thereby solicited – and often elicited – the complex ‘love’ of the colonized and their (post)colonial heirs.”1 This warning is particularly pertinent to the reading of diplomatic relations of aid, which as a form of post-colonial relationship between non-equal partners (including former colonial powers and their colonies), was mediated via cultural production no less than the provision of technical equipment and loans.

This dissertation looks at one such instance of a post-colonial “love affair” facilitated by architectural aid’s amalgamation of exchange and use value, or “words” and “things”

1 Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 7.

2 between Israel and three African states: Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ethiopia.2 As Israel’s permanent representative at the UN stated in July 1960, “In the next year or two, we must establish facts… technical assistance and commerce as a dam against diplomatic crises bound to come.”3 Perceived as instruments of Israeli diplomacy, architectural objects acted as concrete dams against fragile futures.

Organized around case studies in these three locales, this dissertation demonstrates how architectural aid operated in a variety of scales and to different ends, from the scale of the individual public building – the parliament, the singular most representative building of independence – through a national physical plan, a regional university campus, and a capital city. The first chapter examines how father and son architects Dov and Ram Karmi advanced an image of nativist nationalism for the Sierra Leone parliament (1960-64) based on their revisions for the contested design of the Israeli parliament, and how the joint Israeli-

Sierra Leonean construction company staged the parliament’s construction in the local media as a national event that transcended ethnic and class divisions. The second chapter shifts the focus to the national territorial scale and analyzes the Sierra Leone National

Urbanization Plan (1965) in relation to its Israeli precedents and the United Nations discourse on Third World urbanization.

The third and fourth chapters explore the planning and design of the Ife University campus in West Nigeria, established in 1960 as part of a regional competition over the allocation of

2 These countries shared with Israel recent ties with the British Empire, although of differing characters and lengths.

3 Cited in Zach Levey, Israel in Africa, 1956-76 (Dordrecht: Martinus-Nijhoff, 2012), 37.

3 higher education in the federal state. I analyze architect Arieh Sharon’s plan for the campus in relation to his experience in kibbutz planning in Israel and to the American Land Grant

University model, and interpret his design approach as a rejection of the Tropical

Architecture method as promoted by late colonial British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane

Drew, which was epitomized by their design for the neighboring University College Ibadan.

Unlike previous chapters that focused on official aid projects, the fifth chapter shifts registers to follow the work of Zalman Enav, an architect entrepreneur who established a practice in Addis Ababa independent of any Israeli or Ethiopian institutional ties. However, as this chapter demonstrates, this private endeavor was undergirded by Israeli trade, military, and diplomatic connections in the country and by ties with local and expatriate elite. The sixth and final chapter concludes with the physical development of Addis Ababa in the

1960s and the role played by Enav’s projects in articulating an “Ethiopian modernity” in the context of Haile Selassie’s ambition to modernize the capital city and assume continental leadership while precluding social reform.

Exporting Zionism

“I was doing Zionism,” Zvi Meltzer, a member of the Israeli team of architects who designed the Sierra Leone parliament, exclaimed in an interview when referring to a photo where he is seen presenting a model of the building to the Queen of England (fig. 1).4 In that same photo, between the architect and the queen stood a silent member of Sierra Leone’s newly founded parliament, recognized only by his British-style wig. What can we make of this strange triangular constellation that comprised the Queen of England, the Israeli

4 Zvi Meltzer, interview by Ayala Levin, Rishon LeZion, Israel, August 16, 2011.

4 architect, and the Sierra Leonean parliament member? And what did it mean “to do”

Zionism in this context? On the face of it, this encounter symbolizes the smooth transition from colonial to neo-colonial forces, with new actors like Israel gaining a foothold in the

Cold War development market via technical aid. Moreover, this transition did not transgress old colonial hierarchies: while supplanting the diminishing authority of the imperial monarch, both the Israeli expert and Sierra Leone’s newly born sovereign still sought the warmth of her approving gaze.

The Sierra Leone parliament building was one of the first high profile governmental, educational, and recreational buildings that Israeli architects undertook as part of Israeli aid during the “golden age” of the Israeli-African relationship from 1958 to 1973, whose objective from the Israeli point of view was to outflank the surrounding Arab countries and gain support at the UN.5 These relationships coincided with optimistic development plans that were carried out by African governments and were supported by foreign aid.6

Encompassing the countries’ industry, agriculture, infrastructure, health and education, these

5 For international relations literature see Levey; Samuel Decalo, Israel and Africa: Forty Years, 1956-1996 (Gainesville: Florida Academic Press, 1998); Joel Peters, Israel and Africa: The Problematic Friendship (London: The British Academic Press, 1992); Olusola Ojo, Africa and Israel: Relations in Perspective (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988); Mohamed Omer Beshir, Israel and Africa (Khartoum, Sudan: Khartoum University Press, 1974); Aryeh Oded, Afrika ve-Yisrael (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2011); Steven S. Carol, From Jerusalem to the Lion of Judah and Beyond: Israel’s Foreign Policy in East Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, Inc., 2012). For literature on Israeli aid in the Third World see: Mordechai E Kreinin, Israel and Africa: A Study in Technical Cooperation (New York: Praeger, 1964); Sidney Goldberg, Israel, Africa and Asia: Partners in Progress (London: Labour Friends of Israel, 1968); Leopold Laufer, Israel and the Developing Countries: New Approaches to Cooperation (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1967); Shimeon Amir, Israel’s Development Cooperation with Africa, Asia, and Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1974); Michael Curtis and Susan Aurelia Gitelson, eds., Israel in the Third World (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1976). For reviews of the architectural work produced as part of this aid see Zvi Efrat, haProyekt haYisraeli: Bniya ve'Adrikhalut, 1948-1973 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2004), 607-30; Haim Yacobi, “The Architecture of Foreign Policy: Israeli Architects in Africa,” OASE 82 (2010), 35-54.

6 The “Five Year” model does not indicate Soviet involvement. The U.N. recommended this model in 1951, and subsequently it was widely adopted among African decolonizing countries regardless of their Cold War ideological affinity. See Amanda Kay McVety, Enlightened Aid: US Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 119.

5 plans to some extent continued late colonial development plans, but in their unprecedented comprehensiveness, scale, and funds also presented a decisive turn away from the “not yet” approach that characterized colonial rule. Measuring the colonies under a universal yardstick of development, this approach served to justify colonial presence even at the latter stages of decolonization.7 With the emergence of “development” as an object of theory following

WWII, inherent causes, environmental or racial, could no longer explain “backwardness” and serve to legitimatize external rule. The new developmental narrative postulated the latecomers’ ability “to catch up” via the omnipotence of science and technique, rational economic planning, and social engineering, and align themselves with the “universal history” as recorded and narrated by the west.8 A tangible example of such a “leap,” Israel presented

African visitors with a test case that proved the theory. If Europe presented a fait-accompli image of a desired future, Israel presented a moving image of development in the making; an acceleration of history that could be emulated and repeated elsewhere.9

To be sure, Israel’s model of development, as well as that of most of the African countries it aided, adhered to the same universal history yardstick and enjoyed western patronage. What

Israel had to offer was an alternative approach to development aid. As David Hacohen,

7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7-9. I refer here and throughout the text to decolonization in historical rather than epistemological terms (“decolonization of the mind”), indicating the latter years of colonial rule leading to independence.

8 Michael Watt, “’A New Deal in Emotions:’ Theory and Practice and the Crisis of Development,” in Power of Development, ed. Jonathan Crush (London; new York: Routledge, 1995), 49-50.

9 As John Tettegah, the secretary General of the Ghana's trade union movement, declared after a visit to Israel in 1957: “Israel has given me more in eight days than I could obtain from two years in a British university.” Similarly, Tom Mboya, the Kenyan trade unionist commented: “Any African who tours Israel cannot fail to be impressed by the achievements made in such a short time from poor soil and with so few natural resources. We all tended to come away most excited and eager to return to our countries and repeat all those experiments.” Cited in Peters, 3.

6 Israel’s first diplomatic envoy in the Third World explained, these countries did not need someone to teach them how to be patient, like the western powers had done for generations, but how to be impatient.10 While Israel’s extensive efforts to constitute relations with

African countries are often attributed to Golda Meir’s term as foreign minister from 1956 to

1966, it was Hacohen’s experience in Burma in 1953-54 under Moshe Sharett, Meir’s predecessor, that helped develop Israel’s unique method of aid. A leading figure in the

Jewish Settlement in Palestine, Hacohen was nominated to serve as Israel’s “guinea pig in the Jungle,” as he put it,11 where he devised the basic principles of Israeli aid. Recognizing the economic and diplomatic potential of the development market once freed from colonial monopolies, Hacohen emphasized the urgency in entering this market before other major players did, the involvement of Israeli public companies versus privately owned firms, and the simultaneous training of local workers in Israel while Israeli personnel set up parallel companies in the recipient country.12

This mutually beneficial aid was grounded on a “soft socialism” ideology, which the Israeli

Mapai (Labor Party) shared with Burma and other Third World countries.13 The Histadrut

Federation of Laborers, Mapai’s economic and institutional backbone, played a significant role in establishing relations with Third World leaders at international trade union

10 N. Pundak, “Ha’iti Shafan Nisyonot Ladjungel,” Davar, July 26, 1963, 3.

11 Ibid, ibid.

12 ISA, MFA 226/5 (93). See also Shimon Avimor, ed., Relations between Israel and Asian and African States: A guide to Selected Documentation No. 5; Union of Burma (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, 1989), 138.

13 Avi Bareli, “Mamlakhtiyut, Capitalism and Socialism during the 1950s in Israel,” The Journal of Israeli History 26, no. 2 (September 2007): 201-27.

7 conferences.14 Established in 1920 as a cooperative organization of Jewish laborers in

Palestine, the Histadrut consolidated Labor Zionism’s hegemony by providing an infrastructure and services for the Jewish population, acting de-facto as a state-within-a-state under the British Mandate and as the breeding ground for the future state’s political leadership.15 Due to its intimate relationship with the ruling party, where many of its actors overlapped (David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, to note one example, served as its first elected Secretary), the Histadrut helped the foreign ministry establish initial contacts with Third World leaders, often before their countries’ independence. The Histadrut, therefore, played a crucial role in paving the way for constitution of relations and gaining a foothold in the development market before state relations could be established following independence.

Histadrut’s role of constituting “international relations” in the Third World on behalf of the state dates back to the pre-state period and was mediated primarily through its construction cooperative subsidiary, Solel Boneh (in English: Paves-Builds). Established in 1923, Solel

Boneh played an instrumental role in demarcating the territory of the Jewish settlement and facilitating the occupational shift of the New Jew from commerce to productive labor.16 By providing the immigrant Jews with the technical skills that enabled them to supplant the

14 Hannan S. Aynor, Shimon Avimor and Noam Kaminar, eds. Terumat Tenuat Ha’avodah Beyisum Kishrey Hakhuts shel Medinat Yisraʾel Beasyah Uveafriḳah: Teudot (Tel Aviv: Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Harry Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, 1989).

15 Yosef Gorni, Avi Barʾeli and Yitsḥaḳ Grinberg, eds., Mekḥevrat Avodah Leirgun Ovdim: Leḳeṭ Maʾamarim al Histadrut Ha’ovdim Biyemei Hayishuv Vehamedinah (Śdeh-Boḳer: Ben-Gurion Center; Tel Aviv: Cḥaim Ẉeizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, Tel-Aviv University; Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2000).

16 For Solel Boneh’s history see: Eliyahu Biletsky, Solel Boneh, 1924-1974 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974); Hillel Dan, Bederekh Lo Slula: Hagadat Solel Boneh (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1963).

8 lower-salaried Palestinian workers, Solel Boneh created a Jewish workforce and industry in the field of construction and played a crucial role in implementing the ideology of the

Zionist Labor Movement, crystallized in expressions such as "conquering of the labor

[market]" (kibush ha'avoda), "Hebrew labor" (avoda ivrit), and “to build and be built,” which encapsulated the ideology of national transformation.

In addition to the works initiated by the Histadrut, Solel Boneh carried out public works for the British mandate government. Its cooperation with the British Empire in Syria, Lebanon,

Egypt, Iraq, Persia, Bahrain and Cyprus further enhanced its economic and symbolic capital.17 Taking advantage of these jobs, the company not only expanded its scale of operation and professional expertise in dealing with different environments and labor conditions, but also provided cover for clandestine operations for the Jewish settlement’s intelligence gathering and Zionist recruiting in the Middle East.18 And yet, the Histadrut’s objectives went beyond immediate national and professional goals. As some discussions held in the mid 1940s on the “Jewish colony” in the Abadan headquarters of the Anglo-

Persian Oil Company reveal, the Histadrut saw its Solel Boneh workers as representatives of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.19 Their prime audience was not the British administration or the Jewish recruits for immigration to Palestine, as one would suspect, but the Iranian

17 Biletzky, 403-06; Dan, 170-80.

18 Dan, 180; Dan Svorai, “’Solel-Boneh’ – Irgun Kalkali Ezrakhi Mitgayes Vemeguyas, Bama’avar Mishilton Mandat Lemedina Atzmayit,” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2008), 129-30. Its dual relationship with the British authorities, acting as its right hand while promoting Zionist agendas, at times even by overtly defying British policy, perhaps captures more than any other institution the ambiguous complicity of the Jewish settlement with the British Empire.

19 See LA IV-320-6; LA IV-320-7. For an architectural history of Abadan see Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 52-71.

9 hosts.20 In one of these discussions, even the term “Jewish colony” was put under scrutiny, as some members deemed it inappropriate to express the desired relations with their Middle

Eastern neighbors.21

Despite Solel Boneh’s seminal role in creating the infrastructure for the future state, with the establishment of Israel in 1948 the cooperative’s expectation to be favored over private contractors in public projects was shattered as the government and the Histadrut opened their contracts to the competitive market.22 David Hacohen, who prior to becoming a

Parliament Member and diplomat in Burma was a Solel Boneh Managing Director, put Solel

Boneh on a new course to reassert its political power by relegating its operation to Third

World countries, where its expertise in mobilizing manpower and executing complex tasks under strenuous conditions could be put into use as part of Israeli diplomacy. Solel Boneh’s increasing operation abroad during that period in collaboration with Israel’s most prominent architects was made official by the creation of a subdivision designated for work abroad

(Solel Boneh Overseas and Harbor Works) when it was reorganized in 1958.23

The relegating of Solel Boneh’s pre-state colonial expertise to post-colonial governments was one manifestation of the crisis Israeli society underwent in the shift from voluntary society to state sovereignty. With the era of settler-colonial pioneering ending, Ben Gurion

20 November 24, 1945, LA IV-320-7. For a discussion on this “Jewish colony” from the perspective of its Zionist recruiting mission see Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2006).

21 Ibid.

22 Biletsky, 249-51, 286-94, 319-42.

23 Ibid, 346-47, 407-35. From here on after, all my references to Solel Boneh in Africa would be to Solel Boneh Overseas and Harbor Works.

10 attempted to institutionalize “pioneering” as a new program of “mamlakhtiut” (usually translated as state-ism or republicanism) that sought to preserve the pioneering zeal that had characterized the voluntary society as a mobilizing force that would unite veteran and new immigrants under a national sense of purpose.24 As part of this secular-messianic doctrine,

Ben Gurion suppressed opposing factions with the coercive power of the state, and attempted to subject formerly privileged Labor Zionist institutions such as Solel Boneh and

Kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) to the demands of the state.25 While this crisis is well documented in Israeli historiography, it has not been addressed in relation to how it played out in Israel’s self-fashioning in the international community.26 In 1959, Ben Gurion announced that the peoples of Asia and Africa “desire rapprochement not because we are rich in possessions that enable us to influence them, but because they view the spiritual values enshrined in Israeli halutziut [pioneering] as worth learning.”27 Coupling aid with pioneering, Israeli aid in the Third World was constructed as a continuation of Zionist pre- state pioneering tasks. I interpret Israel’s imbuing of aid with spiritual and moral values as a

24 Developed into a coherent doctrine in the 1950s and the 1960s, mamlakhtiut has no adequate translation in English, and has usually been referred to as “statism” or “republicanism,” although these terms fail to convey its distinct Jewish character (the idea of a Jewish sovereignty, drawing from its biblical kingdom precedent), and its Ottoman and Russian imperial models of influence. See Avi Bareli and Nir Kedar, Mamlakhtiyut Israelit (Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute, 2011); Eliezer Don Yehiyeh, “Mamlakhtiyut Veyahadut Behaguto Uvemediniyuto shel Ben Gurion,” Haziyonut 14 (1989): 51-88; Nir Kedar, “Ben-Gurion's Mamlakhtiyut: Etymological and Theoretical Roots,” Israel Studies 7, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 117-33. On the conflict between the pioneering ethos and the socialist ideology in the Israeli labor movement see: Dani Gutwin, “Al Hastira bein Ha’etos Hakhalutzi La’ideologya Hasotzyalistit Bitnuat Ha’avoda Hayisra’elit: David Ben-Gurion Veyitzhak Ben-Aharon, 1948-1967,” Iyunim Bitkumat Yisrael 20 (2010): 208-48.

25 See for example the conflict between Ben Gurion and the kibbutzim in Eli Tzur, “’Hekhela Yetziat Mitzrayim – Uma Asu Khalutzeinu?’ Hakibbutz Bemivkhan Ha’aliya Hahamonit,” Iyunim Bitkumat Yisrael 9 (1999): 316-37.

26 The messianic and moral overtones of Israel’s foreign aid had been previously acknowledged, but not in relation to this internal crisis. See Samuel Decalo, Messianic Influences in Israeli Foreign Policy (Kingston, RI: University of Rhode Island, 1967), and for a more recent account see Haim Yacobi, “The Moral Geopolitics of Exported Spatial Development: Revisiting Israeli Involvement in Africa,” Geopolitics 15 (2010): 441-61.

27 David Ben Gurion, Divrei Haknesset 22, (16-31 March 1959). Cited in Levey, 33.

11 means of alleviating the predicament of becoming, with the establishment of the state, “a nation like all nations” that divested Zionism from its moral purposefulness. The developing countries thus presented an opportunity for Israel to perpetuate the sense of voluntary sacrifice – and thereby continue to sharpen its operative and moral edge –28 while helping it to position itself in the postcolonial international realm as moral and just, despite the injustices it was performing against the Palestinian population.

This is what it meant to “be doing Zionism” in Africa. From a noun designating a national movement, it became a mode of development; a set of “pioneering” practices that could be exported to other territories and state-building tasks. Once Zionism achieved its teleological aim, that is, national sovereignty, it also faced the danger of losing its moral justification and messianic force. If at the turn of the century, the Zionist movement allied with colonial forces to achieve its goals, in the height of decolonization, and as a “post-colonial colony,” as intellectual historian Joseph Massad aptly put it,29 Israel refashioned itself vis-à-vis the emerging post-colonial world. By arguing that what Israel exported drew its practices and ethos from the pre-state period, my approach continues international relations historian Odd

Arne Westad, who interprets the superpowers’ Cold War ideology in terms of “deep structures,” that extended to the global arena as an extra-territorial continuation of their civil wars.30 Similarly, I argue that Labor Zionist settler-pioneer ideology was the deep structure

28 See Ahuvia Malkhin and Zeev Goldberg eds., Yakhase Yisrael im Ha’aratsot Hamitpatkhot: Diyun Bekhug Ra’ayoni (Tsofit: Berl Katzanelson Institute, 1962), 50-51, 78.

29 Joseph Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel,” in The Pre- Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, eds. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2000), 311-46.

30 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5-6.

12 that undergirded Israel’s foreign policy. However, rather than interpreting it as ideologically consistent (as Westad’s argument might imply), I interpret this continuation as an anachronistic attempt to restore a previous position, real or imagined, of facing crises both domestically and internationally. As we shall see in various examples throughout this dissertation, the labor invested in holding to the pre-state ethos and practice reveals the contradictions embedded in this anachronism. In addition, while most accounts of international relations separate practices of aid from foreign relations’ ideology, this study complicates the notion of aid ideology by looking closely at the practices of aid. Rather than deal with international relations’ ideology and realpolitik as distinct frames of reference, this study interrogates how the deep structure and its contradictions both shape material practices and manifest through them. Architecture presents a unique medium through which this relationship between aid and ideology can be critically unpacked. Alongside the prominent role it played in Jewish national transformation as encapsulated in the idiom “to build and be built,” its complex amalgamation of use and exchange values, as well as the durability of its evidentiary status as fossils of a now-bygone era, privilege architecture over other spheres of aid such as health, education, police, and industrial and agricultural production, for an historical inquiry of this kind.

By stressing the pre-state Labor Zionist ethos and logic of operation of Israel’s aid, my analysis differs from previous studies that emphasized Israeli state control and violence as the gist of Israeli aid.31 However critical these studies are, by ignoring the historical basis of these practices in the pre-state colonial period, they run the risk of naturalizing the

31 See for example, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Yacobi, “Moral Geopolitics;” Yotam Feldman, ha-Ma’abada (Israel; Belgium; France: Gun Films; Luna Blue Films; The Factory, 2013), DVD.

13 “development miracle” and the exceptionalism myth that Israel has since cultivated.32

Furthermore, this emphasis does not contribute to our understanding of why African governments chose to be seduced by Israeli persuasion. If it presented a singular case in the history of the region, how could its experience be exported to other territories and other peoples? This is one of the contradictions that Ben Gurion’s famous messianic call for Israel to be a “light unto the [developing] nations” betrays.33 This internal contradiction characterizes the double audience, the Third World and the West, for Israel’s pursuit of diplomatic relations during its first two decades of existence, specifically before 1967 when its alliance with the US was buttressed. Presenting itself as both a bridge between east and west and as a western outpost in the Middle East, this duality is also manifested in Israel’s self image as a colonial society that desired to portray itself as anti-colonial.34 This dissertation emphasizes the ambiguity between the two as it manifested in the uncanny doubling of Zionism in the African territories through the practices of architectural and planning.

Resisting the automatic association of Israel with the west, as it has self-fashioned itself unequivocally since 1967, this dissertation draws attention to the labor invested in constructing Israel as a postcolonial developing country, and to its aid as a form of “south- south” aid, to use current social science terminology. To be clear, the aim of this dissertation

32 Continuing until today with emphasis on high-tech export. See Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (New York; Boston: Twelve, 2011 [2009]).

33 Carol, 38.

34 Through his rich and multifaceted reading of Israeli discourse on Africa, Eitan Bar-Yosef points out to the irresolvable conflict between the desire to be anti-colonial and acting as colonial, and how the practices of “blackening” and attempts to create similitude only served at the end of the day to affirm difference and Israel’s supposed “whiteness.” See Eitan Bar-Yosef, Vila Badjungel: Afrika Batarbut Hayisraelit (Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; Hakibbutz Hameukhad, 2013).

14 is not to redeem Israel from the historical choices it made that eventually cemented its position unequivocally as a western outpost in the Middle East, or from the cynical reduction of its aid to arms dealing and war mongering in Africa while cultivating strong ties with apartheid South Africa since 1973.35 Rather, the emphasis on Israel’s pursuits in the

Third World based on solidarity and sameness is advanced here as an attempt to salvage the development story in Africa from the dead-end of the choices African leaders had at the time of independence as is tended to be portrayed by critiques of development since the emergence of the dependency theory in the 1970s.36 I interpret Israel’s attempt to present a unique approach to development aid as a moment that fleshes out African choice. Even if these choices were shaped by Cold War politics, they were not completely determined by them.37 For this reason, this dissertation steers away from the use of the term

“neocolonialism” since it fails to account for the range of relationships formed and predetermines the interpretation of their interests and outcomes.38

35 Beit-Hallahmi; Haim Yacobi, Kan Lo Afrika (Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; Hakibbutz Hameukhad, forthcoming), 131-49; Bar-Yosef, 220-21; Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

36 Israel’s in-between position between the western states and the Third World, and the complexity of its position as a “post-colonial colony” preclud this discussion from falling into the trap of what literary theorist Jennifer Wenzel has dubbed “anti-imperialist nostalgia.” See Jennifer Wenzel, “Remembering the Past's Future: Anti-Imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World,” Cultural Critique 62 (2006): 1-32.

37 In addition to the Western and Eastern blocs, the Non-Aligned Nations also participated in aid. Furthermore, there was a competition of aid even among nations within the same bloc, or neutral countries such as Israel and Sweden, who held strong ties with the US. For one such competition see chapter 5.

38 Although trade was an important part of these relations, its sum was negligible compare to the resources Israel invested in its aid. Israel’s goal was diplomatic, and trade was perceived as a conduit of these relations rather than their end result. Similarly, aid was not conditioned by African countries’ votes at the UN, which did not consistently favor Israeli objectives. The structural logic of aid can be described in terms of Marcel Mauss’s gift relations, where debt and bondage are constituted in the time lag between giving and reciprocating. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: The Norton Library, 1967 [1925]). See also Ayala Levin, “The Binding Gift” Fabrikzeitung, no. 300 (April-May 2014).

15 Importing Zionism

In contemporary scholarship on African states, the state-building period following independence is rarely discussed, as the hopes that characterized it have long dissipated.

From a contemporary vantage point, the African state is often depicted as corrupt and its power-hungry leadership as a continuation of the arbitrary and exploitive rule of colonialism.39 Resisting this tendency, this dissertation isolates the privileged moment of independence and the opening up of opportunities before their foreclosure, however limited they were.40 Although in most cases of British and French colonies the peaceful transition to independence entailed a continuation of institutions that fashioned the state on the European model, independence did take place and with it the opening of previously impossible opportunities. To many of these post-colonies the problem was not so much one of establishing an epistemic break with the west, since their leaders were educated in western tradition and articulated their goals in its language, but how they could instill new content into the inherited forms and define the contours of the African state on national, regional and pan-African scales.41

39 This is especially noticeable in Achille Mbembe’s otherwise rich and thought-provoking study: Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2001).

40 For an electrifying description of this opening of possibilities at the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung see Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnology of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 81-7. See also Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010).

41 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The historic and Humanistic Agendas of African Nationalism: A Reassessment,” in Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa: Essays in Honor of Don Ohadike, eds. Toyin Falola and Salsh M. Hassan (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 37-53.

16 Since African nationalism grew out of anti-colonial struggles, it was based mainly on negation: of imperialism, discrimination and exploitation.42 On the positive end, the intellectuals that led these struggles had no concrete form of politics in mind besides general concepts like freedom and the dignity of the black man. To the masses, on the other hand, the notion of freedom was very concrete, as it related to political stability (against arbitrary colonial rule), social mobility, and an increase in standards of living. “Beyond that,” claims historian J.F. Ade Ajayi, “they had little conception of the kind of society they were striving to build outside of the vague concepts of Europeanization or modernization. They had no clear-cut goals, and nothing like a blueprint of development.”43 Although featured prominently in their development plans, economic development was “low on their list of priorities, subsumed under the concept of well-being and national progress.”44 Even though some African traditions were evoked, western liberal models prevailed as the only available prototypes.45

The continuation of western institutions also entailed continuation in the realm of representation. According to historian Mamadou Diouf, if the emblems of colonialism were roads, commerce, and sanitation, then with independence the emblems were schools,

42 J.f. Ade Ajayi, “Expectations of Independence,” Daedalus 111, no. 2 (Spring, 1982): 2. 43 Ibid, ibid.

44 Ibid, ibid.

45 Ibid, ibid. For a more ambitious account that attempts to articulate African difference by claiming that although “forward looking was a general principle,” it did not provide a universal pattern, see Zeleza, 37-53. Similarly Jean-François Bayart offers a long durée perspective on African desire for progress: “as far as we can go back, the continent has revealed its desire to enter the universal world of wealth and values. The idea of progress was always important to it and autochthonous ideologies - among the Yoruba, the Asante or the Beembe, for example – emphasised the advantages of social change, of well-being and prosperity.” Jean- François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison and Elizabeth Harrison (Cambridge, UK; Malden: Mass: Polity Press 2010 [1989]), 29.

17 community clinics, and electricity.46 Rather than a break in representation, the stronger emphasis put on welfare and social mobility was to be achieved by continuing the focus on infrastructure and services that had begun during the colonial era. Thus rather than representing an epistemic break, African independence calls for a more nuanced reading, one that identifies in this historical impossibility for a radical break a crisis of representation.

If modernism was the international language of modernization, the question was how to articulate a modernism while pursuing modernization on African states’ terms. The question, therefore, was how to enunciate a difference at the level of practice. I interpret this enunciation not in hierarchical terms as a difference between metropolitan centers’ modernism and its derivative local manifestation, but in structural-linguistic terms as the difference between langue and parole. While the newly formed governments continued late colonialism’s high-modernist projects, and the language of representation was technology and modernist architecture – all very much based on the importation of foreign expertise and machinery – the difference was that with independence, African governments could choose whose expertise and machinery to import. This dissertation calls attention to what has been long overlooked in development scholarship: that in the Cold War development race,

African governments were in a position to negotiate and choose from various aid donors the forms of aid – and by extension the forms of modernity – they desired. I argue that it is through this choosing that difference was enunciated.

46 Mamadou Diouf, “Modernity: Africa,” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 4, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 1478.

18 Moreover, this agency cannot be reduced to mere consumerism, as it is commonly interpreted even in the most critical accounts.47 To understand the level of African agency, we first need to understand that aid did not mean merely the showering of gifts over thankful recipients. As a representative of Ghana in Washington explained in 1964, in order to maintain its independence Ghana preferred to accept loans rather than gifts:

Loans with interest payable, and technicians loaned to a developing country with the receiving country paying much of their upkeep are not aid in the restrictive sense. As far as the Government of Ghana is concerned only a very insignificant amount of the cooperative assistance it had received from other countries could be considered outright gifts with no chance of gain of the giving country (…) we are appreciative of the technical skills that we have acquired with the cooperation of other peoples but most of these things are joint projects and the gain goes both ways…48

As this representative made clear, Ghana was to be seen as a partner worth investing in, not as a charity case. African recipients of development aid did not expect or desire it to derive from disinterested humanitarianism, but from business and diplomatic interests that would benefit both sides. If anything, it was a “contractual dependency” with a clear termination date as in the case of the joint companies Solel Boneh established with African

47 See for example, Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1991), 1-33; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2008). I share this critique with Partha Chatterjee who claims against the reductive portrayal of colonial and postcolonial subjects’ participation in modernity as “perpetual consumers.” See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5. 48 G. Odartey Lamptey, “Technical Cooperation: American, Africa, Israeli Approaches; The Ghana Experience,” in Conference on Free World Cooperation with Africa, Duquesne University, 1964, (New York: American Histadrut Cultural Exchange Institute, 1964), 12-3.

19 governments.49 Limited to a set number of a few years of management and skill transfer, this partnership model relieved African governments from the fear of neocolonialism. Attentive to the anxieties and self-dignity of African leaders, Golda Meir explained, “we’ll look for the most professional people available, but development of Ghana can be carried out only by the Ghanaians themselves.”50 Similarly “The Department of International Aid and

Cooperation,” which grew out of the “Section for Technical Cooperation” Meir established in 1958, was renamed in 1961 “The Department of International Cooperation” (Mashav) to alleviate any sense of patronization.51

Although closely aligned with western powers, as it demonstrated forcibly in its involvement in the Suez Crisis in 1955, Israel’s official stance in relation to the Cold War was neutral. Together with its “soft socialism,” its neutrality offered African leaders a “third way” between communism and capitalism without the strings attached to the receipt of aid from the superpowers. As a general rule, if not always in practice, Israel tried to distance its aid from American institutions such as Ford and Rockefeller and avoided participating in umbrella organizations such as those organized by the British Commonwealth that tried to coordinate aid and thus limit African leaders’ maneuvering.52

A particular point of attraction in Israel’s mode of socialism was the Histadrut’s intimate ties

49 Anthropologist Archie Mafeje defines neo-colonialism as a contractural relationship. See Archie Mafeje, “Neo-Colonialism, State Capitalism or Revolution?” in African Social Studies: A Radical Reader, eds. Peter C.W. Gutkin and Peter Waterman (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 412. 50 Cited in Levey, 31.

51 Oded, 30.

52 Ibid, ibid.

20 and near-unity of interests with the government, known in Israeli contemporary parlance as

“constructivist socialism.” The subsuming of trade union loyalty to state-building tasks in

Labor Zionism presented African governments a seemingly viable model, despite its anachronism as it preceded the establishment of the state,53 to counter the masses’ distrust cultivated under generations of colonial rule.54 To the social cause of labor solidarity that was sometimes compared to African communitarianism, Israel’s experience in forging a coherent national identity despite the various origins of its immigrants, and in relation to the broad Jewish Diaspora, was another example held up to African governments facing their own challenges.55 Furthermore, after a failure to establish relations with the Asian postcolonial countries, Israel buttressed its appeal to Africa by capitalizing on a shared narrative of racial oppression, Diaspora, and national-cultural rejuvenation that drew from the intellectual tradition of the African Liberation movement that was itself influenced by

Zionist thought.56

By taking seriously the choices presented with independence, and the emphasis placed on cooperation, however uneven, this study offers a new model to understand African

53 Histadrut members acknowledged this anachronism in their discussions. As one member explained: “There is no doubt that historically, Histadrut’s vision is appropriate for the needs of the developing countries. They need to raise their work pride, to achieve the broadest possible organization of all workers’ types, to delegate responsibilities from the margins to the center to strengthen the general public, to groom independent cooperative initiative in the village and the city. But I am not certain that the political reality in Africa’s young countries is the right backdrop for this growth. The forms of organization and goals of the workers’ movements result from the historical conditions of their countries. With all our conviction about Histadrut’s right path, it is doubtful whether in 1962 and in the framework of a state, the same organization as the Histadrut -- as it was established under the British mandate in 1920 – can be established.” Malkhin and Goldberg, 59. (My translation).

54 Ajayi, 4.

55 Zeleza, 40, 47.

56 Such as Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. de Bois.

21 modernity (and Israeli (un)modernity) through a critical reading of architectural production in the “contact zone,”57 including the negotiations and misrecognitions of sameness and difference involved in translation from one context to another. This study does not postulate that this encounter gave birth to an alternative modernity, epistemological or aesthetic, but seeks to complicate the framing of questions of modernity and cultural transfer in binary terms such as global versus local, or imposition versus resistance. No doubt, the public institutions designed and built to celebrate and practice independence necessitated the import of modern technology and skills. Their status as imported artifacts, however, does not attenuate their symbolic force as markers of national independence and harbingers of a desired modernity. On the face of it, these seem like the objects par excellence of the

“material” domain, which postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee associates with western imposition of models of governance, in juxtaposition with the spiritual or cultural domain of non-western societies.58 The challenge in this approach, however, is to trace how the two realms affect each other, so that the danger of divorcing culture from economy and technology, and the consequent locking of non-western societies in timeless traditions, can be avoided.59

While this dissertation stirs away from the global-local binary, it does not do so at the expense of effacing the role of identity politics. Examined here on a national level, identity politics reflects the hierarchy of international players that shaped processes of modernization

57 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992). 58 Chatterjee, 3-13.

59 Andreas Huyssen. “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World” New German Critique 100, 34, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 193, 196-97; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 [1996]).

22 and globalization.60 Understanding identity politics as a strategic subject positioning rather than a base for essentialist claims, this dissertation participates in the debate over

“alternative modernisms.” However, by emphasizing the “contact zone” in the processes of becoming (transculturation) of both sides participating in the exchange, I steer away from fixing this differentiation in categories such as African or Israeli modernities, since this exchange did not occur in a sterile laboratory between “pure breeds.”61 As mentioned earlier, this exchange occurred in a highly saturated transnational environment, in collaboration or against a variety of players and models. This is highlighted by the fact that the “Israeli model” imported to African countries is itself an adaptation of various European and

American models. The question I raise instead is what sort of modernity this encounter produced in the specific context of Cold War development race against the background or active influence of various competing models.

Taking into consideration the multiplicity of international and domestic audiences these encounters and exchanges were shaped by further complicates any attempt to pin down an

“authentic” manifestation of culture. Just as the architectural objects were not shaped only by a dialogue between the architects and the African commissioners, but were affected by third country or international institutional demands, so were their conceptions not isolated

60 Ibid, ibid. 61 See Art historian Finbarr Barry Flood’s critique of the use of the term “hybrid” metaphor that assumes “pure” original or parent cultures, and has roots in nineteenth century discourse on race. For this reason, I avoid using the term “hybrid” unless the subject is composed of completely different technologies, as in the case of the Israeli parliament building, whose terraces refer to vernacular agriculture while the technology used is glass and steel construction (see chapter 1). Similarly, by emphasizing that culture is always-already the product of relations and transaction, Flood argues that transculturation is a misnomer. See Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval Hindu-Muslim Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Architectural historian Esra Akcan makes a similar argument about the term “hybrid” in Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 277. For a recent compelling defense of the term transculturation see Monica Juneja, conversation with Christian Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism,” in Transcultural Modernisms, ed. Model House Research Group (Vienna: Academy of fine Arts Vienna; Sternberg Press, 2013).

23 from the performative role that the architects and commissioners assumed. Going back to the claim that “deep structures” affected Cold War ideologies, it is reasonable to assume that as tenants of “national identity” in the international realm, these structures informed the respective countries’ methods of aid.62 Rather than assuming that these followed inherent national traits, this dissertation examines them as performative acts that asserted a specific subject position in the international realm. This includes not only the competing donor countries, but also the recipient African countries that solicited their aid. As political scientist Jean-Francois Bayart has argued poignantly, Africans “have been active agents in the mise en dépendance of their societies.”63 Against notions of collaboration versus resistance to international forces, Bayart explains that African dependency is a strategy of extraversion “astutely fabricated as much as predetermined” designed to exploit the resources of (in-)dependence.64 The issue at stake is not the extent of autonomy these states had with independence in relation to international forces, but how they appropriated resources to accommodate local interests.65 Similarly, Israel’s desire to portray itself as anti- colonial despite its own colonial practices should not be evaluated as “true or false” since this would foreclose any meaningful discussion. Instead, I refer to it as a productive tension that informed the structuring of its aid, the expertise it exported, and the self-fashioning of its experts vis-à-vis their African commissioner and laborers on site.

Even if the objective of modernization was shared by all the competitors over the giving and

62 Westad, 6. See also Lukasz Stanek on the “socialist gift economy”: Lukasz Stanek, “Introduction: The ‘Second World’s Architecture and Planning in the Third World,” Journal of Architecture (2012): 299-307.

63 Bayart, 24.

64 Ibid, 6.

65 Ibid, 27.

24 receiving of aid, the question that follows is whether the different methods of structuring aid affected their outcomes. Architecture provides a privileged site for this type of historical analysis since its enduring objects congeal and bear evidence of the material-discursive practices, such as the organization of design and construction process, the materials used, and the labor division that participated in their inception and formation. Through a fine- grained archival research and analysis, I unpack the history of “development” and reconstruct a nuanced story of modernization that challenges any clear-cut formulation of neocolonial power relations. At the same time, the uneven relationship of aid affects the archive, which contains considerably more “official” or professional documentation produced by Israeli actors than by their African counterparts. Furthermore, access to archival resources in Israel and the African countries is limited and determined by historical and structural reasons.66 Even the availability of secondary literature on the period of state formation of the various African countries differs radically from one country to another.67 I confronted these challenges by an extensive review of contemporary local media and conducted interviews when possible. For these reasons, the types of sources used vary from one chapter to the next and determine their focus. As stated above, the architectural objects themselves presented an invaluable archive. While this dissertation does not extend to analyzing their contemporary use and to changes made by the occupants, these objects lend themselves to an historical analysis by the sheer fact that they still function in their original

66 Since its privatization in the 1990s, most of Solel Boneh’s documents were removed from the Labour Movement Archives at Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research in Tel Aviv, and are no longer accessible to the general public. In Ethiopia, access to archival material by foreign researchers is extremely rare. In the rest of Africa, most often the national archives set up by the colonial administration mainly hold catalogued documentation up to independence. Thus the structure of the archive and its challenges of maintenance continue to privilege colonial authority and narration.

67 There is a high disproportion of secondary literature on Ethiopia in this period versus on Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

25 capacity and that they still stand out in relation to their urban or semi-urban context as emblems of modernity and as harbingers of unfulfilled futures.68

Objects of Hope

As discussed above, the opening of the development market, previously dominated by the colonial powers, brought to Africa various new players who competed to gain a foothold on the continent. This competition was not determined by market forces alone but also by geopolitical interests, serving as a theater for a strategic performance of identity politics.

Geopolitical stakes, alongside economic interests, dictated these relations and shaped the character of exchanges. Within the highly complex dramaturgy of this new geopolitical field, architectural objects played a significant role in making aid visible. As the most visible products of development aid, concrete images that presented long processes to come, they addressed various audiences, domestic and international. Internationally, they represented the aid donor’s foothold (“a dam against diplomatic crises”) and acted as a catalyst for further foreign investment. Domestically, they represented the institutions of the independent state to its populace as evidence of the government’s ability to execute its promises. Giving concrete image to independence and to the entailing economic and social processes described in dry technical language in the national development plans, these objects gave form to something that would have been otherwise too abstract for a majority of the population. Like props in a play (think of Chekhov’s gun that must fire in the second

68 On modernity as a broken promise for equal status in the world and standard of living see James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durhan, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2006), especially 186-7. See also Ayala Levin, “Ruins of Modernity that Never Was,” in Timing is Everything: The Exhibition of a Necessary Incompleteness (San Diego: University Art Gallery, University of California, 2013), 1-17, Exhibition brochure.

26 act, if it appears in the first), these objects not only participated in development as a backdrop for action, but also acted as catalysts for action, for example in the mobilization of workers, funds, lands and infrastructure around single objects, or in the case of planning, the mobilization of policy making.

I coin the term “development theater” to highlight both the geo-political stakes (theater in military parlance denotes a geopolitical arena), and the complex mis-en-scene produced by the performance of its human and inanimate actors. The theater metaphor is more accurate than “market” for describing this nexus, since the latter runs the risk of reducing African desire for modernity to mere commodities, and therefore as a manifestation of false consciousness and continual “colonization of the mind.” Emphasizing the capacity of subjects to set into motion architectural projects extends the agency of African commissioners beyond passive consumption. Moreover, as “plot motivators,” the objects themselves had an active role far beyond evoking fetishistic desire. While produced as part of an international network of governments, institutions, and professionals that exceeded its

African locale, I use the metaphors of nexus and theater as an analytic framework that examines these objects in relation to their local effects; the locality of African modernity that they aimed to produce.

The question is how to account for these objects and the desire they evoked in terms that do not constrict them to mere commodities. First, we should ask whose desires they meant to address. Despite the stratified access to international aid and state resources, the architectural objects of development projects were not determined only by the desires of

27 individual politicians. These were not fanciful objects designed to express the tastes and ambitions of power-hungry rulers.69 Conceived in relation to an existing repertoire of images of modernist architecture and planning, circulated in media and seen in person by African elite during their education abroad or professional and political tours, the objective of these objects was to connect African locales, usually, but not always, capitals, to the international system by an aesthetic language that for the most part was based on similarity and virtuosic repetition, not iconic difference.70 For this reason, there was no contradiction between national aspirations and an international modernist outlook, and no particular insistence on the employment of local architects – in countries where such were available, such as Nigeria

- for prestigious governmental projects, even when the choice of architects was not circumscribed by conditions of aid.71 Rather than expressing any singular African identity, these projects were designed by foreign architects who dictated the form, and often even the program.

Even if they were not the direct product of creative African individuals, but of a group of foreign and local, professional and political stakeholders, these objects constituted an

“ontology of not-yet-being” in the societies in which they were staged. As Ernst Bloch, the

69 Compare to Nnamdi Elleh, Architecture and Power in Africa (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

70 As James Ferguson explains, questioning the authenticity of African modernity as a shadowed copy of the west ignores “the fact that a shadow is not only a dim and empty likeness (…) Likeness here implies not only resemblance but also a connection, a proximity, an equivalence, even an identity. A shadow, in this sense, is not simply a negative space, a space of absence; it is a likeness, an inseparable other-who-is-also-oneself to whom one is bound.” Ferguson, 16-7. The aspiration for a “European” house, Ferguson explains, “was a powerful claim to a chance for transformed conditions of life – a place-in-the-world, a standard of living, a ‘direction we would like to move in.’” Ibid, 19. Nkrumah’s Ghana is the closest to formulate an iconic language that embraced the international style to forge and represent an ”African Personality.” See Janet Berry Hess, Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa (Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 70-90.

71 Very often, the conditions of aid predetermined the choice of architects and construction materials of the donor country.

28 Frankfurt School philosopher who coined this term explained, cultural products such as architecture and art can carry a utopian imaginary. Even the false promise and false needs produced by advertisements, he argued, could express wishes that subvert the logic of capitalism.72 The content of hope, which he equates with the utopian imaginary, derives its power from basic human needs such as physical or metaphorical hunger.73 Simply put, hope is a dream for better life. From this perspective, even if these architectural objects were not a direct expression of African wishes and desires, as they were produced as part of an international western-dominated market, their function as objects of desire could still articulate “a complex configuration of unmet needs” that went beyond material consumption.74

This emphasis on needs in Bloch’s theory can help the reader reflect on the dominant narrative of development that was shored up by a “sociology of desire” and the “sociology of the non-existing.”75 According to geographer Michael Watts, the feeling of lack in these narratives was “articulated by projecting desires on the social reality which exaggerates the

72 Douglas Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London; New York: Verso, 1997), 91. In this sense, this argument foreshadows Reinhold Martin’s emphasis on projection as a concrete open-ended historical and discursive practice: “a site of projection in which past, present, and future meet at a single threshold. Also at this site, power, knowledge, and art meet to form new compounds with new possible outcomes.” See Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis, Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 150.

73 Kellner, 87-8. Compare this discourse of needs to Achille Mbembe’s discussion on the “vulgar aesthetics” of African politics. Mbembe, 102-41.

74 Jamie Owen Daniel, “Reclaiming the ‘Terrain of Fantasy’: Speculations on Ernst Bloch, Memory, and the Resurgence of Nationalism,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London; New York: Verso, 1997), 55.

75 Watts, 50.

29 relative importance of certain agents, forces and institutions.”76 Against this notion of exaggeration, or skepticism regarding whether something was missing at all (and therefore

African countries should have been left, literally, to their own devices, without external aid and intervention),77 I suggest that as vehicles of social and governmental functions these objects served as more than psychological fixations. Providing a concrete image for development, they served to mediate between the abstract ideals of the intellectuals who led independence and the masses and their concrete needs.78 Functioning as an intermediary category between statements and needs, these objects provided not only the image but also the means of translating governmental ideals into concrete programs of action. While Bayart interprets African politics of extraversion as primarily oriented towards access to resources, which he calls “the politics of the belly,”79 the architectural objects produced in the first decade of independence served as active agents not only in the grabbing of resources but also in their mobilization and distribution.

Just as access to resources was not an end unto itself, so were the objects open-ended in terms of the future they aesthetically and institutionally inscribed. As active participants in the post-independence imagining of African societies, they did not present ends in themselves, but rather acted as “wish-images” that delineated future trajectories. In this respect, their symbolic content or active role could not be fully scripted by either international or local stakeholders, since according to Bloch,

76 Ibid, ibid. 77 This is of course a false option, since Africa is integrated in the world economy, albeit as an unequal partner.

78 Ajayi, 5.

79 Bayart, especially 70-83.

Its space [of utopian imagination-AL] is the objectively real possibility within process, along the path of the Object [Objekt] itself, in which what is radically intended by man is not delivered anywhere but not thwarted anywhere either. Its concern, to which all its energies must be devoted, remains what is truly hoping in the subject, truly hoped for in the object [Gegenstand]: our task is to research the function and content of this central Thing For Us.80

This temporal open-endedness allows the object to act beyond resource interests and opens up space for alterity in relation to the original intentions of its creators, as the addressees of the objects – the “Us” – change over time. A proof that these objects served more than the immediate interests of their foreign and local creators is the fact that all the buildings discussed in this dissertation survived radical changes in the countries’ political regimes and still conform to their original functions. Furthermore, most of them have been recently refurbished. This fact cannot be taken lightly in a context where constructing new buildings is often easier (and provides new opportunities for more extraction of resources) than maintaining existing ones.

The double temporality of the architectural objects as both markers of modernity (in the present) and its harbingers (for the future) entails an alternative conceptualization of subject- object relationship than is usually attributed to development projects.81 Unlike the enlightenment-based approach that underscores the human agency’s transformative capacity for ostensibly passive objects such as geography and society, the objects discussed here play

80 Ernst Bloch, The Principles of Hope Vol. I, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986 [1959]), 7.

81 For notable examples see James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Conditions have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2002).

31 an active role in the total transformation of society. This is not only the case in non-western societies. As historian David Nye has observed, objects of engineering in the US were also imbued with transcendent qualities.82 In Zionism, the quasi-messianic undertone of the dictum “to build and be built” denotes pre-enlightenment relations and a non-linear causality between subject and object, as both engage in mutual becoming and redemption.83 Unlike

Chekhov’s gun that must shoot in the second act, there is no temporal immediacy or legible relation between cause and effect.84 More like triggers of a spillover effect in economic theory, these objects have the potential to cause future outcomes beyond their original trajectories. For this reason, the objects’ “success” cannot be assessed fully if analyzed from the prism of international development institutions.85

Embodied Expertise

Referring to development aid in Lesotho in his seminal work “The Anti-Politics Machine,” anthropologist James Ferguson argues, “(T)hrough Africa – indeed, through the Third World

– one seems to find closely analogous or even identical ‘development’ institutions, and along with them often a common discourse and the same way of defining ‘problems,’ a common pool of ‘experts,’ and a common stock of expertise.”86 This statement represents a prevailing conception regarding the homogeneity of the development discourse. It also

82 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996 [1994]), XI-XX.

83 An entire different pre-enlightenment relationship that continues in the present can be found in Chinese relationship between origin and copy, man-made and nature, in contemporary architecture. See Bianka Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013).

84 In its non-linear and seeming disproportionate effects it follows a similar logic to the gift.

85 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [1994]), 20.

86 Ibid, 8.

32 assumes to some extent an uninterrupted continuity from late colonial development

(specifically after WWII) to the post-independence era, both in terms of discourse and actors.87 However, Ferguson’s list of the twenty-eight countries from almost across the entire geopolitical map that offered Lesotho development aid raises the question of how all these players, old and new on the geopolitical map, could possibly adhere to the same discourse without offering competing strategies and practices – if not competing narratives of development – to differentiate their aid and make it attractive.88 One way to address this current blind spot in scholarship is to ask how development expertise is performed and staged as adaptable from one context to another, and how one’s experience is made particularly relevant to the experience of others in this act of translation.89

This differentiation was perhaps stronger in cases where the donor country emphasized the export of expertise over monetary aid, as in the case of Israel. Unlike the category of professional knowledge that is encoded and sealed by technical language and international standards, expertise opens up a broad interpretive horizon for a fine-tuned discourse analysis of aid, and of architectural practice. Deriving etymologically from experience, expertise can be explained by professional as well as personal biographies to include the effect of socio- corporeal experiences on the construction of professional knowledge. A review of

87 For a slightly more nuanced account see Watts, 50-5.

88 Taking into account that not all aid can be accepted simultaneously, coordination of it demands sophisticated maneuvering.

89 Framed this way, any attempt to evaluate the authenticity of intentions and altruism of individual actors is limited at best. See Kim de Raedt, “Between ‘True Believers’ and Operational Experts: UNESCO Architects and School Building in Postcolonial Africa,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 1 (2014): 19-42; Luce Beeckmans, “The Adventures of the French Architect Michel Ecochard in Post-Independence Dakar: A Transnational Development Expert Drifting Between Commitment and Expediency,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 6 (2014): 849-71. For a critique of limiting the analysis to “interests’ and “intentions” to individual actors, whether states, international institutions, or experts see Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 16-21.

33 contemporary publications from Israel on knowledge transfer reveals that there was as much emphasis on social qualifications such as resourcefulness, unpretentiousness and a “hands- on” approach from the Israeli experts – the ideal characteristics of the Zionist settler-pioneer

– as on their technical knowledge. Technical expertise was not simply complemented by these qualities, but was rather conditioned by them as knowledge production stemmed from facing unprecedented challenges such as difficult climate, lack of natural resources, and warfare conditions. At the same time, these qualities conveyed the informal, down-to-earth, and nonhierarchical character of the Israeli expert in the social sphere of labor relations with

African workers. I argue that while this expertise drew its discursive potency, as well as its methods of operation, from the colonizing pioneering ethos, by the late 1950s it was translated to an exportable expertise that could be capitalized upon to support Israeli diplomatic efforts in Africa.

My focus is on how expertise was constructed to contest international professional hierarchies. In other words, how new actors and new sets of expertise could challenge the hegemony of centers of professional knowledge and standard production. The underlying assumption regarding Israeli expertise was that it was more relevant to African states than strictly “textbook” knowledge and the formal professionalism of western experts. At the same time, it remained strongly affiliated with existing centers of knowledge production such as UN planning units, and it can be considered original only in the sense that it reworked existing accepted formulas. But the lessons of this reworking were highly significant. Following experiences in Israel, including failures and criticisms of high modernist projects that were already acknowledged in the 1960s, these lessons could be

34 incorporated to sophisticate this expertise when applied in Africa. If, according to Ferguson, once put to motion development aid produces “unlikely instruments of an unplotted strategy,”90 then the Israeli experts mastered this mechanism of incorporating the unplanned into a reformulation of development strategies.

Just like in the diplomatic realm where the alternatives of aid were a nuanced version rather than an outright rejection of dominant American or Soviet models, this professional competition did not contest hegemonic frames of reference. Rather than a contestation of perceived ideas, the claim for participation in knowledge production of Israeli institutions such as the Rehovot Institute (renamed the Weitz Center for Development Studies), was complementary and reciprocal, hosting in the 1960s among its numerous delegates from

Asia, Africa and Latin America also American planning economists. As the travel plans of one Ethiopian economist demonstrate, attending one of the Rehovot Institute conferences was not perceived as a detour, but as a new central node in an ever-expanding network.91 At stake in this relativization of expertise was how to make “othered” experiences relevant across geographies, and more importantly how to make it relevant to new hegemonic centers now under pressure to broaden their margins of inclusivity.

90 Ibid, 20.

91 On his way back from a trour to the US in 1965, Ato Wubishet Dilnessanu, Buisness Vice-President of the Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa, visited the East-West Communication Center at the University of Hawaii, the University of Tokyo, and finally, it was reported at the university bulletin, “he attended a very important conference on fiscal and monetary policies in Rehovoth, Israel. Finance ministers, goverors of banks, as well as distinguished economists from such great Universties such as Harvard, Cambridge, and Chicago, participated in the conference.” See HSU Bulletin, September 1965, 11-2, IES.

35 Architectural historian Duanfang Lu argued in a book she recently edited that there is a distinct architectural “third world modernism.”92 However, it remains unclear how it is manifested: is it a recognizable aesthetic determined by specific climates and an incorporation of non-western traditions, or is it the expression of a particular ideological affinity?93 And what does it mean in this context to “embody knowledge as commodity,” as art historian Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler theorized in her analysis of the work of Israeli architects in Nigeria in the same edited volume?94 These propositions are potent, but they demand further articulation. Israeli adaptation of architectural modernism to African territories entailed a double removal from its hegemonic center, as it first involved adapting professional knowledge studied in Europe to the conditions of the Middle East.95 I argue that at least in the context of the Israeli architects, adaptation was a form of expertise that was perceived as more important than the production of a new origin. For the Israeli practitioners, it was in the repetition of the same, in terms of adhering to modernist principles, that difference could manifest itself through adaptation to specific conditions: climatic, cultural, or political. With experience in one such translation, they were not exporting to Africa an

“Israeli architecture” but the experience of adapting modernism to non-western locales. This

92 Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity (New York; London: Routledge, 2011), 1-28.

93 By the term Third World Lu refers to a broader category than membership in the Non-Aligned Movement to include “the developing nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America which shared broad historical, economic, social, cultural, and ideological commonalities: a history of colonization, relatively low per capita incomes, culturally non-Western and agriculturally-based economies.” Ibid, 2.

94 Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, “Campus Architecture as Nation Building: Israeli Architect Arieh Sharon’s Obafemi Awolowo University Campus, Ile-Ife, Nigeria,” in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, ed. Duanfang Lu (New York; London: Routledge, 2011), 134.

95 It is rarely acknowledged that the studies of Jewish architects in major centers of knowledge production such as the Bauhaus often followed their immigration to Palestine, and were therefore colored by this experience. I suggest that their professional and personal objectives in Palestine should be taken in consideration when examining their studies and the professional knowledge they brought back with them.

36 double removal from the origin, as produced in the center of knowledge production, did not dilute its potency. On the contrary, it reinforced it by expanding its vocabulary while preserving its principles. By expanding the locales of knowledge production through adaptation, Israeli architects reinforced the discipline’s modernist creed by showing its adaptability, relevance, and its validity for new societies in another part of the world. At the same time, they acquired a privileged position, by virtue of their adaptation expertise, in a globally expanding market of architectural production.

This is not a purely rational, calculable adaptation. Beyond the factoring-in of variables of adaptation, there remains the self-conscious positionality in relation to this act of translation which may also produce unconscious effects. As art historians Laura Doyle and Laura

Winkiel explain,

The term modernism breaks open, into something we call geomodernisms, which signals a locational approach to modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global modernity…here, positinality is onto-social as well as geographical, entailing a sense of situated and disrupted social presence (…) this aesthetic self-awareness expresses a geocultural consciousness – a sense of speaking from outside or inside or both at once, of orienting toward and away from the metropole, of existing somewhere between belonging and dispersion.96

Acknowledging this self-conscious positionality can help construct a history of the formation of the architectural profession in non-western locales under the conditions of an uneven and racialized global modernity. Many times, professional status correlated with the

96 Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3-4.

37 status of subjects in colonial hierarchies. This, for example, explains the presence of Indian architects at British colonial posts in East Africa.97 That Israeli architects belonged already to the first wave of modernism via an education in Central and Western Europe that included prestigious institutions such as the Bauhaus gave them a privileged position in regards to first-hand access to knowledge, connections, and early experiences of adaptation.

Coming out of the “interstices of power structures,” as historian Frederick Cooper and anthropologist Ann Stoler have defined this position,98 these professional hierarchies determined to some extent the changing map of the professional world after colonialism. By examining the specific case study of Israel aid in Africa, this dissertation asks how colonial interstitial positions have translated in the post-colonial world. For this reason, it is not enough to claim that modernism was always cosmopolitan and situated,99 but it is important to ask what the conditions and positions are that enable the translation from the universal

(professional) to the local, and vice versa.100 Adding to Doyle and Winkiel’s definition of geomodernism, I argue that this position is not only informed by the choices and decisions of self-conscious subjects, but can also be affected and manifest at the unconscious level of

97 See, for example, the case of Ajit Singh in Garth Andrew Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 23-7.

98 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 18.

99 Vikramaditya Prakash, “Epilogue: Third World Modernism, or Just Modernism: Toward a Cosmopolitan Reading of Modernism,” in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, ed. Duanfang Lu (New York; London: Routledge, 2011), 255-70.

100 Mark Crinson’s call for a “critical internationalism” is a step in this direction. See Mark Crinson, “Modernism across Hemispheres, or Taking Internationalism Seriously,” in Non West Modernist Past: On Architecture and Modernities, eds. William S W Lim and Jiat-Hwee Chang (Singapore: World Scientific Pub., 2012), 37-45.

38 ideology, as it is inscribed through layers of experience where the biographical and the historical intertwine.

Contrary to a common understanding of the figure of the expert as a disembodied technician,

I propose to think of professional expertise as a form of “embodied cosmopolitanism,” following literary theorist Bruce Robbins’ definition of the term.101 In Robbins’ interpretation, although cosmopolitanism is defined as an ethic, it is not neutral or disinterested, and can even reflect national interests.102 Referring to cosmopolitanism in relation to international relations of aid is particularly appropriate since the modern interpretation of the term derives from Immanuel Kant’s discussion on cosmopolitanism as relations of hospitality and “perpetual peace” conditioned by the nation-state.103 The strength of Robbins’ definition lies in its acknowledgement that ethical claims and the power relations embedded in every act of cultural exchange are not mutually exclusive. However, I would like to go further than Robbins to stress the corporeal and epidermal dimensions of this exchange as expressed particularly through aid-practices by marrying his “embodied cosmopolitanism” to the term “embodied difference” as conceptualized in queer and gender studies, specifically by the theorist Teresa de Lauretis in her discussion on Frantz Fanon.104

This reading of materiality that extends to the expert’s body can further explain the effects

101 Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond Nation, eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1-19.

102 Ibid, 8.

103 See Akcan, 277-80. See also Garrett Wallace Brown, “State Sovereignty, Federation and Kantian Cosmopolitanism,” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 4 (2005): 495-522.

104 Teresa de Lauretis, “Difference Embodied: Reflections on Black Skin, White Masks,” Parallax 8, no. 2 (2002): 54-68.

39 of experience on acts of translation through identification and (mis)recognition of difference.

My reading of the Israeli architects’ response to African independence is therefore informed by their biographical and historical experiences in taking part of the physical construction of

105 the New Jew and his environment as a negation of Diaspora life.

105 The figure of the New Jew (as well as the discourse of development as discussed throughout this dissertation) is based predominantly on an ideal male figure. See Michael Gluzman, Haguf Hatsiyoni: Leumiyut, Migdar Uminiyut Basifrut Hayisraelit Hakhadashah (Tel Aviv: Haḳibbutz Hameukḥad, 2007).

Part I: Sierra Leone

1.1: A Knesset in the Jungle: Designing the Sierra Leone Parliament

Characterizing Israel as a “prosperous modern villa in the jungle” in 1996, Foreign Minister

Ehud Barak portrayed Israel as an isolated outpost of enlightenment in the midst of Middle

Eastern “wilderness.”106 By symbolizing Israel with this architectural image, Barak constituted a sharp dichotomy between a western modern (white) villa and an untamed natural and supposedly primitive environment. While this image expressed a desire for a clear cut separation, a fundamental divide between Israel and its neighboring countries or the non-western world at large, it also disclosed the threat of proximity, the entailing of the possibility of becoming the same, since as Barak’s metaphor implies, Israel must follow the laws of this jungle if it wants to survive. As it turns out, the stripped aesthetics of the modern villa become a symbol of brute force rather than a radiant lighthouse of enlightenment, comparable perhaps to the fortified villas of African ruthless dictators that haunt western imagination.107

In the late 1950s, however, this was not the image Israel wished to present domestically or internationally. As a private residence and an image of prosperity, Barak’s villa is a late neoliberal rendering of Israel’s self-proclaimed modernity. In the first decade of the state’s existence, the aesthetics of modernism were employed under an austerity regime, with national urgency standing for collective goals, epitomized in public-housing and the creation

106 Cited in Bar-Yosef, 10. This metaphor is so potent that Bar Yosef chose it for his book title. As Bar Yosef notes, this statement is particularly ironic given that PM Rabin’s assasination had occurred just a few months prior to that.

107 The portrayal of the modern villa as a locus of power appears in movies such as The Passenger, Lumumba, and The Last King of Scotland, among others. The Passenger, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy: Carlo Ponti, 1975), DVD; Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck (France: Jacques Bidou, 2000), DVD; The Last King of Scotland, directed by Kevin MacDonald (UK and Germany: DNA Films and Film 4, 2006), DVD.

42 of frontier agriculture and urban settlements. To this urgency was added the hegemony of

Labor Zionism, and its functionalist aesthetics.108 In public buildings and housing, modernity was tied not to luxury but to social and political achievements, and in the international realm, not to a manifestation of force but to self-reliance. In a tight economy in which each government expenditure could become subject to public scrutiny and criticism, the architectural community, as we shall see later, was even skeptical of the possibility that there would be enough funds for the construction of a parliament.

This skepticism concealed a graver problem, namely a professional impasse regarding the appropriate architectural civic structure for the young state. The question was how to create a physical manifestation and a concrete image for the idea of Jewish nationalism that would express both territorial belonging and modernity, while overcoming the inherent contradictions of an ethnocratic democracy. During the heat of the debate over the Knesset design and its continuous revisions, father and son architects Dov and Ram Karmi, who were part of the team designing the Knesset, were commissioned concurrently to design the

Sierra Leone parliament. As this chapter argues, the Sierra Leone parliament design presented an opportunity for the young Ram Karmi to articulate his fantasy of Zionist nativism away from Israel’s conflicted architectural community. The following chapter traces how the design of the Sierra Leone parliament was informed by the Knesset design,

108 This austerity aesthetics is termed in the field of art as “dalut hakhomer” (material meagerness), as coined by curator Sara Breitberg-Semel. See Sara Breitberg-Semel and Varda Steinlauf, Ki Karov Elekha Hadavar Meod: Dalut Hakhomer Keikhut Baomanut Hayisraelit (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1986). As in any hegemony, there were competing factions and trends. In architecture, the Histadrut Headquerters in Tel Aviv (designed by a team headed by Dov Karmi, 1949-53) and other projects commissioned by the Histadrut adopted late modernist international trends, especially in its public buildings that competed with the more austere architecture of the state. See Efrat, 393-343. Similarly, public projects funded by the world Jewry like Bet ha-Uma in Jerusalem, designed by Zeev Rechter in 1949-1956, and Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, designed by Dov Karmi and Zeev Rechter in 1953-57, present the more lavish end of that “austerity aesthetics.”

43 while avoiding the dilemmas it presented. In this sense, the Sierra Leone parliament is an early manifestation of what the generational watershed architectural historian Alona Nitzan-

Shiftan has characterized as the turn to locality in Israeli architecture, epitomized by the architects of the “generation of the state,” of which Ram Karmi was the most dominant figure.109 Not unlike in colonial projects, where architects were free to implement their designs while circumventing the hurdles of public opinion and bureaucracy back home,110 this project presented Karmi’s “solutions” to the Israeli conflict between modernity and tradition, universalism and nationalism, only to find out that similar conflicts existed in

Sierra Leone.

Having already constituted diplomatic relations with Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, and

Ethiopia, Israel’s entry into Sierra Leone, despite the large Muslim population, seemed like a natural development to both parties and was fairly smooth.111 With its impending independence in April 1961, Sierra Leone took a compromising stance toward England and the western powers, since “as the Sherbro proverb had it, ‘the shrub you know in the bush is the one from which you take your medicine,’” explained Dr. Richard Kelof-Caulker, the

109 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “Siezing Locality in Jerusalem,” in The End of Tradition? ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 231-255.

110 See for example Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Zeynep Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Sometimes local agencies initiated these experiments. See Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait, eds. Urbanism: Imported or Exported (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2003); William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern – Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

111 On Israel’s first diplomatic steps in Africa, see Zach Levey, “The Rise and Decline of a Special Relationship: Israel and Ghana, 1957-1966,” African Studies Review 46, n. 1 (April 2003): 155-177. While in Nigeria the largely Muslim northern region presented Israel a continuous diplomatic challenge, in Sierra Leone this was never an issue. On the contrary, Israel was presented in the media as an example of cooperation and tolerance. For example, Freetown’s Muslim mayor Alderman Abdul Fattah Rahman participated in the Congress of the International Union of Local Authorities, where he was photographed conversing with Arab mayors of Israeli cities. “Mayor of Freetown at Israel Talks,” Daily Mail, November 30, 1960, 4.

44 Commissioner for Sierra Leone.112 The prominence of Israel in its foreign relations is evidenced by the fact that Israel was included (albeit as a possible maybe) in the list of non-

African countries in which Sierra Leone’s future foreign ministry was planning to open commissioners’ offices, along with the United States, West Germany and France.113 To ensure the materialization of this hoped-for development, Israel’s foreign ministry offered the assistance of Solel Boneh, Israel’s largest construction company, in the construction of its new parliament building, while providing half of its projected costs as a loan.114

Even before the Sierra Leone delegation to Israel returned home with the good news,115 Dov and Ram Karmi arrived in Freetown accompanied by Mordechai Shpitz, chief construction engineer of Solel Boneh. The Karmis received the commission for the job because, along with Dov Karmi’s established relations with Solel Boneh,116 he and his son were involved in the design of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem. Immediately upon their arrival,

112 Daily Mail, March 3, 1961, 1.

113 Daily Mail, May 27, 1960, 1.

114 The loan was in the sum of 193,801 British Pounds. Israel Bank to Israel Ministry of Treasury, August 2, 1963, ISA, MFA 3142/11. The total estimate of the Parliament construction was 400,000 BP, of which 90,000- 100,000 BP was the planned cost of stage one. The estimate, however, was proven too naïve already in December 1960, and has more than doubled by March 1961. The Director of Public Works to the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Works, December 2, 1960; Permanent Secretary’s Minute Paper, January 3, 1961; The Director of Public Works to the Ministry of Works, March 14, 1961, Sierra Leone National Archive RG/4/1B/186.

115 The delegation travelled in August 4, 1960. “Move to get Money for New House of Representatives,” Daily Mail, August 3, 1960, 1; “Minister of Housing Off to Israel,” Daily Mail, August 5, 1960, 1. This series of front page headlines finished with “Was Trip to Israel a Success? Officialy: No Comment. Unoficialy: Yes!” Daily Mail, August 23, 1961, 1. That the terms of loan were not publicized in Israel or Sierra Leone may have to do with the fact that Israel was uncomfortable publishing its loans while receiving American aid, and more specifically, donations from American Jewry. In addition, the loans and aid have become increasingly discrete since the recipient countries saw the publicity of aid to promote Israeli and Zionist agendas as exploitative. Michael Elitzur, Israeli representative in Rangoon, to A. Shaham, Mashav, July 18, 1961, ISA, MFA 2025/13.

116 Designing the Histadrut Headquarters in Tel Aviv 1949-53, and the Solel Boneh Tel Aviv Headquarters in collaboration with Arieh Sharon (mid-late 1950s).

45 with no particular study of the country and its cultures, the architects began the design work and submitted preliminary plans within two weeks, while Shpitz surveyed the land chosen for the site.117

While it seems that Israel and Sierra Leone had no historical ties or commonalities save their incomparable degrees of entanglement with the British Empire before gaining sovereignty, the two states were intrinsically linked by the marriage of enlightenment and separation that undergirded both of their histories.118 Literary theorist Aamir Mufti foregrounds the “Jewish problem” in Europe as the discourse that set in motion postcolonial ethnic and religious- based partitions. Yet it appears that the very idea of a Jewish “return” as the paradigmatic displacement of populations in the name of enlightenment was preceded by another “return,” namely of freed slaves to Africa. As Mufti shows, the idea of Jewish return fascinated

British gentiles perhaps even more than the Jews themselves during the mid-nineteenth century.119 Similarly to the problem of the Jews’ assimilation that exposed the internal inconsistencies of British liberalism, the unresolved status of freed slaves, who found themselves with neither legal rights nor employment opportunities, presented an acute challenge to British liberalism. Unlike the “Jewish problem,” however, the solution of return to Africa was not framed in terms of cultural or religious differences, but was strictly based on skin color.

117 Daily Mail, August 16, 1960, 1; “Plans for the New House Submitted,” Daily Mail, August 30, 1960, 3.

118 Political scientist Joel S. Migdal fails to acknowledge these similarities in his influential study that compares state-society relations in Israel, Sierra Leone, Egypt and India. See Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

119 Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ; Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2007), 96.

What came to be known as Sierra Leone started out as a radical experiment in resettling liberated slaves in Africa. Founded as an “enlightenment colony” in 1787 by British abolitionist Granville Sharp, this “Province of Freedom” was conceived as a model society based on self-governing and private land ownership.120 The experiment in self-rule lasted only three years before the Sierra Leone Company took over the management of the colony.

However, the company continued Sharp’s philanthropic heritage, establishing Free-Town according to city planning principles and absorbing repatriate settlers from Nova Scotia,

Jamaican Maroons, and, following the abolition of the slave trade, recaptive slaves (African slaves seized by the British naval blockade, 1807-1860s). Although originally imagined as an agricultural community, after failed agricultural attempts the settlers turned to free professions and led bourgeois lives.

The settlers, of various ethnic descents, identified themselves inclusively as Creole or

Krio,121 while distinguishing themselves economically, culturally and religiously from the indigenous population. This distinction was legally formalized in 1808, when Britain declared Freetown a Crown Colony, and even more dramatically after Britain’s annexation of the hinterland in 1896.122 This annexation created what African political scholar

120 For the history of Freetown see Christopher Fyfe and Eldred Jones, eds., Freetown: A Symposium (Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1968).

121 After the Krio language that developed from a mix of English with African languages. From this point on I will refer to the Creoles of Sierra Leone as Krio. See Akintola Wyse, The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretative History (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1989), 96-7.

122 The Act of August 20, 1853 confirmed the conference of the rights of natural born British subjects on the Liberated Africans, namely to hold land and property within the colony. See Arthur T. Porter, Creoledom: A Study of the Development of Freetown Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 97. Granting the Colony residents British subjecthood and rights to purchase land.

47 Mahmood Mamdani has characterized as the colonial bifurcated state, consisting of a legal and administrative division between direct rule of the Colony (Freetown peninsula) and indirect rule of the Protectorate (the hinterland provinces): “direct rule was the form of urban civil power. It was about the exclusion of natives from civil freedoms guaranteed to citizens in civil society. Indirect rule, however, signified a rural tribal authority (…) Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, rural power of community and culture.”123

Defined mainly in relation to settler versus non-settler forms of administration and the language of rights, the case of a majority of African settlers in this case, however, is particularly challenging to any clear cut division between colonial citizens and subjects.124

The Krio enjoyed the language of rights and civil society they developed in Freetown, which in its heyday in the nineteenth century became known as the “Athens of Africa.” The settlers who were ardent proponents of Christianity and civilization identified with the European powers’ “civilizing mission” in Africa. With the establishment of the Fourah Bay College in

Freetown by the Church Missionary Society in 1827, Freetown became an intellectual center serving British West Africa’s African educated elite. From 1840s onwards, Freetown Krios traveled in Africa, particularly Nigeria and the former Gold Coast, either voluntarily or as agents of the government, the church, or trading companies “as accountants, clerks, teachers,

123 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18.

124 Unfortunately Mamdani does not deal at length with the position of the Creole settlers in Freetown.

48 ministers, and even top administrators without whom no modern process or installations in those countries could have been worked.”125

In their estrangement from the indigenous population, who perceived the Krios as a spearhead of European colonization, the Krios’ cultural hegemony presents a case of settler national revivalism under colonial patronage comparable to the Jewish settlement in

Palestine the following century.126 Edward Blyden, one of the leading intellectuals of Pan-

Africanism, imagined Sierra Leone as a center for the African race, from which “western civilization and culture could spread and illuminate the surrounding areas.”127 Blyden, who taught at the Fourah Bay College in its heyday, recognized in Zionism a comparable model of African racial and cultural regeneration.128 This intellectual connection that persisted in the following generations of pan-African thought did not only ensure that with decolonization the African educated elite accepted Israel’s foreign ministry rhetoric of a shared history of racial oppression, diaspora and return to the land of the fathers, but also ensured the advocacy and concrete help of contemporary intellectuals such as George

Padmore, who assisted Golda Meir with her first diplomatic steps in Africa.129

125 Porter, 57.

126 As in the case of historiography of the Jewish settlers’ society in Palestine, historians do not agree regarding the extent to which the Krio society was complicit with British colonialism. According to one historian, “colony people regarded natives of the Protectorate as unredeemed savages”; the Creoles “spoke of the natives as ‘aborigines,’ taking the name of the Government Aborigines Department” even after the British changed the department’s name in 1891. See Michael Banton, West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (London; Ibadan; Accra: Oxford University Press, 1957), 9. See Wyse and Porter for a more nuanced history of the Krio’s relations with the protectorate natives.

127 Porter, 58.

128 See Benyamin Neuberger, “Early African Nationalism, Judaism and Zionism: Edward Wilmot Blyden,” Jewish Social Studies 47, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 151-166; Michael J. C. Echeruo, “’The Jewish Question,’ and the Diaspora: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Black Studies 40, no. 4 (March 2010): 544-565. 129 Golda Meir, My Life (New York: Putnam, 1975), 325.

By the time of independence, however, much of the glory of the “Athens of Africa” had waned, and so had the hope for a national unity based on race rather than ethnicity. The annexation of the provinces entailed a British policy of strengthening the protectorate at the expense of the Krios, who were blamed for instigating the provinces’ resistance in the Hut

Tax War of 1898, and whose political status degraded considerably thereafter. By the time of decolonization, the Krios’ continuing minorization throughout the twentieth century, coupled with their bourgeois individualism, resulted in a fragmented society comparable to the support political figures from the provinces enjoyed from their chiefs. When the process of decolonization was set into motion in the 1950s, the loss of political power and the threat of being governed by the provinces’ leadership even led the Krios to demand that they alone become independent, separately from the provinces.130 This cry for separatism was a desperate attempt to revive the hegemony that they had once enjoyed before turning into a political minority. With the successful consolidation of a provinces coalition party, the

Sierra Leone People’s Party led by Sir Milton Margai, the Krio’s cultural identity and political interests faded to the background of the new nation, and were marginalized at the parliament.131

With the shift of emphasis from the colony to the provinces, the question of creating national symbols that would unite the four administrative regions (northern, eastern and southern provinces, subdivided into twelve districts, and the former colony in the west peninsula), presented a problem to the nascent democracy. No easy task, this would consist

130 Wyse, 104-6.

131 Ibid, ibid.

50 of composing a national hymn, designing a flag and a national costume, and building a parliament. The public media, specifically the government-owned Daily Mail, took a leading role in negotiating these matters and opening them to public debate. For example, when it was announced that the search for a national costume was entrusted to the Sierra Leone

Federation of Women’s Organizations, the editor added that the public was invited to contribute to the search by sending photographs of their own design.132 Building on the civic pride of Freetown residents, it also declared a competition for the best-looking house façade as part of the city’s face-lift in preparation for the independence celebrations.133 The public discourse that the media facilitated helped to alleviate the provinces’ emphasis on tradition that could have presented an obstacle to forging a national identity beyond ethnic specificity.

As in the case of the national costume, which belonged to the realm of tradition and therefore to the domain of the provinces (as evinced by the selection of the Mandigo Gown or Buba as national dress), opening this search to the public married Freetown’s urban civility with tribal traditionalism.

Incidentally, the call for the public to participate in the search for national costume was printed just below a perspective rendering of the Israeli-designed parliament building (fig 8).

That the design of the House of Representatives, the single most important national public building, was presented as a fact rather than a subject for public debate or competition demonstrates how wanting were the references for its desired architectural image. The Daily

132 “Have You Any Idea for Our National Costume?” Daily Mail, December 9, 1960, 4.

133 This tradition of civic pride goes back to the early British philanthropists who emphasized the well maintenance of the settlers’ gardens, even over the provision of food. See John Peterson, “The Enlightenment and the Funding of Freetown,” in Freetown: A Symposium, eds. Christopher Fyfe and Eldred Jones (Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1968), 15-16.

51 Mail attempted to create a public discussion by informing its readers about such attempts at national representation in their neighboring countries, specifically the other former Crown

Colonies Nigeria and Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast). It reported about the refurbishing of the Ghanaian parliament and Nigeria’s independence celebrations, which included laying the foundations of a twenty-five story building in Lagos.134 Named “Independence Home,” it was supposed to be seen from ships approaching the shore as the Statue of Liberty was in

New York, and in the spirit of New York’s skyscrapers, a band of golden mosaic at its top was designed to reflect a shimmering light for miles. On the Nigerian Federal Parliament, it was reported that “the layout of the Parliament is superb, and the colourful costumes of the parliamentarians add colour to the surroundings. Perhaps we can copy a few things from it for our own new House of Representatives.”135 With the lack of a tradition of African public buildings suitable for modern institutions, the search for an architectural language for such a monumental undertaking was left in the hands of the Israeli architects. Even the site chosen, as we shall see immediately, was determined by Israeli personnel.

The Site: Tower Hill

The site chosen for the parliament, Tower Hill, was the location of the British barracks until

January 1959, when the responsibility for the administration of the Sierra Leone military forces was transferred to the government of Sierra Leone. On July 22, 1960, as part of the series of concessions made by the departing colonial administration, the British government

134 “A New Look in Ghana’s Parliament,” Daily Mail September 23, 1960, 8; Daily Mail, “Independence Home,” October 1, 1960.

135 Daily Mail, October 21, 1960, p. 6.

52 handed over the land to the Sierra Leone government.136 A day later, the government announced its plan to build a new house of representatives to replace the Secretariat

Building where it used to meet since its formation in the 1950s. Despite this opportune turn of events, Tower Hill was not the first site considered for the parliament. Following early colonial planning of the city, the Sierra Leone government considered a site in the city’s gridded historical nuclei that served as the administrative and market center.137 This choice of site stirred an outcry of the market’s women, whose businesses were concentrated in this central location.138 A week later, however, the Daily Mail announced that following “the architect’s recommendation,” another site was to be chosen.139 Since the Karmis had not yet arrived, it was most likely Zvi Vagshal, a Solel Boneh manager who had already arrived in

Freetown, who recommended Tower Hill, probably due to the similarity of the site chosen for the Israeli parliament, which too was an isolated hill in the center of Jerusalem.

That Tower Hill was not the first site of choice may have had to do with the British colonial administration’s urban planning recommendations, made by eminent British architect E.

Maxwell Fry, who acted as the Town Planning Advisor to the Resident Minister in West

Africa. In a report accompanying the Draft Planning Scheme for Freetown he submitted on

December 14, 1944, Fry commented that “there is no civic center, and municipal buildings are of nondescript character. New centralized offices for Government and municipal

136 “UK Govt. Hands Over Tower Hill,” Daily Mail, July 22, 1960, 2. Tower Hill was valued at £109,719.

137 More specifically, where “the Parcel post and Telegraph Sections are and across the road including the ‘Big Market’ at Oxford Street,” as reported by the Daily Mail on July 23,, 1960.

138 “Market Women Object to Site for New House,” Daily Mail, July 28, 1960, 1.

139 The Daily Mail reported “it is believed that the new House will now be built at Gberia, Pademba Road, near Mereweather Road, George Brook,” today Jomo Kenyatta Road. “New House of Reps to Be Built at Gberia,” Daily Mail, July 30, 1960, 1.

53 administration are very desirable.”140 Regarding Tower Hill he observed the fact that its military functions became obsolete, “(f)rom a military point of view its one time impregnability is exchanged for an uncomfortable prominence and as a barracks or headquarter for a modern garrison it can have little to recommend it.” Yet for similar reasons, he did not consider it for the new civic center. Noting that it was not central enough for military or administrative functions, inaccessible in its height and cumbersome in its walling, Fry nonetheless perceived these negative qualities as fortuitous for “European housing.”141 By suggesting Tower Hill for European housing, Fry must have considered the hill’s elevation as a natural barrier, sufficiently isolated for a salubrious European quarter, following the justification of racial segregation by the “topography of health” of British colonial Hill Stations.142 Since the report was made as part of late colonial development,

Fry’s racially based zoning was condemned by an Interim Town Planning Committee appointed a year later to review his scheme, and suggested euphemizing it by referring to class distinctions alone.143

140 E. Maxwell Fry and K.W. Farms, Town Planning Scheme for Freetown (Lagos, Nigeria: Government Printer, 1945), 6.

141 Ibid, 16-17.

142 Judith T. Kenny, “Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Stations in India,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 4 (1995): 694-714. For the specific Sierra Leone context see: Stephen Frenkel and John Western, “Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation and Malarial Mosquitoes in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, no. 2 (Jan. 1988): 211-228.

143 “The committee notes with regret the use of the phrase ‘European and Better Class African Areas’ at paragraph 3 (e) and 4 (c) of the report, and suggests that a more appropriate expression would be ‘Better Class Areas.’ Sierra Leone Interim Town Planning Committee Report (Lagos, Nigeria: Government Printer, 1948), 7. In addition to his reluctance to adapt to changes in postwar colonial rhetoric, Fry’s anachronism reflected the rapid degradation of Freetown’s proud Krio society. Up to the end of the nineteenth century there were no areas reserved exclusively for English population in Freetown. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century Hill Station was built exclusively for white population, admitting senior African civil servants in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the postwar colonial development policy. See Wyse, 95; Porter, 98-99. As suggested by the list of names of the committee members, at least one was of a Krio.

54 Tower Hill was probably considered too vast and isolated to become a new civic center given the limited funds the British government was willing to spend. While the committee reproached racial discrimination as applied in this report to housing types, they did acknowledge the recommendation to dispose with the military use of the site, and in lieu of the segregated neighbourhood Fry proposed, the committee suggested it be kept as a large open space, reserved for recreation. With minimal capital investment, the transformation of the site into the green lung the city so badly needed144 would continue the site’s function as a dividing zone between downtown and foreigners’ luxury houses in the neighbouring hill, which with independence became the site for foreign consulates and diplomatic missions.

For the Israeli observer, however, Tower Hill seemed like the perfect location for a parliament: its prominent position in relation to the city, while not being far removed from the center, resembled Givat Ram, a hill at the center of west Jerusalem that was chosen by the Israeli Governmental Planning Department for the new Government quarter (Kiryat

Hamemshala) in 1949.145 Until the opening of the parliament the young government used

Fromin House on King George Street at the city center, originally designed by architect

Reuven Avram (Avramovich) to house a six story private residence with a commercial ground floor. The construction of this international style rounded corner building had begun in 1947 when it was interrupted by the 1948 war. At that point only three floors of the concrete frame were completed, and when the government searched for a Jerusalem residence it decided to utilize the large hall with a gallery that was designed for a bank at the

144 According to Fry’s 1945 scheme.

145 David Kroyanker, Adrikhalut Bi-Yerushalayim – Tkufut Vesignonot: Habniya Hamodernit Mikhutz Lakhomot 1948-1990 (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1991), 94-103.

55 ground and basement levels. However, the location of the parliament in the midst of a busy commercial street introduced traffic and security challenges, as in the case of a 1952 protest against the Reparation Agreement between Germany and Israel in which demonstrators threw stones that broke into the assembly hall.146 Thus the decision to allocate separate grounds away from the city center for the government facilities and national institutions had to do with security and traffic considerations in addition to issues of representation.

Similarly to Tower Hill, Givat Ram (Ram Hill) became accessible to the new governments following recent military operations. When the site was chosen for the government precinct,

Givat Ram was comprised of mainly expropriated land of the Palestinian Arab semi-rural suburb Sheikh Badr that covered approximately 150 acres.147 During the 1948 War, after the original inhabitants had fled, Jewish refugees were settled in the northern parts of the suburb, while the southern parts served for Jewish paramilitary training.148 In the practice of appropriating this contested zone for civilian representation of the country’s most important national institutions (besides the Knesset, also the National museum and the Hebrew

University), the Israeli government continued a pre-state practice of building civilian institutions in areas that were associated with battlegrounds in order to alleviate their military connotations and any reminder of their contested status or possibility of their future

146 David Kroyanker, Yerushalayim: Mishkan Haknesset Bebeyt Fromin, 1950-66 (Jerusalem: Hevrat Mishkan Haknesset Hayashan, 2003), 11.

147 Efrat, 734.

148 The Hebrew name of the site derives from the training camp’s acronym: Rikuz Mefakdim. During the war, the site also served as a provisional burial ground for Jewish fighters, see Maoz Azaryahu, “Mount Herzl: The Creation of Israel’s National Cemetery,” Israel Studies 1, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 57, 66-67.

56 reclamation.149 As Tower Hill had been the site of the British barracks, the Israeli consultant may have assumed that the Sierra Leoneans would appreciate the appropriation of what used to be the buttress of colonial military power and its transformation into a symbol of national independence. However, as the preservation of the Martello Tower (water tank) on the site and the adjacent Governor’s House indicates, the Sierra Leoneans have incorporated these

British symbols into their national history.150

Fixing Zionism in Stone

Towards the end of August 1960, within two weeks of the Karmis’ arrival, they submitted their preliminary plans for the Sierra Leone house of parliament. It took them exactly the same time to produce these plans as it had taken to produce their plans for the Knesset in the familiar context of Israel, where they had only needed to introduce revisions to an already existing plan. Although this was their first commission outside of Israel,151 questions of cultural difference and historical context were set aside, as they recognized in Tower Hill a comparable site to the one in Givat Ram.152 As this brief planning indicates, the Karmis simply adjusted their plans for the Knesset to the new location, free from the public debate and series of compromises that surrounded the Knesset design. It therefore presented the

Karmis, especially the young Ram Karmi, who had recently graduated from the

149 This was the case in the building of the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus first in 1917 and later in 1967. See Ayala Levin, "Hahar Vehamivtzar: Campus Har Hatzofim Bedimyiun Hamerkhav Haleumi Hayisraeli,” Teoria Uvikoret 38 -39 (Winter 2011): 11-34.

150 “Ancient Tower Declared a Relic,” Daily Mail, Octber 2, 1961, 3.

151 This commission was followed by a commission to design the Cape Sierra Hotel in Freetown, and the president house in Liberia.

152 Ram Karmi, interview, in Meira Yagid-Haimovich, Dov Karmi: Architect-Engineer Public Domestica (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2011), DVD and Book.

57 Architectural Association in London, with an opportunity to materialize his vision for the

Knesset as a “building that would grow from the ground” removed of all historical context including African and British colonial architecture in the area.153

The Karmis got involved in the latter stages of the design process of the Knesset following a heated debate that the 1956 design competition for the parliament roused. Sharing the postwar sentiment that associated neoclassicism with fascist regimes,154 the architectural community in Israel protested against the winning entry, whose style, they claimed, was unfitting for a young democratic state (figs. 2-3). Reminiscent of the Prussian State architect

Karl Fridrich Schinkel’s design for the Altes Museum in Berlin,155 the contested winning entry by the architect Joseph Klarwein was a stripped classicist rectangular structure, 84m long, 64m wide, and 12m high, with the assembly hall flanked on both sides with courtyards and the exterior surrounded by a colonnade.156 Before immigrating to Palestine in 1933, the

Poland-born architect was educated at the Munich Polytechnic, trained at the studio of the

German expressionist architect and set designer Hans Poelzig in Berlin, and worked for ten years at the expressionist architect Fritz Hoger’s Hamburg office. In Palestine, however, this strong expressionist predilection was mitigated, much like in the case of the prominent expressionist Erich Mendelsohn. One of the explanations for this phenomenon could be that expressionism was considered too subjective to represent the collective interests of Jewish

153 When I asked about the architectural context back then in Freetown, Ram Karmi stated that there was no architecture, just shacks, ignoring the colonial architecture that prevailed in what used to be the “Athens of Africa.” Ram Karmi, interview with Ayala Levin, August 4, 2011, Herztliya Pituach, Israel.

154 As expressed by Siegfried Gideon in his 1944 lecture “The Need for a New Monumentality.” See Siegfried Gideon, “The Need for a New Monumentality,” in New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 549-68.

155 Sheila Hattis-Rolef, “Mishkan Haknesset Begivat Ram: Tikhnun Uvniya,” Katedra 96 (2000), 138. 156 “Beyt Habkhirim,” Davar 2 August 1957, 23.

58 nationalism.157 In Palestine, Klarwein turned to the prevalent modernist idiom that served well both the hegemony of Labor Zionism as well as the urban bourgeois, while carefully and selectively imbuing it with classicist tendencies in representative buildings such as the

Knesset.158

While a Greek temple would have been a fitting, although conservative, model for a modern acropolis, Klarwein denied this was his primary reference. In one interview, the Jerusalem- based architect traced his inspiration to Jerusalem’s Old City walls, which he had watched with his binoculars since 1948,159 as well as to his studies of the archeological sites of the

Roman king Herod the Great’s family tomb and of the Old City architecture built in the sixteenth century under the reign of the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent. Searching for “atmosphere” and inspiration that he could not find in modernist buildings, he situated his studio in a nineteenth century arched house that used to be owned by an Ottoman pasha

(a high rank of governor or general). When confronted with the question of the influence of

Greek temples, he admitted that there was some resemblance but instead of referring to it as a distinct style, he situated Greek architecture within the long durée traditions of the

Orient.160 In another interview he stated that while he was not seeking a particular Oriental style, he was perhaps inspired by ancient Egyptian temples. Yet the style he came up with

157 The Dagos Silos in Haifa are probably his most expressionist project in Israel (1953-66). The rejection of expressionism can be explained in similar lines to Georg Lukács’s critique of expressionism, which he claimed to be too subjective and escapist to represent class interests. Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London; New York: Verso, 2007 [1977]), 18-19. Similarly, expressionism could have been deemed too subjective to represent Zionist national interests.

159 Under Jordanian rule (1948-1967), the Old City’s walls and especially the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) were an object of desire and longing for the Jewish residents’ of the city. See Levin, “Hahar Vehamivtzar,” 20- 24. Artist Dan Karavan was commissioned to create an “Eastern Wall” within the Knesset assembly hall. Zvi Elgat, “Hakotel Hamizrahi shel Mishkan Haknesset,” Ma’ariv, August 12, 1966, 9.

160 Yonatan Amir, “Ba’al ha-Tokhnit Mispar 13”, Ma’ariv July 26, 1957, 2.

59 for the Knesset, he stressed, “does not belong to any period – it belongs to all periods.”161

Similarly, regarding the Jerusalem Wall he said: “It is built with simple straight lines.

Simple and arid stones like the rocky ground around it. It is always beautiful. Modern and beautiful.”162 The reference to simplicity of lines, whether Egyptian, Greek, or sixteenth century Ottoman as embodying eternal beauty, and therefore “modern” can be interpreted as reminiscent of the synthetic, yet contradictory approaches of British colonial architects such as Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens in New Delhi and Austen St. Barbe Harrison in Mandatory

Palestine. As argued by Ron Fuchs and Gilbert Herbert, while the first used classicism as a way to offer a modern vision for India by abstracting local vocabularies into pseudo universal forms (mediated by western knowledge), the latter employed “stripped Orientalism” in order to preserve tradition against the Jewish Settlement’s rapid and aggressive modernization.163 Similarly to Lutyens, Klarwein identified in the simplicity of stripped classicism a key to an ostensible universal language of forms, whereas similarly to Harrison, he turned to a wide range of “regional” sources of inspiration – divested of history and politics -- for that timeless “modernity” that he found in his objectified Orient, including

Greek classicism.

Situating the state of Israel within this colonial lineage, or conversely, as part of an imagined long durée of the Orient, was one of the causes of the ardent response the winning entry had instigated among the architectural community. Arguing that the building did not embody the

161 “Beit Habkhirim,” 23.

162 Amir, 2.

163 Ron Fuchs and Gilbert Herbert, “Representing Mandatory Palestine: Austen St. Barbe Harrison and the Representational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922-37,” Architectural History 43 (2000): 281-333, especially 284-5.

60 spirit of the time like the prevalent modernist idiom of the international style, which served

Zionism to assert a revolutionary modern intervention within the country, the modernist architets deemed it unfit to represent a young dynamic state.164 Even the fact that Walter

Gropius, the highly regarded pioneer of modern architecture, designed that same year a modern Greek temple for the American embassy in Athens did not alleviate the outrage.165

The competition for the Knesset, therefore, exposed the problem of imbuing architectural modernism, which was promoted on principles of functionalism and internationalism, with monumentality and representation that would give a distinct sense of identity and community. Although this dilemma was particularly acute in the context of crafting a modern but national identity for the new states that emerged after WWII, it was articulated also in the mainstay of the modernist canon in postwar Europe, with the reconstruction of bombed city centers and the construction of British “new towns,” and in the American increasingly suburbanized cities.166

In this late Israeli equivalent to the League of Nations’ architectural scandal, in which a neoclassical design was chosen over modernist entries such as Le Corbusier’s or Hannes

Meyer’s, many Israeli architects of stature had refrained from entering the competition in the first place.167 Most of the country’s prominent modernist architects, who were educated in

164 Hattis Rolef, 140; Kroyanker, Adrikhalut bi-Yerushalayim, 106-108. See also Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism-Alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine,” Architectural History 39 (1996): 154-5.

165 The difference is of course in the materials used; a subject I deal with later in the chapter.

166 Consequently, the main theme of CIAM 8 (Congrès internationaux d’architecture modern), held at Hoddesdon, England in 1951, was “the heart of the city.” It coincided with the festival of Britain, where a similar problem of manifestation of postwar national pride of a country dominated by a labor party, resulted in a new modernist monumentality. 167 Hattis-Rolef, 137.

61 West Europe or the local Technion, deemed there would be no available funding for the project, and some disapproved of the competition’s specifications.168 Ironically, these prominent architects also refrained from joining the selection committee that was later scolded for its decision, in order to maintain the right to compete if they wished to.169 The lack of entries may have had also to do with the cultural predicament discussed above, namely, how to reconcile modernism with national and civic representation, which in this particular context had also to reconcile the contradiction embedded in the proclamation of a

Jewish democratic state. In 1952, four years before the competition was announced,

Klarwein himself suggested that it would be better to wait until the Israeli constitution was completed before starting to build a parliament.170 In the heat of the opposition to his plan,

Heinz Rau, another Jerusalemite architect with whom Klarwein had collaborated, together with the well known Jewish Settlement planner Richard Kaufman, in the planning of the

Government Quarter and the Hebrew University Campus, both on Givat Ram (1950, and

1953 respectively), stressed the open public character the building should have and commented sardonically that “it may be correctly objected that the State is not yet sufficiently mature for parliamentary procedures of this nature.” Instead, he recommended afforesting the hill that would “serve the population of Jerusalem until the nation would

168 Only 35 architects submitted their proposals. For comparison, at a previous competition for the Israeli Academy for the Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram 99 proposals were submitted. Kroyanker, Adrikhalut Biyerushalayim, 105. According to one architect, the competition’s ambiguous and contradicting specifications was the reason why many architects refrained from submitting their entries. See Ella Binshtuk, “Se’ara Adrikhalit,” Davar, August 9, 1957, 15.

169 Binshtuk, 15.

170 Hattis-Rolef, 134.

62 solve its more pressing economic and ideological problems, so that the seat of the government might be built about the year 2000.”171

To the astonished architectural community, funds became miraculously available when the pre-state Jewish Settlement’s most benevolent patron, Edmond James de Rothschild, endowed in his will six million Israeli Pound (1.25 BP) specifically for the construction of the parliament building.172 To appease the angry architects, a committee comprising the

“international experts” Howard Robertson and Max Abramovich reviewed the winning design and approved the selection.173 The committee also advised that Klarwein and Shimon

Povsner, the architect who was assigned to help rework the design, would go on a study tour

“abroad.” While the exact itinerary remains unknown, it is safe to assume that the tour was limited to Western and Northern Europe. Ironically, while Asher Gad of the Public Works

Department (MA’ATS: Misrad Avodot Tsiburiot) sent an enthused postcard of the ultra classicized parliament in Helsinki, Klarwein stated that the only building he found worth studying on that tour was the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, a collaborative work of the

171 Heinz Rau, “No Hurry to Build,” Jerusalem Post, September 6, 1957, 5. Neither the constitution, nor the ideological problems of the state, have been written or resolved to this day. Rau’s suggestion to build a park there was not far fetched, as it would have connected to the public park Gan Saker that was built on Givat Ram’s eastern slope in 1965. Furthermore, forestation was a Jewish National Fund common practice as a means of nationalizing space by camouflaging ethnic cleansing and expropriation with national parks. See: Naama Meishar, “Fragile Guardians: Nature Reserves and Forests Facing Arab Villages,” in Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, ed. Haim Yacobi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 303-328; Efrat, 465.

172 Kroyanker, Adrikhalut Biyerushalayim,105.

173 “Va’adat Mumkhim Ishra Bi’yesoda Tokhnit Klarwein Lebinyan Haknesset,” Davar, April 17, 1958, 4. Hattis-Rolef, 141; Kroyanker, Adrikhalut Biyerushalayim,108-109.

63 international prominent modernists Marcel Breuer and Pier Luigi Nervi, and the local

French architect Bernard Zehrfuss.174

Dov Karmi, who was awarded the Israel Prize in 1957,175 was invited in early 1960 as a consultant to rework the Knesset design in collaboration with Klarwein, after Povsner had failed miserably in the task (fig. 4).176 His son Ram, who joined his office in 1956 after graduating from London’s Architectural Association (AA), collaborated on the project. The main changes they introduced were turning the rectangular shape of the building into a square, removing the courtyards, locating the assembly hall off center, and adding terraces for offices in the south slope, instead of having the offices at the perimeter of the assembly hall as in Klarwein’s original design (fig. 5). While it is unclear what exactly their working relationship with Klarwein, who continued to have some control over the final design, was, one of the limitations placed on their revisions was that the colonnade surrounding the representative part of the building must stay.177 The young Karmi, who had a notoriously vehement temper, presented an uncompromising position regarding the columns. First, he suggested five large partitions in a portico “in the spirit of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh.”178

Later, he amended it to seven concrete columns, following the number of columns in the

174 Hattis-Rolef, 141.

175 Israeli state’s highest honor. Dov Karmi was the first architect to receive it.

176 Haim Ben-Shaul, “Al Haikuv Bebitsua Hatokhnit,” Ma’ariv, February 11, 1960, 3. Sheila Hattis-Rolef, “Tikhnun ha-Knesset: Tosafot ve-Tikunim,” Katedra 105 (2002), 171-180.

177 Hattis-Rolef, “Miskan Haknessset,” 147.

178 Karmi, interview in Dov Karmi.

64 Parthenon, claiming that the eye cannot grasp more than seven elements at once.179 His persistence regarding the columns resulted in a severe clash that led his father to remove him from the project. According to Ram Karmi, his father sent him away to design the Sierra

Leone parliament, where he could build “a Knesset without columns.”180

Rootedness and Expansion

The Sierra Leone parliament design demonstrates that the columns were merely a symptom of a deeper conflict embedded in the very materiality of the design of the Israeli Knesset, as evidenced by the series of compromises and revisions the original design had suffered by the time the building was finally completed in August 1966.181 In Sierra Leone, where he was given carte blanche to design a parliament with no stylistic or programmatic specifications,182 Ram Karmi could bypass the turbulent public opinion in Israel and more importantly, the cultural predicament that was at the root of that turbulence, with complete ignorance of Sierra Leone’s history and culture.

Similarly to the Knesset, Karmi divided the Sierra Leone parliament building into two parts according to their function: the assembly hall building served the representative function, while the sloping terraces served for offices and future functions such as the government’s

179 Hattis-Rolef, “Mishkan Haknesset,” 147. This insistence on gestalt, and immediate imageability of the building may be derived from Reyner Banham’s conceptualization of British Neo-Brutalism, whose heyday coincided with Karmi’s schooling at the AA. See Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism” Architectural Review (December 1955): 354-361.

180 Hattis-Rolef, “Mishkan Haknesset,” 147; Karmi, interview in Dov Karmi. According to Ram Karmi, the Sierra Leone’s parliament design is completely his. Zvi Meltzer, Dov and Ram’s partner, was the architect on site.

181 August 30, 1966.

182 According to Zvi Meltzer, the architect on site, the commissioners were not even sure regarding how many parliament members the assembly hall should accommodate. Meltzer, interview.

65 archive. This topographical division between the representative space and the administrative space at the Knesset and the Sierra Leone parliament is reminiscent of two contemporaneous internationally renowned designs, the Sao Paulo Museum of Art designed by Lina Bo Bardi

(1956-68) and Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1962-68). In the latter two, the representational space is embodied in a glass box laid on top of a podium, or suspended over it, while the podium serves for permanent exhibitions and administrative functions. The podium is either slightly elevated from the ground, as in the case of the classicized Neue Nationalgalerie, in which the basement floor leads to a walled sculpture garden, or as in the case of the Sao Paulo Museum, it terminates at street-level, while bridging the sloping terrain with a two story block extending at the rear. As in the above cases, the podium at the Knesset served as a solution to the land infill Klarwein’s original plan necessitated, while maximizing the functional space at the basement level.

Despite these similarities, the Knesset structure presented a curious inversion of the material and tectonic logic exemplified in both of these projects. In the latter, the representational space is accentuated by a strong material juxtaposition of the glass airiness and structural framing, either by the red painted concrete supporting arms in the Sao Paulo Museum or the black steel roof that rests on slender columns at the Neue Nationalgalerie. The concrete podium that supports it, especially in the Neue Nationalgalerie where the supporting walls of the podium are coated with stone and the glass box is paved with marble, further accentuates the airiness of the glass walls.

66 Contemporary commentators in Israel were perplexed by the curious decision to have a stone coated building rest on glass terraces at the Knesset (figs. 6-7). They pointed out the tectonic incongruity, which failed to give a sense of structural unity or continuity between the two parts.183 Against Klarwein’s original insistence on a unitary image which he hoped to achieve by referring to the Old City wall,184 the addition of the glass terraces presented a competing logic that marked a radical departure from the original design. According to the

Karmis, the reason they chose glass and steel for the terraces’ addition was to allow structural flexibility for further extension of the offices.185 Intended to accommodate growth and change, this horizontal expansion logic is influenced by Team X member Aldo van

Eyck’s structuralist approach, exemplified in his Amsterdam Orphanage (1955-60), or by

Louis Kahn’s contemporarous design for the Jewish Community Center in Trenton, New

Jersey (1954-59). While Klarwein’s and Karmi’s approaches may seem structurally and visually incompatible, both derive from a similar desire to connect the structure to the ground. If for Klarwein this was via the material but timeless connection of the local stone, which he associated with various building traditions in the region, for Ram Karmi the connection to the ground was rendered through the grading terraces reference to agricultural terraces, a vernacular form of cultivating the ground practiced by the Arab fellahin.

Through this particular reference to Palestinian vernacular, the design of the Knesset marks a significant moment in the generational watershed that Nitzan-Shiftan has called the “turn

183 Abba El-Channani et al, “HaBniya Hamonumentalit Bamea Hanokhekhit: Simposyon,” Tvai (1967): 14-22; Bill Gillit, a British architect and Ram Karmi’s classmate who joined the design team of the Knesset in its latter stages, also expressed this criticism. See Sheila Hattis-Rolef, “Tikhnun Haknesset: Tosafot Vetikunim,” Katedra 105 (2002), 174.

184 “Beyt Habkhirim,” Davar, August 2, 1957, 23.

185 Hettis-Rolef, “Mishkan Haknesset,”145. The terraces were completed in 1991.

67 to locality” in Israeli architecture. While Nitzan-Shiftan emphasizes this turn by referring to the emulation of Arab architecture following the conquering of East Jerusalem in the 1967

War, she traces the shift back to the late 1950s, when a generation of architects born and raised in Palestine was influenced by Team X and looked at Arab vernacular as a form of inspiration to assert a more authentic relationship to the Israeli territory than their modernist

émigré predecessors.186 Seeking to create a sense of belonging to the territory, it was their desire to “achieve” Arab nativness that motivated this generation of “Sabra” architects, the first “natives” of the Israeli state, to look at the Arab vernacular.187 Ram Karmi, who studied at the Architectural Association from 1951 to 1956 and was therefore one of the earliest

Israeli architects to be exposed to Team X’s paradigm shift in modernist architectural discourse, became by the late 1960s arguably the most important architect of this

“Generation of the State.”188

In their search for an image of Israeli belonging to the territory, the “Generation of the State” architects turned to the figure of the Arab fellah as a model for emulation. As Nitzan-Shiftan demonstrates, the relationship of “the fellah to his house, which he builds and maintains with his own hands” was perceived as “a relationship of belonging, of identification, and of strong emotional attachment.”189 The appropriation of Arab vernacular among Jewish artists dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, and was analogous to the European trend of primitivism

186 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “Siezing Locality in Jerusalem,” in The End of Tradition? ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 231-55.

187 Ibid, 238-41.

188 The term “generation of the state” was first coined by literary scholar Menachem Brinker to define a literary generation. See ibid, 251, n. 8.

189 Nitzan-Shiftan, 238. (Emphasis in original).

68 on the one hand, and the exaltation of the traditional farmer in the internal colonization of

Kamelist Turkey and Fascist Italy on the other.190 Nitzan-Shiftan’s analysis neglects these earlier examples and does not account for the differences between pre-state and state period reification of the Arab vernacular. The revived interest in the Arab vernacular in the 1950s and 1960s marks a significant shift in this form of modernist Orientalism, since as sociologist Gil Eyal explains, the military rule and especially the academic practices that emerged from its dissolution in 1966 have solidified the Arab Village into a discursive object bound to tradition, as a distinct spatial and social entity, comparable to some extent to the fixation of tradition in chiefdoms under the administration of the British colonial system of indirect rule.191 Only by removing it from the Israeli public space (purifying the hybrid, in the Latourian terminology Eyal employs), and isolating it as an object of study and governance, could it re-emerge as an aestheticized and politically neutral image to emulate.

In this respect, the shift to the vernacular in Israeli architecture starting from the late 1950s is more closely related to a contemporaneous turn to “settler primitivism” in Australia, New

Zealand, and South Africa.192

Ram Karmi too employed the figure of the fellah in his writings, only to offer a modern alternative to its traditional form of belonging:

190 Dalia Manor, Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine (London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 128-65. On the village in Kamelist Turkey see Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 2001), 97-105, 255-71. In another study Nitzan-Shiftan discusses Erich Mendelsohn’s borrowing from the Arab vernacular in Palestine, but she does not contrast his approach with the one she is presenting here. See Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 163-71.

191 Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 152-84.

192 John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 21.

The modern building seized being a stable mass that sits on the ground in the corporeal expansiveness of a fellah sitting confidently on his land. The building becomes transparent, thin, and muscular: its skeleton is like a tree trunk that is not laid on the ground but planted in it, nailing its roots deeply. And the deeper the roots, so is the foliage vaster, since it does not depend on its weight but on its strength, to its dynamic muscularity that reaches its long lean arms to the sides, as if hanging by a thread, similarly to the outward extending cantilevers in FLW’s Fallingwater.193

In this retrospective theorization of his work, Karmi juxtaposes the “corporeal expansiveness” that he associates with the fellah’s confident relationship with the territory with an image of a transparent and thin muscular tissue supported by a skeletal infrastructure.

While Karmi refers to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house of 1935, this description is reminiscent more of Yona Friedman’s megastructure of the late 1950s, with its light modular infrastructure and flexible enveloping materials. Karmi’s image, however, differs from Friedman’s raised structures, which could have been potentially superimposed over any given territory. Instead, he emphasizes the structure’s rootedness in the terrain, similarly to Frank Lloyd Wright’s “organic” architecture, while replacing the massive rock that serves as the vertical axis in the case of Falling Water with a slender tree trunk, and its extending reinforced concrete cantilevers with the image of vast delicate foliage. “Muscular” yet airy,

Karmi locates the source of strength of his imagined structure in its dynamic motion downwards and upwards, vertically and horizontally, where the passive confidence he associates with the fellah is replaced by tension, “as if hanging by a thread.” Similarly, instead of “sitting confidently on the land” the stone-faced concrete structure of the Knesset assembly hall is sitting on Karmi’s seemingly fragile glass terraces, creating a visual tension

193 Ram Karmi, Adrikhalut Lirit (Tel Aviv: Misrad ha-Bitakhon, 2001), 46. (My translation-AL).

70 between the two. The dynamic relationship is achieved not only by the material juxtaposition and tectonic inversion but also via the very logic it conveys: that the technically advanced structure, symbolizing in its reference to agriculture the Zionist modernization of agriculture, provides the economic and historic basis for the realization of a Jewish nation-state, embodied in the seemingly archaic assembly hall building. By creating a hybrid between vernacular agriculture and a glass and steel rhizome-like structure, the Israeli modern linkage to the ground is performed as an inorganic organism, a technologically advanced base for the monumental, allegedly timeless presence of the nation.194

While Karmi stated that it was the “Mediterranean” Le Corbusier who was his true inspiration,195 he nonetheless presented Frank Lloyd Wright’s model of organic architecture as the one that his generation of architects in Israel could most identify with:

A Full-fledged American symbolizes the true force of primordial nature – a deep interior impulse, liberated from the European-based architectural tradition… Wright identified with the pioneer that conquers the vast prairies; we, the Sabras – that knew this character from American movies – felt like him… we, like the Americans are leaves on a tree, immigrants- refugees that began a new life in a new country; but as the sons of one place they are also united, since these leaves are tied to each other as a tree planted in water creeks.196

194 However, since the terraces represent a different temporality than the representative image, they are relegated to the back. The tension between these two temporalities is similar to what postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha identifies as the conflicting temporalities of the nation between “the accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative.” See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York, 1994), 209.

195 Karmi, Adrikhalut Lirit, 53.

196 Ibid, 48-9. (My translation-AL)

71 The image of the tree is evoked again as a metaphor for unison in difference and dispersal, and the perseverance of a central constant core despite the course of history symbolized by the running water. Against Karmi’s figurative consistency, as manifested in his repeated employment of the tree trope, the wording he uses to invest the tree with his desired symbolism betrays irreconcilable contradictions between settler-colonialism and nativism, and between the dispersed places of origin of immigrants and their supposed shared unitary primordial source. In an essay on Esther Raab, known as “the first Sabra poet,” literary scholar Hannan Hever explains Zionist desire for nativism as an attempt to naturalize Jewish presence in the territory and the effacement of its colonial character.197 This desire was pregnant with the temporal paradox of radical beginning, on the one hand, and with time immemorial of continuous ownership of the land on the other.198 Born in the territory of the ancients, explains historian Yael Zerubavel, the Sabras or “New Hebrews” were considered as an authentic continuation of the ancients and as a “radically transformed breed” of their

Jewish immigrant parents.199 Despite this seemingly privileged and secure position in comparison to their immigrant parents, Karmi, like Raab, desired to identify with the settler- pioneers in their “conquest” of the territory.200 By identifying with the labor Zionist pioneer, while at the same time claiming a new “native” understanding of the place, Karmi sought to maintain the pioneering zeal and perpetuate its creative energy even after the establishment

197 Hannan Hever, Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 3-4.

198 Ibid, 4-5.

199 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1994), 25-27. However, both Zerubavel and Hever maintain that Zionism rejected a total rupture between the New Hebrew and Jewish continuity. For this reason, Hever differentiates between Zionist nativism and Zionism.

200 Hever, 12.

72 of the state.201 Paradoxically, he could do that in Sierra Leone, where Israelis were told that they are continuing the pioneering tasks by representing their country on foreign land.

The attempt to reconcile the temporal schism between the Sabras’ supposed primordial belonging and the radical beginning they represent is the driving force behind their creative process, whose ultimate referent is the territory itself. As Hever demonstrates, Raab’s poetic act becomes “a primary tool for the colonialist appropriation of space, appearing as an endless motion that nourishes the appropriative desire over and over.”202 For Karmi, Israeli architects (like himself) who turned to Brutalism in the 1960s “aspired to an authentic locality and saw in concrete a local material. They felt that the work of the architect and the artist is equal, by the force of faith that throbs in it, to the work of the fellah who diligently cultivates his land.”203 Associating concrete with the land, Karmi coalesced the land as an object of desire with the material medium of his artistic production.

More than anywhere else, the burden of “proof” of native belonging is located principally in the visual realm. Since nativism is constructed as a natural “biological fact,” in order for it to become “obvious” it needs to be clearly recognizable. “The role of nativism,” Hever argues,

“is to compensate, through culture, for the fact that the colonial Jewish presence in that space lacks a natural, organic appearance, and thus to render it organic and natural.”204 As

Zali Gurevich and Gideon Aran claimed in their seminal essay on the dual character of the

201 I will return to this problem in chapter 4.

202 Hever, 11.

203 Karmi, Adrikhalut Lirit, 63-4. (My translation – AL).

204 Hever, 4.

73 “Israeli place,” in its early beginnings the Zionist enterprise was characterized by a conspicuous disproportion between a symbolic (spiritual) kinship to the place, and a lack of a primordial connection (material).205 This was the problem Karmi’s generation wished to resolve by offering a concrete image of native belonging that is naturally molded from the materiality and creative forces of the place itself. Yet as we saw from Karmi’s conflicted portrayal of the figure of the fellah, as well as from his glass and steel terraces, this could not be carried out by a simple borrowing of forms from the Arab vernacular or the use of local stone in a timeless Oriental fashion, as suggested by Klarwein. It had to be created anew, while undermining its own newness, since as Hever explains, the idea of a “new beginning” also contains within it its own end, its own historicity, and this had to be eradicated to maintain a sense of continuity from time immemorial.206

The proclamation of the site of the Knesset as a center of Jewish stonemasons during the

Second Temple era served well this narrative of material re-appropriation.207 Beyond the meaning attached to the stone by Klarwein, who used it as a marker of Oriental traditions shared by different peoples that inhabited the region, the association of the location of the building specifically with an ancient Hebraic material practice was part of a general trend characteristic of Zionist narration that linked antiquity and national rejuvenation. In the

1950s this narrative focused on creating a direct correspondence between the bible, read as an historic document, the Jewish people, and state territory. This shift was recognizable in

205 Cited in Hever, 7. Zali Guervitch and Gideon Aran, “Al Hamakom: Antropologia Yisraelit,” in Al Hamakom, ed. Zali Gurevitch (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007), 22-73.

206 Hever, 7.

207 Hattis-Rolef, “Mishkan Haknesset,” 136. In Zionist culture, the Second Temple symbolizes the period of Hebraic heroism. See Zrubavel, 23.

74 the field of archeology, in which as anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj argues, an interest in the biblical past “would finally stabilize the ancient Israelites, and national history itself, squarely within the parameters of national sovereignty and the boundaries of a clearly demarcated national home.”208 With the turn from the excavation of Jewish religious monuments that dated to Roman through Byzantine times in the 1930s, to the 1950s excavations of settlements and everyday objects from the Canaanite period, archaic Hebrew culture had gained the status of empirical evidence.209 While this vision of Hebrew antiquity was foreign to Klarwein, who attached to the stone a general Oriental meaning with no specific mention of Hebraic ancient traditions, this narrative appealed especially to the

“Generation of the State.” The reference to stonemasonry as a Hebraic tradition concealed the anxiety over the loss of this craft among the majority of the Jewish population, and the fact the trade has become almost exclusively a Palestinian Arab domain, including the quarries from which the stone for building the Knesset eventually arrived.210

As a way to compensate for this loss, the brick façade was conceived as a non-bearing detached screen (fig. 13), denoting that the building is in fact constructed using the most advanced technology of that time. The vertically divided screen creates an illusion of folding,

208 Nadia Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 76, 99-129. Partly as a response to the growing popularity of the Canaanite movement, that took the ideology of the “New Hebrew” and nativism to its radical end by promoting a complete break from Jewish history and alienation from Diaspora Jews, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion used the bible as a common cultural and political symbol of the Jewish people, regardless of religious observance and political stance. While for Ben Gurion it was specifically the First Temple period that symbolized the national golden age, the Second Temple that fell outside of the historical scope of the Old Testament, had a strong hold on popular imagination among secular Jews. See Zerubavel, 23.

209 Abu El Haj, 99-129.

210 Or Alexandrovich, “Kurkar, Melet, Aravim, Yehudim: Eych Bonim Ir Ivrit,” Teoria Uvikoret 35 (Spring 2010): 61-87; Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London; New York: Verso, 2007), 33.

75 with each pair of vertical strips bending slightly inward, facing each other. Rather than mimicking a heavily laid stone structure, the screen emphasizes the fact that it is a non- bearing wall, thus asserting its employment of industrial building techniques and adherence to modernist aesthetics. In this architectural statement, the Knesset joins a few generations of modernist architecture in Jerusalem that followed British regulations mandating the use of stone facades for construction in Jerusalem, especially in the Old City environs, by using increasingly thinner cladding, emphasizing that it is in fact merely that.211 Rather than functioning as a construction material, the stone cladding exposes itself as an ornament that does not necessitate the application of traditional masonry, and thus joined the industrialized iron and glass rendering of the agricultural terraces.212

Exporting Rootedness

In Sierra Leone, Karmi could project his image of a desired nativity onto the newly decolonized state by bypassing these contradictions and envisioning a unified image of a building that “grows from the ground” in a site he found comparable to Givat Ram (figs. 8-

10).213 Contrary to the Israeli Knesset, the terraces at the Sierra Leone parliament are integrated with the assembly hall to create an effect of organic continuity between the two parts in a unified image that seems to emerge from within the terrain. This unity is achieved

211 Michael Levin, “Regional Aspects of the International Style in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” in Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings, ed. Spyros Amourgis (Pomona, CA: College of Environmental Design, California State Polytechnic University, 1991), 248-254. Weizman, 27-30.

212 In Karavan’s mural inside the assembly hall, on the other hand, the artist collaborated with Arab stonemasons, whose names he wanted to include on the wall next to his. He was denied that and withdrew his name from the wall.

213 It is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s statement: “I knew well that no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it.” Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Horizon Press, 1977), 191-200; Cited in Michelangelo Sabatino, “Spaces of Criticism: Exhibitions and the Vernacular in Italian Modernism,” Journal of Architectural Education (2009), 49.

76 by the repeating horizontal lines of the cantilevers that over-hang above the window strips.

Their perspectival rendering recalls unequivocally Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water (fig.

8).214 According to Karmi’s series of drawings and model, a pedestrian route leading up the slope would have extended these horizontal lines down the hill in accordance with the site’s topography. Projected surfaces coated with white plaster were interweaved into the earthy reddish tone of the laterite stone that dominates the building’s facade to create a sense of visual dynamism and accentuate the projected massing. This interplay of surfaces is echoed in the interior hall surrounding the assembly hall, where it is imbued with metaphoric meaning by literalizing Karmi’s tree trunk metaphor: the columns are divided into wooden fluted trunks at the base, and white bare trunks at the top, denoting the dynamic young elements of the nation and symbolizing the process of an organic rejuvenation (fig. 12).

While in Jerusalem Klarwein’s use of stone served to denote a linear continuum between the state and an ancient Hebrew civilization, in Freetown Karmi carved out an image of nativity directly from the ground, thus bypassing any reference to local history, recent or ancient.215

Instead of referring to the local history as expressed by the architecture of repatriated

Africans and British colonial administrators in Freetown, or the mud structures of the country’s rural areas, Karmi and Zvi Meltzer (the architect on site) “invented” a tradition by converting the local laterite stone, customarily used for building foundations and road paving, into cladding. In other words, instead of using it merely for the base of the structure

214 Similarly to the Knesset, the sunken library draws from Alver Aalto’s Viipuri Library, and the separate circulation according to audience is reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s assembly hall in Chandigarh.

215 The "traditional" house in Sierra Leone is a clay and earth structure topped with a thatch roof. Construction can either be "wattle and daub" (wattle is the frame of a group of poles secured by the intertwining of twigs and vines; this frame is then "daubed" or plastered with soft earth to cover it), or clay and earth blocks, which are dried and hardened in the sun.

77 as was the local custom, the architects incorporated the laterite stone into the parliament’s facade to become the most dominant feature of the building.216 The assembly chamber was made of laterite blocks (fig. 12), whereas the cantilevered exteriors were faced with crushed stone embedded in concrete plates (fig. 11). The autochthonous element of the land was thus incorporated into the façade of the building, allowing the iron-rich stone to gradually deepen its rusty shade when exposed to the elements. By crushing the stone and fixing it permanently into the concrete plates, the architects both preempted the stone’s corrosion and eventual disintegration, and hastened its color transformation by increasing its surface area.

This process ensured not only the convergence of autochthony with the newness of the present, but also with the future in which the building’s surface would increasingly merge with the land’s rusty shade. Similarly to the contemporaneous parliament buildings designed by Louis Kahn in Dakha and Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, the weathering of stone instilled an aura of archaism and authenticity, while asserting the building’s modernity.217 That the excavated stone, an ostensibly unequivocal symbol of autochthony, was nonetheless subjected to a process of acclimatization attests to the architects’ unwitting recognition that nativity is not a given biological fact, but is subject to becoming, similarly to Zionist acclimatization of the Jewish body by exposure to the environment.218

Ram Karmi’s adaptation of the design for the Israeli parliament into the Sierra Leonean context can thus be understood as a phantasmagoric projection of modern nativism, one that

216 It is ironic that the laterite stone was chosen to represent growth from the ground considering that its rockiness is what stood in the way of the original settlers to cultivate the land.

217 William J.R. Curtis, “Authenticity, Abstraction and the Ancient Sense: Le Corbusier’s and Louis Kahn’s Ideas of Parliament,” Perspecta 20 (1983): 181-194.

218 This subject is dealt with extensively in chapter 4.

78 encapsulates Zionist desires and anxieties, but that could paradoxically only be materialized on, and by means of, foreign grounds. Moreover, Sierra Leone’s unindustrialized context freed the architects from dependence on industrial production (Hebrew labor’s competitive edge in the building industry against Palestinian masonry that gradually rendered it obsolete) and made it possible for them to project the fantasy of the revival of Hebrew ancient masonry on Sierra Leone’s cheap labor. A manual technique that can be performed by unskilled labor, the embedding of the crushed laterite stone into concrete plates took place in-situ, and created an open-air makeshift pre-fabrication plant that involved hundreds of workers. The architects were quite stunned by the image of the mass of manual workers, comparable to an ancient civilization’s monumental undertaking.219 While this use of labor- intensive methods may raise criticism over cheap labor’s exploitation, in the context of the

African economy such monumental undertakings were celebrated by local populations as they engaged and fed entire communities.220 More than any claim for sustainability, however, this novel use of stone was supposed to fulfill a symbolic function by introducing a new national aesthetic that would overcome ethnic, cultural, and religious rivalries.

Yet this new aesthetic of nativism was something that some Sierra Leoneans found hard to swallow. While visiting the construction site, the Parliament’s Secretary asked Karmi when the Italian marble was expected to arrive, implying that the building seemed incomplete and

219 On such an undertaking, organized by an Italian contractor in Nigeria, architect Harold Rubin commented that it was like building the pyramids. Harold Rubin, interview by Ayala Levin, Jaffa, Israel, July 31, 2011.

220 As Rubin explained, the Italian contractor who did it in Nigeria became a local hero since he fed an entire community. Ibid, ibid. The introduction of a new manual technique that required only concrete, laterite soil, and wooden frames can be considered in contemporary terms as a sustainable technology, although this technique served for coating alone while heavy machinery was used for construction.

79 bare without marble coating.221 While this client’s dissatisfaction could have had to do with a general discontent with the spending patterns of the construction managers (see next chapter) or Israeli “austerity aesthetics,”222 it may have derived from an expectation of colonial standards for exhibition of power. That he did not represent the majority of Sierra

Leoneans may be inferred from his further comments to Karmi that disclose his Krio identity and hostility toward the new government and political hegemony of the provinces.223 In a not-so-subtle manner, he noted that the ministers would probably need extra facilities at the terraces to host their lady friends. Portraying the ministers as power dazzled “monkeys that just came off the trees,” the secretary betrayed the Krio administration’s resentment over their loss of political power to the new provinces-led government. Karmi, who had no knowledge of the deep cultural schism existing between the

Krio and the population of the provinces, was so disturbed by the secretary’s comments that he decided to “flee before he’d be asked to design a brothel.”224

Associating skin color with nativism (skin color acting as empirical evidence of nativism), and nativism with nationalism, Karmi’s reaction attests to his ignorance of the historical dichotomy in Sierra Leone between the Krio and the “natives.” As Mamdani has explained, the dichotomy between the subjects of the colony and the protectorate was based on race

221 Ram Karmi, interview by Ayala Levin, Hertzliya Pituakh, Israel, August 4, 2011.

222 Another example of such an aesthetic clash and incompatible expectations was one kibbutz’s preparations for a visit of an African king, where the kibbutz members borrowed a king’s chair from a theater to welcome the guest, who arrived in a tailored suit. Bar-Yosef, 215.

223 Krio remained in top posts in civil service despite change of government because of their long tenure and experience in administration. Wyse, 117. According to Meltzer, speaking from his experience on site, the commissioners loved this idea of coating the walls with laterite stone. Meltzer, interview.

224 Karmi, interview by the author.

80 versus ethnicity, respectively. The category of race belonged to the language of rights and social mobility, and for this reason could be expanded by Krio intellectuals to an all inclusive pan-African identity.225 Ethnicity, on the other hand, was used as a binding category that fixated customary rule and chiefs’ power.226 It was therefore difficult for

Karmi to comprehend that although they belonged to the same race and the same nation, the

Krio and the provinces population considered themselves inherently different. Furthermore,

Karmi was not aware of how loaded the category of “nativism” was in Sierra Leone’s colonial history. While the official colonial terminology regarded the colony’s population as

British subjects and non-native, the protectorate native population was defined as British protected aliens. Yet with decolonization, we witness the reversal of the status of the non- natives and alien natives when Milton Margai, the leader of the Protectorate coalition party who would become the country’s first prime minister, referred in a speech he made in 1950 to British and Krio as aliens/foreigners. Under the leadership of the provinces, nativism now became a marker of true belonging and rights.227

225 Edward Blyden regarded Sierra Leone as the centre of the African race, the point from which western civilization and culture could spread and illuminate the surrounding areas. Another African intellectual, Dr James Horton stated in 1868 that “the inhabitants of the Colony have been gradually blending into one race, and a national spirit is being developed.” See Porter, 58.

226 Mahmood Mamdani, “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism,” in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2001), 21-8.

227 George Roberts, The Anguish of Third World Independence: The Sierra Leone Experience (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 8. Interestingly, in the same spirit, Roberts too reverses the category and names the British and Krio “aliens.” This nativist language of rights continued also in post military rule 1996 elections, with the SLPP symbol of palm branches that according to one political scientist “speak of ancestral links to the land.” In this late postcolonial manifestation, nativism is tied to images of consumption as a commitment to feed one’s followers. See Mariana Ferme, “Staging Politisi: The Dialogics of Publicity and Secrecy in Sierra Leone,” in Readings in Modernity in Africa, eds. Peter Geschiere, Brigit Meyer and Peter Pels (London: The International African Institute, School of Oriental and African studies, 2008), 120. See also Mbembe, 102-41.

81 With his fantasy of unequivocal nativism shattered by this outright rejection of native legitimacy, coming from someone who seemed to him native simply by the biological “fact of blackness,”228 Karmi was forced to recognize the limits of his own claims for nativity.

Facing this disturbing mirror image, he faced an inability to reconcile the Zionist double desire to be both colonial and anti-colonial;229 both native and civilizer, mirrored in the Krio, who had turned from a privileged “subject” to a “stranger” with equal rights but with no political hegemony. This mirror image must have brought up disturbing questions regarding

“natives” and “strangers” in Israel, owners of the land and its civilizers. With the military rule separating and cleansing the Palestinian threat of hybridity, a new threat of

“contamination” and reversal of power was presented with the mass immigration of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries following the 1948 war. This changed completely the population make-up of the new state during the time Karmi was away studying at the AA. The Knesset was not immune to the racism that plagued Israeli society, and in its paternalism and suspicion towards the immigrants even instigated it. In a response to the Wadi Salib Protest of 1959 against discrimination and mistreatment, Minister of

Finance Levi Eshkol, who would become prime minster a few years later, expressed his misgivings about the arrival of immigrants from Iran: “from Egypt they sent us first the weaklings… I don’t know who they are bringing us now from Persia, but we have to accept them, we’ll figure out what jungle we are getting into.”230

228As noted by Teresa de Lauretis, this phrase, which is usually attributed to Franz Fanon, is a bad translation of his chapter title “L’expérience vécu du Noir” (the lived experience of the Black) in Black Skin, White Masks. De Lauretis, 58.

229 Bar-Yosef, especially 67, 101.

230A government meeting on the Salib Wadi demonstration held on July 27, 1959. See: Gidi Weitz, “ha- Protokolim shel Eru’ei Wadi Salib,” Ha’aretz Sof Shavua, February 15, 2014. http://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/.premium-1.2242853, Accessed April 2, 2014. (My translation-AL)

The desire for nativism had turned into an anxiety over the “jungle” that exists within – rather than without – Israeli society. The question of who was the “civilized” and who was being civilized was one that had already been under severe criticism as early as 1951, when a group of about a hundred Jewish immigrants from India demanded, in a series of protests and hunger strikes, to return to India. Protesting against what they experienced as discrimination, racism, and insensitivity, one argued that “you live here like animals. One eats another. I could not imagine a country where human relations take on such a brutal character,” and others exclaimed “we cannot live in a country where you can achieve something only by shouting or making a scandal.”231 Perhaps when Karmi decided to flee

Sierra Leone and the tribal brothel he thought he was expected to design, it was rather the content of the hit song “Parlament be-Eretz Zulu” that he saw take shape before his eyes.

The song, which welcomed him upon his return home after his five year long sojourn in

London, depicted the Knesset as a cannibal (African) society where justice is achieved with cavemen’s clubs, and the opposition is cooked in a soup.232

231 Ofer Aderet, “Mearkhiyon Ha’aretz: Ha’olim Mehodu neged Israel: Khaiym Kan Kmo Khayot,” Ha’aretz February 4, 2014, http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/comeback/1.2234636, accessed February 4, 2014. See also African students’ disillusioned view of Israelis, which they found to be not so western as they seemed at first, in Bar-Yosef, 210-11.

232 Released in 1956, by Ayalon Group (Yekhiel Mohar: lyrics; Sasha Argov: melody). The song was banned ostensibly to protect the feelings of African visitors. See Bar-Yosef, 205 n. 32.

1.2: Fast-Tracking the Nation-State: The Construction of the Sierra Leone Parliament

Embodied in this nation is a creative and pioneering force, vibrant and dynamic, which turns miracles to an everyday practice and raises every transformative mission and constructive effort to the level of example and symbol.233 Reuven Barkatt, 1958

To politicize the masses is not and cannot be to make a political speech. It means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone.234 Frantz Fanon, 1961

On April 27, 1961 the Sierra Leone House of Representatives declared independence in its newly built parliament in Freetown. On time for the independence celebrations, a fully furnished and air-conditioned Assembly Hall welcomed the Duke of Kent, then Prince

Edward, a member of the British royal family who inaugurated the building. Yet the exterior of the Assembly Hall resembled nothing more than a concrete water tank as the building that housed it was still underway (fig. 14). To compensate for this deficiency, a model of the complete building was presented to the Duke and the rest of the dignitaries as they passed underneath the scaffolding (fig. 1). It seems as though Ram Karmi’s nativist aesthetic that

233 Reuven Barkatt, Opening Address of the First Afro-Asian Seminar, Tel Aviv, November 20, 1958. LA IV- 104-38-104. Reprinted in Aynor, Avimor and Kaminer, 2. (My translation-AL).

234 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]), 138.

84 seemed incomplete and bare to the Parliament Secretary was extended to the modus operandi of the entire building’s construction.

What was the logic behind this seemingly inverted Potemkin village phenomenon -- the stage-like setting of impressive building facades that mask undesirable social and economic conditions? The theatrical effect in this case was achieved through the Assembly Hall’s interior, rather than the exterior of the building, which was yet to be built. While the interiors were seen by a privileged few (fig. 15), namely the parliament members and the foreign guests including the Israeli architects and engineers who had been working on the building for the past seven months,235 the building in scaffolding was the image the rest of

Freetown residents saw at the time of inauguration. A result of hasty construction by a joint

Israeli-Sierra Leonean company, this privileging of a selected audience for the ceremony of independence and inauguration of the parliament could be interpreted as an utter indifference toward the general public. Yet, as I argue in this chapter, the Israeli managers collaborated with the Sierra Leone government and the local media to turn this image of the parliament under construction into a potent symbol of Sierra Leone’s independence and used it as a tool for national mobilization. This chapter examines the managerial ideology employed in this staging of the parliament’s construction as a national event. At the center of this examination is the emphasis the Israeli managers placed on present urgent needs rather than on gradual future-oriented planning. I trace the Labor Zionist origins of this managerial ideology and its practices and explore the implications of their translation in the

Sierra Leone state-building context.

235 S. Shkhori, “Haparlament shel Sierra Leone Niftakh Bemoado: Hamehandesim Ha’yisraelim shel Solel Boneh Nitzkhu Bamerotz im Hazman,” Davar, May 11, 1961, Zvi Meltzer private collection.

The Israeli construction company Solel Boneh won the contract to build the parliament house at a particularly opportune moment. Sierra Leone’s date of independence was announced as late as May 1960 at the Constitutional Conference held in London.236 Since no apparent provisions for a parliament house had been made prior to this declaration, the building of the parliament became an urgent task that, as reported by the Israeli media, none of the British firms which had been approached were willing to pursue in such an unrealistic time-table.237

This was an opportunity the Israeli Foreign Ministry, headed by Golda Meir, was keen to seize,238 as the ministry’s method of operation was to constitute relations with African decolonizing states by recognizing potential spheres of influence before independence. Solel

Boneh, Israel’s largest construction company, a subsidiary of the Histadrut (the General

Federation of Labor) and a public-owned cooperative, had by then established local partnerships in Burma (1956), Ghana (1958), and Nigeria (1959), where it acted as a provisional and junior partner. Seen by the Foreign Ministry as an instrument for technical cooperation that preceded formal diplomatic agreements, the establishment of these joint ventures ensured Israeli visible presence as an aid donor immediately upon independence.

Solel Boneh’s managerial personnel developed unique methods of collaboration with the

236 “Independence Next Year,” Daily Mail, May 5, 1960. The date of independence commemorates the Hut Tax War of 1898 that broke on the same day and marks Sierra Leone’s Provinces resistance to British colonialism. See Martin Kilson, Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 257. For the Constitutional Conference see: Report of the Sierra Leone Constitutional Conference, 1960 (Govt. Printer: Freetown, 1960).

237 Davar, May 11, 1961.

238 Golda Meir visited in Sierra Leone in January 1960, Israel Representative in Monrovia to Foreign Ministry, January 15, 1960, ISA, MFA 2033/20.

86 Asian and African governments by emphasizing their expertise in state-building tasks such as workers’ mobilization and technical training.239 Sierra Leone government officials were highly impressed by this model, as evinced by the fact that they chose Solel Boneh over the much better financed and locally experienced Woodrow-Taylor, one of the largest British general construction companies still operating today.240 J.C. Mitchell, the General Manager of Woodrow-Taylor, was willing to secure loans to the government jointly with the United

Africa Company, and assured Mr. Pearl, Sierra Leone’s Development Secretary, that the company highly prioritized the Africanization of senior positions. However, unlike Solel

Boneh, he did not address the requisite of training unskilled workers, or offer to liquidate the company’s private shares in favor of the company’s future nationalization. As discussed by the government’s Executive Council, the merits of Solel Boneh’s offer versus Woodrow-

Taylor’s were that it

…would be a national company, training Sierra Leoneans in managerial posts and the Government could if it wished take over the company after a certain period. Members has seen the work of an Israeli construction company in Monrovia and felt that the quality of workmanship and the speed of execution could not easily be bettered.241

239 Solel Boneh developed this method of cooperation in the mid 1950s in Burma, the first Asian state that constituted diplomatic relation with Israel. David Hacohen, Israel’s first diplomatic representative in Burma acted prior to his appointment as a senior manager at Solel Boneh.

240 J.C. Mitchell with Mr. Pearl, 2.11.59 – 28.1.60, SLNA RG4/1B/142.

241 Extract No. 94: government/Israeli Construction Company (extracted from the minutes of Executive Council Meeting No. 9 of 1960, held at the Government House on Tuesday the 22nd day of March, 1960), SLNA RG4/1B/142. Although Monrovia was one of the first countries in Africa to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, Solel Boneh did not establish a joint company there. Yet it built in 1958-9 Monrovia’s executive mansion, town hall and law courts. Its work there by the end of 1960 generated $15 million, based on a loan from Israel in the sum of $13 million. Levey, Israel in Africa, 19-20.

87 The National Construction Company of Sierra Leone (NCCSL) was consequently established in July 1960 in partnership with Sierra Leone’s government, and within a month, after securing a loan from the Israeli government,242 the parliament design and construction commenced.

A National Event

Political scientists often interpret Sierra Leone’s relatively peaceful transition to independence as a symptom of an ideological lethargy. According to Jimmy D. Kandeh,

Ricardo René Larémont and Rachel Cremona, “anticolonial nationalism in Sierra Leone never assumed the form of a transformative ideology nor did it rise above the minimum requirements of an independence movement (…) independence was neither preceded nor followed by any serious attempt to mobilize the population on the basis of a common national imaginary.”243 Less concerned with questions of ideology, political scientist Jeffrey

Herbst claims that this peacefulness presented concrete state-building challenges.

Comparing the formation of African states to those in Europe, Herbst argues that boundary disputes, war, and crisis were key for the creation of “important symbols around which a disparate population could unify and bond with the state in a manner that legitimized the

242 The loan was in the sum of 193,801 BP. Israel Bank to Israel Ministry of Treasury, August 2, 1963, ISA MFA 3142/11. The total estimate of the Parliament construction was 400,000 BP, of which 90,000-100,000 BP was to be the cost of stage one. The estimate, however, was proven too naïve already in December 1960, and has more than doubled by March 1961. See SLNA RG/4/1B/186.

243 Jimmy D. Kandeh, Ricardo René Larémont and Rachel Cremona, “Ethnicity and National Identity in Sierra Leone,” in Borders, Nationalism, and the African State, ed. Ricardo René Larémont, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005), 195. See also Roberts, 101-2; Irvin Kaplan et al., Area Handbook for Sierra Leone (Washington, DC: US Govt., 1976), 5; Kilson, 252-255.

88 capital’s authority.”244 Furthermore, war not only justified taxation but also forced leaders to become more efficient in collecting taxes. In accepting colonial boundaries which in turn are recognized and defended internationally, Herbst contends, African states lacked a sense of a

“productive” crisis in their formative years.245

The urgent task of building the parliament by the recently formed National Construction

Company addressed this need to some extent by offering a national collective symbol that would require sacrifice and work under duress. Given that the company was founded based on its Israeli management’s agreement to construct the building in time for independence, the completion of the Assembly Hall before continuing with the rest of the building could be interpreted as a last resort measure taken to meet the pressing deadline. However, as a government document indicates, the construction of the parliament was planned in advance to be executed in three stages: The first phase included “The Chamber, with such other work as the Contractor is able to complete but at least sufficient to give access to the various levels of the Chamber by Independence Day,” while the second stage and third stages referred to the remaining structural work and the finishing, respectively.246

That the parliament in fact would not be completed in its entirety by Independence Day became a publicly known fact when it was published in the widely circulated newspaper

Daily Mail barely a month after the architects had submitted their plans and construction

244 Jeffery Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 113.

245 Ibid, 112-116.

246 The Government of Sierra Leone: Minute Paper, January 3, 1961, SLNA RG/4/1B/186.

89 began.247 However, this fact did not in the least attenuate the exalted tone of the Sierra

Leonean reporter’s front page piece, “The New House Will Be Ready In Time!”

The new House of Representatives will be ready in time for the ceremonies which will take place on Independence Day, next April 27.” You – like me - may have said “oh, yeah?” when you heard that. But yesterday I went to see what progress has been made so far, and I’m telling you this: THE NEW HOUSE WILL BE READY IN TIME - or I’ll eat my hat (my best Sunday one) (…) The progress that has been made in just a few weeks is STAGGERING. The whole site is one scene of hustle and activity. Streams of labourers are moving earth, carpenters and other skilled men are busily working in unison. And it goes on for TWELVE HOURS A DAY.248

The reporter’s assertion of the expedited construction process attests to a constructional feat, one that is comparable to the spectacles of infrastructure in the latter years of colonial rule that produced what anthropologist Brian Larkin has named the “colonial sublime.”

According to Larkin, in the colonial context the grand opening ceremonies that accompanied infrastructural objects such as power plants, bridges, dams, or railroads were not just effects of colonial rule but a mode of its governance.249 Serving as evidence of the superiority of

European civilization, and as a means to legitimate its continuous rule, technology was used to incite awe and thereby ratified the colonial difference between “those who understand and control machines and those who do not.”250

247 As reported in “The New House Will Be Ready in Time!” Daily Mail, September 28, 1960, 1.

248 “The New House Will Be Ready in Time!” Daily Mail, 28 September 1960, 1.

249 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 16-47.

250 Nye, 60. Cited in Larkin, 39.

90 While this report helped to instill confidence in the new government’s ability to measure up to colonial demonstrations of technological prowess, the Daily Mail’s report departs from this colonial precedent in two fundamental ways. First, the depiction of construction as a process, rather than as a celebration of a completed object, attenuated the sublime effect achieved by the object’s appearing ex-nihilo. To be sure, the “colonial sublime” presented too a temporal dimension that engendered the awe it induced. Education and training provided access to it, and in effect technology could be domesticated and its sublimity, dissipated.251 For Larkin, the rift of difference opened by this form of spectacular representation was dynamic and dialectic; it also carried with it the possibility of a fusion and the promise of equality. In this way, the “cultivation of sameness,” achieved through the education and training of the colonial subjects, seemed attainable yet was constantly deferred, suspended between the spectacular present and its domesticated future. Larkin’s formulation presents a soft, late colonial version of what Dipesh Chakrabarty succinctly coined the “not-yet” paradigm of Eurocentric thought that measured the colonies according to a universal linear narrative of historical progress.252 Openings of grand infrastructural and architectural projects were used as sites for the momentary convergence of these temporalities by presenting a promise for an attainable future. In cases in which the documented event was the process, rather than the shiny completed object, as in the case of the construction of the Sierra Leone parliament, this promise was rendered more tangible and attainable.

251 Larkin, 39.

252 Chakrabarty, 8.

91 Secondly, the reporter focused on the ensemble of workers rather than on the machinery used. He deliberately chose to refer to the coordination of human effort rather than on the imported technology that was needed for such grand project. The harmonious orchestration of different groups, composed of skilled and unskilled labor of various ethnicities, consequently became a salient feature of the completed object. Through this report and others that followed, the project was represented as a national construction story253 in which the workers were the main protagonists, and the building - to borrow from David Nye - a

“monumental proof of hopefulness.” 254 Thus the hopefulness attached to the Sierra Leone parliament, a building that represented more than any other the impending independence, was achieved by two revisions to the colonial sublime: a focus on the present rather than on the perpetually deferred “sameness” of the post-independence future; and a focus on the workers, reinforced through an emphasis on the labor intensive methods, rather than on the machinery used.

A National Managerial Ideology

The Daily Mail reporter’s emphasis on the twelve hour shifts was not, as a contemporaneous westerner would suspect, a condemnation of the working conditions. Rather, it expressed an appreciation of the workers’ discipline and stamina, which was mediated through the authoritative expertise of the Israeli supervisors:

253 Nye, 79.

254 According to historian David Nye, “these photographs, together with extensive radio, newsreel, and newspaper coverage, made the erection of the Empire State Building into a great national event, demonstrating willpower and determination in the face of great obstacles. The heroic difficulty of the task and the speed with which it was accomplished helped establish the sublimity of the building.” Ibid, 103.

92 A word of praise to the Israeli supervisors. They are really bringing out the best in our workers. And this is what one Israeli to whom I talked to yesterday said: “we find the Sierra Leoneans are very co-operative and very willing to learn. They are working well, as you see for yourself. Lazy? Not a bit of it! I for one am very pleasantly surprised by the way your people get on with the job.”255

In this post-independence context, the appreciation of the local worker served two purposes: to refute the colonial stereotypes of the idle natives, and as a didactic impetus to heighten the work morale and productivity of the workers. This attempt to motivate the workers is reminiscent of Human Relations, a managerial ideology that was developed in the United

States in the late 1920s to increase productivity by addressing the psychological make-up of the work environment.256 Productivity per se, however, was not the sole objective at stake here. The reporter and the Israeli supervisor’s joint didactic effort, as performed on the newspaper’s pages, had an additional ideological effect: the reporter’s “our workers” was reformulated by the Israeli supervisor and transformed into “your people.” This succinct dialogue interpellated, in the Althusseriean sense,257 the workers, and by extension the readers, as national subjects, as a people. The Israeli supervisor’s authority was thus extracted and metonymically expanded from the realm of construction to the realm of nation building; his approval of the workers’ performance was elevated into an acclamation of the

Sierra Leonean newspaper readers as a nation.258 The skilled and unskilled workers, of

255 Daily Mail, 28 September 1960, 1 (My emphasis).

256 Michal Frenkel, Yehouda Shenhav, and Hanna Herzog, “The Political Embeddedness of Managerial Ideologies in Pre-State Israel: the Case of PPL 1920-1948” Journal of Management History 3, no. 2 (1997): 120.

257 Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). Brian Larkin alludes to Althusser’s interpellation when he refers to technology’s “ideological mode of address, hailing people as new sorts of political subjects.” See Larkin, 43.

258 And, as a byproduct and precondition, reaffirmed the Israeli manager’s own nationality, and his foreignness.

93 different ethnic descent, from colony and protectorate, became a national cohesive body through this process of signification that, according to theorist Homi Bhabha “must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process.”259 This reproductive process of national becoming, which needed to be repeatedly ratified in order to maintain its vitality, divested the workers of their previous, colonially-defined loyalties, and molded them into a homogenous national (re)productive whole.260

While work provided the site for this divesting, it also introduced new alignments that threatened the construction of a national homogenous whole. As anthropologist Michael

Banton observed in 1957, ethnic loyalties in Sierra Leone were supplanted in the workplace by class solidarities: “Tribal people may in some situations feel themselves united in opposition to Creoles, but at work the opposition is between employers and employed, so that tribal immigrants readily accept the leadership of Creole trade unionists.”261 Yet despite this extraordinary political opportunity, in which the people of the Protectorate and the Krio

(Creole) population could unite under shared goals, as was indeed the case in the 1955

General Strike,262 this union was not long lasting. As historian Frederick Cooper argues, while the rise of a working class and trade unions in conjunction with late colonialism’s

259 Bhabha, 208-09.

260 Architectural historian Roy Kozlovsky makes a similar argument regarding this vocational transformation via construction as a mechanism for transforming a heterogeneous group of immigrants into a proletariat, which in turn, will become the “building blocks” for nation building. See Roy Kozlovsky, “Necessity by Design,” Perspecta 34 (June 2003): 10-27.

261 Banton, 81.

262 Wyse, 109.

94 developmentalism was a broad phenomenon that cut across the British and French colonies, by the time of independence, trade unions had become branches of political parties, and workers’ demands were subsumed, if not repressed, under broader national goals.263

A cooperative subsidiary of the Histadrut, Israel’s national federation of labor and the largest pre-state employer in the Jewish sector, Solel Boneh’s management must have been perceived by the Sierra Leone government as the ideal candidate to mediate between the new government’s needs and the rising class of the workers. Its managerial ideology as developed in Palestine during the pre-state era drew an inextricable link between national ideology and productiveness. Unlike the American managerial ideology that was based on rationality and efficiency, argue sociologists Michal Frenkel, Yehuda Shenhav and Hanna

Herzog, the industrial development of the Jewish settlement in Palestine in 1920-1948 was based on an “affective concept of productivity.”264 In a market dominated by the Labor-

Zionist hegemony and its “constructive socialism” ideology, even entrepreneurs in the private sector had to employ nationalist rhetoric in order to ensure a sufficient supply of motivated workers. The workers, in turn, had to comply with lower wages when they were

“told that the firm – whose importance to national needs is undeniable – is under enormous

263 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 422.

264 Frenkel, Shenhav, and Herzog, 11. This “affective concept of productivity” should be distinguished from the concept of “Affective Labor” Michael Hardt uses to describe industries that produce affects rather than concrete products such as the service and care industries. See Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 62, no.2 (Summer 1999): 89-100. While Hardt locates the affect in the product, Frenkel, Shenhav, and Hertzog locate it at the level of the producers.

95 hardship and therefore they should set aside their ‘private’ demands.”265 All the more so this compliance was expected at Histadrut’s own institutions, Solel Boneh included.266

In Palestine, the Jewish workers’ identification with the hardship of the employer derived from the shared pioneering role they assumed in the grand narrative of Zionism. Similarly to the North American pioneer, the mythical figure of the pre-state halutz (Jewish pioneer) displayed toughness regarding new living conditions, climate, and the necessity of manual labor. However, unlike his American counterpart, the Zionist pioneer was not an individualistic entrepreneur. He was portrayed as an ascetic figure, taking part in a national collective goal.267 In this collective endeavor, sacrifice was demanded from all levels of the managerial chain.

This managerial ideology was propagated by the Histadrut in periodical seminars it tailored for trade unionists from “developing countries.” In his address at the opening of the first

Afro-Asian Cooperation Seminar held in Tel Aviv on November 20, 1958, Reuven Barkatt, head of the political department of the Histadrut, described pioneering and volunteerism as the compelling force of Zionism whose success could be repeated, following its societal values and cooperatives forms, in Asia and Africa.268 Volunteerism characterized the pre-

265 Frenkel, Shenhav, and Herzog, 7.

266 Savorai, 126-7.

267 Frenkel, Shenhav, and Herzog, 8-9. On the figure of the Jewish pioneer see Henry Nir, “Halutzim Ve’halutzi’ut Bemedinat Israel: Hebetim Semantim Ve’historim 1948-1956,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel 2 (1992): 116-140, and Henry Nir, “Kehol Ha’amim? Hahalutzi’yut Hatzionit Beperspectiva Beyn-Tarbutit,” in Idan Hatsionut, eds. Anita Shapira, Yehuda Reinhartz and Ya’akov Haris (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2000), 109-126. For a discussion on the Israeli architect as pioneer see chapter 4 in this dissertation.

268 Aynor, Avimor and Kaminer, 2. (My translation).

96 state society, which was based on the hegemony of the Labor Zionist institutions rather than on formal state rule. However, this participatory civil engagement with state-building tasks was now expected to continue under the framework of the state, as the Histadrut leaders held the most important positions in the government. Thus three months later, at the closing of the seminar, the General Secretary of the Histadrut, Pinhas Lavon, explained to the Afro-

Asian trainees that the interests of the workers and the state are in fact mutual: “we are trying to integrate in our work three elements: concern for the well-being of the worker, concern for the development of the country, and unity between the worker and the state. It is characteristic of our work to concern ourselves with the development of the resources of the country because without that development there cannot be well-being for the workers (...) our basic conception is that the interest of the working class and the interest of the nation are not contradictory.”269

This ideology of “constructive socialism,” and its “affective concept of productivity,” as developed in Palestine and exported to African countries by Solel Boneh and the Histadrut, aimed to imbue workers with a sense of national duty and determination. The process of divestment and reconstitution of the workers as national citizens/workers occurred through interpersonal relations with the managerial personnel. Without managerial training but with practical wisdom based on his work experience in Palestine, Zvi Meltzer, the architect on site in 1960-61, used to approach the laborers and explain, for example, how each hole they

269 Ibid, 4. (My translation and emphasis). However, this zeal derived most of its ethos and raison d’etre from the pre-state period. Even Mapay’s most zealous members admitted that importing its model to young African countries would be anachronistic.

97 drilled connected to another, and what was their function.270 Making technical drawings not only concrete but also purposeful, Meltzer imbued the workers with a practical understanding of the process, as well as their particular role in it. To energize them during the long shifts, he would exclaim, “this is for you: you’re working to build your own parliament,” reminding them of the final goal and rendering it not only attainable, but also their personal investment. In this sense, Solel Boneh’s affective concept of production helped to extend control over workers through interpersonal forms of authority, even when groups within the labor force preserved religious identities which ostensibly challenged the homogenization of labor through its abstraction.271 For example, Meltzer took pride in the success of his improvised managerial skills when a group of Muslim workers assured him they would finish with their job before the start of Ramadan.272 Taking personal responsibility over their production capabilities, the workers managed their competing alliances and temporalities when they could no longer meet the basic capitalist presupposition that they would be able to “work tomorrow with the same normal amount of strength, health, and freshness of today.”273

Solel Boneh’s national mobilization of workers served not only the government of Sierra

Leone but also future Israeli companies that wanted to benefit from the tax concessions

Sierra Leone’s government conferred to foreign investors.274 As employees of the first

270 Meltzer, interview.

271 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013): 112, 140-2.

272 Meltzer, interview.

273 Chakrabarty, 56.

274 Sierra Leone Development act of 1960 provides for the free entry of equipment, machinery and plant as

98 Israeli firm to establish a local branch, Solel Boneh personnel continued their role as

“pioneers” outside the borders of the Zionist claimed national territory, laying the ground on foreign lands for other Israeli enterprises to come. And indeed, in February 1961, six months after the establishment of the National Construction Company, an Israeli trade delegation visited Sierra Leone and raised the possibility of venturing into other industries. Among these were national shipping and airlines and a number of light industries including clothing, printing, medical supplies, umbrellas and footwear.275 For lack of funds Israeli aid focused on capacity-building rather than on capital infusion.276 Labor-intensive, consumer-oriented, and requiring low capital investment, light industries were seen as the most efficient path for the creation of an infrastructure for local manufacturing. The proposal of such industries by the Israeli delegation also helped to refute concerns regarding the threat Israel posed as a neocolonial entity. By not following the classical colonial economy based on the extraction of raw materials, the proposed industries were to reduce the need to import consumer products from developed countries.277 At the same time, they were intended to create a dependency on Israeli products in the founding and maintenance of these industries.

well as building materials necessary for the construction, equipment and operation of the factory. It also provides for the free entry, or relaxation of customs duties on raw, semi-processed or fully processed materials necessary for the production of the development product. In addition, income tax-holiday concessions were introduced varying from three to five years. See Aryeh Doudai and Ursula Oelsner, Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan (Tel Aviv: Institute for Planning and Development, 1965), 66.

275 “Israeli Trade Delegation,” Sierra Leonean no.1, February 2, 1961, 4.

276 Aliza Belman Inbal and Shachar Zahavi, The Rise and Fall of Israel’s Bilateral Aid Budget 1958-2008 (Tel Aviv: the Harlod Hartog School of Government and Policy, Tel Aviv University; The Pearce Foundation, 2009), 32, http://socsci.tau.ac.il/government/images/PDFs/riseandfall.pdf, accessed January 8, 2015.

277 The colonial administration turned to “import substitution industries” in the 1950s to preserve the local market for British transnational corporations against the importation of cheaper manufactured goods from Japan and the US. See Jeremiah I. Dibua, Modernization and the Crisis of Development in Africa: The Nigerian Experience (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 156.

99 To save time while the factories were being installed, the trade delegation offered to train

Sierra Leoneans as foremen in similar manufactory plants in Israel that used equivalent machinery and production techniques to the ones that would be constructed in Sierra

Leone.278 This model of cooperation was tailored to present an alternative to the colonial

“not yet” paradigm that continued to undergird the relationship of the former colonies with the British metropole. Its objective was to hasten the knowledge transfer process, while ensuring that training abroad would be effective once the trainees returned to their country.

The emphasis on the concurrent training of workers while setting up the plants addressed the

African states’ desire to hasten the Africanization of their institutions and to loosen their ties to the colonial infrastructure on which the African economy continued to depend for lack of any other options.

One such major enterprise involved the large Israeli shipping company Zim, which was then owned by the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency and the state. The trade delegation’s offer to the

Sierra Leone government to establish its own shipping line was based on Zim’s former success in Ghana. According to an Israeli official, while the British tried to dissuade the

Ghanaian leadership from their plans to ship cocoa in their own vessels, claiming that “the establishment of a merchant fleet would consume hundreds of millions of Sterling pounds and many years for the training of seafaring personnel,” the Foreign Ministry took up the challenge, just as it did when it offered the services of Solel Boneh for the rapid construction

278 “Israeli Trade Delegation,” Sierra Leonean no.1, February 2, 1961, 4. Similarly to Solel Boneh’s model of cooperation, this industrial model of cooperation was initiated first in Burma by David Hacohen, Israel’s first diplomatic representative in Burma. See ISA MFA 226/5 (93); ISA MFA 229/7 (93).

100 of the Sierra Leone parliament. 279 Within six months the first ship had been bought and the

Ghanaian Black Star became the first African shipping company. To sustain this enterprise, and against the British advisers’ warning that they would need “about forty years” to train a

Ghanaian ship’s captain, a nautical college was established after an Israeli model to prepare young Ghanaians for the task.280

Unlike the Black Star shipping line that required a nautical college, and the factories that required the training of foremen in Israel, the urgent task of building the parliament presented the opportunity to train on-site a mass of laborers. In 1950s Israel, the construction industry was seen “as a natural vocation school for new immigrants,” as one planner of the

Housing Ministry explained. “The majority of new immigrants come from the middle classes and are not accustomed to physical labor (…) Under such circumstances the construction industry acts as an important and desirable transitional change.”281 This transitional change was also aimed at immigrants from so-called traditional societies in

North Africa and the Middle East. Thus while addressing the problem of the housing shortage, the construction industry at the time of state-building functioned simultaneously as relief work, a vocational school, and a social engineering mechanism. In Sierra Leone, this transitional phase was aimed at mainly the rural immigrants, as the construction industry became the foremost industrial employer in the country, second only to public

279 Ehud Avriel, “Some Minute Circumstances,” The Jerusalem Quarterly no. 14 (Winter 1980): 31. Similarly to Solel Boneh’s agreement with the government of Sierra Leone, Zim owned forty per cent, and its management was limited for the period of five years.

280 Ibid, ibid.

281 Haim Darin-Drabkin, "Economic and Social Aspects of Israeli Housing," in Public Housing in Israel (Tel Aviv: Gadish, 1959), 78. Cited in Kozlovsky, 16.

101 administration.282 With no need for a spatial and temporal separation of training and practice, the parliament’s construction became the paradigmatic site of the Israeli proposed alternative to the colonial “not yet.”

Performing Production

The nationalist interpellation of the figure of the manual worker should be understood as a reaction to the acute problem of workforce mobilization that postcolonial states faced at the end of colonial rule. Oriented towards creating careers in the civil service, colonial missionary and administrative education created a rift between proper education and vocational training, and as a result manual labor was perceived as undignified.283 In Sierra

Leone this divide was inscribed geographically and ethnically as the westernized educated

Creole population,284 mostly of freed slave descent, was concentrated in the capital and was well integrated within colonial administration, while the rural population of the Protectorate, among them recent migrants to Freetown, became a readily available workforce.285 However, the young people who migrated to the city had a set of expectations that did not correspond to the new state’s urgent needs. Their Freetown was a site of easy money, cinemas, clubs,

282 As a 1961 survey indicates there were approximately 50,000 industrial employees in Sierra Leone, representing about 12% of the labor force. Occupying 40 to 50 per cent of the industrial workers, the government was the largest employer. Composition of employment: Public administration (including health and education) 34 per cent; Construction 20 per cent; Mining 13; Transportation 13; Commerce and private business 10; Waterfornt 3; Agriculture and Forestry 6; Defence Services 1. Cited in Doudai, 64.

283 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 304-351.

284 See discussion in chapter 1 on the historical divide between the Colony and the Protectorate.

285 Banton, 10-22.

102 and access to women, away from the control of their community elders. The chiefs, in turn, criticized the young immigrant generation as lazy and willing to do only the easiest jobs.286

“By the 1950s,” Larkin explains, “there emerged the modern salaried office worker, an ideal of colonial development, well educated, speaking English, working in a modern technological office, and spending his leisure time at the cinema or in private clubs.”287

Larkin’s analysis ties the colonial grand infrastructural works to the emergence of this ideal colonial urban subject, who was both the result of and the bearer of the binding

“development gift” conferred by the colonial regime. While Larkin does not explicate how these two seemingly discrete phenomena are interrelated, his analysis implies that the two are interwoven by the fetishistic value attached to the infrastructural works; constructed as spectacles, they were to be consumed as a commodity. Correspondingly, the urban ideal subject’s relation to modernity was mediated by the commoditization of urban everyday life in the offices, at the cinemas, and in interpersonal relationships. As a result, modernization had a double manifestation: it denoted future access to technology that while deferred could be bridged in the present by commodity consumption.

286 Banton, 56-8. Another important factor that added to this sense of freedom was that the hierarchical relations between Freetown the Colony and the Protectorate also entailed a hierarchy in taxation. Residents of Freetown, contrary to their counterparts in the Protectorate, were free from direct taxation during colonial times.

287 Larkin, 21.

103 As subjects of a fantasy of progress, the colonized were structurally produced in colonial discourse as lacking; a product of mimicry.288 In this Eurocentric vision, the colonized were given access to modernity as consumers, rather than as producers, and therefore they could not master the process of their own becoming. Herein lies the crux of neocolonial dependency as a cultural, and not only an economical, phenomenon. As late as 1989, one author expressed a typical western moralist stance when he argued that Africans and Asians needed to learn to understand - not merely desire – the alien machinery.289 This statement draws a distinction between superficial consumerist desire for modernity, epitomized in the image of the shiny-suited urbanite, and “true” understanding.290 The same author made a parallel distinction between technological monuments and knowledge and activity. The first corresponds with Larkin’s colonial grand projects and their consumption as spectacles that entail a passive consumerist desire for modernity, and the second to education and training that lead, according to the author, to “true understanding.”291 Whereas the latter is dynamic and productive, the first is daunting and static. However, Larkin demonstrates not only that the two were interdependent but also that the monuments themselves were subjected to a dynamic that threatened to erode their sublimity. Since technology can be domesticated by virtue of its use, rather than production, and since spectacles constantly need to be reinvigorated in order to maintain their spectacular effect,292 the colonizers had to outdo

288 Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring, 1984): 125-133. See also Timothy Mitchell, “The stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, edited by Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1.

289 Headrick, 16.

290 Ibid, ibid.

291 Ibid, 304.

292 See Nye’s discussion on technological sublime and consumerism in American society. Nye, 284.

104 themselves periodically in order to maintain the works’ sublimity, and in effect reassert their own superiority. As long as technology was produced for spectacular consumption, the colonizers themselves were caught in the magic cycle of commodity. A temporal marker of difference between those who “have it” and those who do not, it also attested to the colonizers’ anxiety, since the spectacular effect needed constant reaffirmation through enhancement.

With the shift to independence, anti-colonial thinkers and leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Julius Nyerere accepted the modernization theory and embraced the idea of “catching up” with the West.293 However, while technological competency continued to be an object of desire, its manifestation was now displaced from the spectacular effect of objects to their human mastery. “The figure of the engineer,” Dipesh Chakrabarty observed, was “one of the most eroticized figures of the postcolonial developmentalist imagination.”294 While this displacement from the technological object to its human master may have been directed toward a privileged few, it nonetheless had a popular appeal since the effects of this technological capacity were now imagined at the level of entire populations. In his report on the Bandung Conference, the African-American author Richard Wright commented:

“Indonesia has taken power away from the Dutch, but she does not know how to use it (…)

Where is the engineer who can build a project out of eighty million human lives, a project

293 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Alternatives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 46, 53.

294 Ibid, 53.

105 that can nourish them, sustain them, and yet have their voluntary loyalty?”295 As this quote makes clear, the figure of the engineer was entangled with the question of governance. The task at hand was the social engineering of populations “who were already full citizens – in that they had the associated rights – but also as people who were not quite full citizens in that they needed to be educated in the habits and manners of citizens.”296 But what exactly were the contents of this educational program? Surely there was more at stake than the mastering of technical equipment. In the “Wretched of the Erath,” Frantz Fanon addresses this question with his characteristic poetic poignancy:

If the building of a bridge does not enrich the consciousness of those working on it, then don’t build the bridge, and let the citizens continue to swim across the river or use a ferry. The bridge must not be pitchforked or foisted upon the social landscape by a deus ex machina, but, on the contrary, must be the product of the citizens’ brains and muscles. And there is no doubt architects and engineers, foreigners for the most part, will probably be needed, but the local party leaders must see to it that the techniques seep into the desert of the citizen’s brain so that the bridge in its entirety and every detail can be integrated, redesigned, and reappropriated. The citizen must appropriate the bridge. Then, and only then, is everything possible.297

In this call for the integration of muscles and brains, Fanon argues that foreign techniques should not be simply learnt, but fully embodied. Only by this embodiment could they be appropriated by postcolonial citizens and fulfill the needs of the postcolonial government.

Thus the problem was not merely of mastering knowledge or possessing skills, or whether these should be the privilege of a few or the masses. Nor was it a question of implementing

295 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (New York: World Publishing, 1956), 132. Cited in Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Banding,” 53.

296 Ibid, ibid.

297 Fanon, 141.

106 technocratic top-down planning projects such as the ones depicted by James Scott in Seeing

Like a State.298 At stake was the voluntary, even passionate, participation of peasants and workers in state-building projects, and their full transformation – body and mind – in the process.

Chakrabarty relates the image of the engineer to the “pedagogical style” of Third World leadership, who saw themselves as “teachers to their nations.”299 In Sierra Leone, however, there was no charismatic leader equal to Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Julius Nyerere in

Tanzania, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Kwame Nkruma in Ghana, or Léopold Sédar

Senghor in Senegal. George Roberts, an American social scientist born in Sierra Leone, attributes this pedagogic aspect in his country to foreign aid. While he is critical of various aid programs, he considers them valuable when they demonstrate grassroots visibility, especially as a means of setting an example that could foster “changes in attitudes, aspirations, and commitments” inherited from the colonial period. For him, the problem of manual labor’s degraded status could be resolved by presenting an alternative image of foreigners’ attitudes that would serve as a didactic instrument to rival the ideological and material heritage of colonial administration:

For Sierra Leoneans still laboring under the strict separation of the educated from activities requiring manual labor (a heritage of the colonial period which has retained the respect of even the indigenous leaders and role models), the presence of manually-active, although educated, aliens is a beneficial lesson. Unlike the aloof and white-shirted image of the British, Sierra Leoneans now see in action more aliens who are not hesitant to “roll up their

298 Scott, Seeing like a State. I discuss this approach extensively in chapter three.

299 Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung,” 54-55.

107 sleeves” and perform tasks traditionally perceived as demeaning for an educated person – particularly when that person happens to be non-negroid [sic] also. The example of an Israeli Ambassador who walks rather than drives a limousine, or that of a Chinese horticulturist who tends crops alongside ordinary manual laborers, is a beneficial lesson in humility.300

This unmediated approach was exactly the self image the Israeli foreign ministry wished to promote, by setting the state and its people as a living example of an egalitarian, productive and dynamic society united in a goal of national development. Solel Boneh personnel prided themselves on their unpretentiousness, and thereby differentiated themselves from colonial work-relations: “we worked with the local people and wore the same work cloths they did… we let them come into our hut, which no Englishman would do.”301 In newspaper photographs depicting the construction of the parliament, the Israeli management was portrayed wearing simple shirts with short or rolled-up sleeves (fig. 16).302 Sierra Leonean students in Israel, in turn, took pictures wearing the “kova tembel,” a short brim version of the British bucket hat, which became an Israeli national symbol associated with the halutzim

(fig. 17).303 This egalitarian image came in lieu of the late colonial version of aspired

300 Roberts, 92 (My emphasis). This attitude, however, was not limited to aid from socialist or social-democrat regimes. Even the American Point Four employed a “grassroots” approach, according to Amanda Key McVety, that characterize American aid in Ethiopia under Truman’s administration as “intimate, farmer-by-farmer extension activities.” See Amanda McVety, “Pursuing Progress: Point Four in Ethiopia,” Diplomatic History 32, no. 3 (June 2008): 388.

301 Laufer, 55. (My emphasis).

302 Daily Mail, December 16, 1961. A Daily Mail caption even referred to an Israeli photographes with a group of Sierra Leoneans as the one without a jacket. Daily Mail, October 5, 1960, 1.

303 Daily Mail, December 5, 1961. The performance of African youth as Israeli pioneers extended far beyond clothing. An agriculture course in Asawa, Eritrea, opened in 1963 with the singing of Shalom Alechem. On top of professional literature, the Israeli staff ordered Hebrew songs records for “rikudey am,” (Israeli folk dance) a gramophone, tembel hats, a contoured map of Israel, copies of “The Kibbutz Album” as gifts for the director and top students, ISA MFA 1921/7. For an extended analysis of this multifaceted phenomenon see Bar-Yosef, 123-84. While Bar-Yosef interprets one such image of a politician’s daughter wearing Nahal uniform as incomplete mimicry due to the cutting off of the image, I read it this close up as a universalization of Nahal pioneering. Unlike Roland Barthes’ African boy with the French salute, her image does not disclose any

108 similitude in which both (black) worker and (white) manager presented “an ‘up-to-the- minute’ impression in crisp Western suits and ties.”304 To the colonial-inherited incongruity between the modern subject and manual work, the ideology of Labor Zionism, mediated by

Solel Boneh’s personnel, offered a way out; it cultivated a new image of the ideal national subjects, who literally took the task of development into their own hands.305

Facts on the Ground

How did the architects fit into this egalitarian vision of national development? According to the newspaper report cited above, they were running behind the energetic momentum: “work is going on so fast that the planners are having a job to get their drawings out ahead of the work that’s being done!”306 With this hyperbole, the reporter unwittingly crystallized an intrinsic Labor Zionist practice that originated in the settler-colonial pre-state years: the privileging of action over planning that was used as part of a political strategy to establish a territorial foothold through the setting up of “facts on the ground.” As I have shown, the national managerial ideology demanded sacrifice from all workers, regardless of their position in the occupational ladder. For the architects, this meant on the one hand their direct

national features, Israeli or other (besides a piece of a Nahal badge that would not be recognized internationally).

304 Hess, 141.

305 This image was hard to sustain. Israeli diplomats would often criticize Solel Boneh managers’ work relations, and what they deemed was a too comfortable life style. The most radical case was a strike that took place in the East Nigerian company, in protest against one Mr. Teichman, who beat the workers and called them stupid. See January 3, 1962, ISA MFA 1908/7; January 31, 1962, ISA MFA 1908/7. See also Bar-Yosef, 174-5. As a professional organization Solel Boneh had its own interests that did not always correspond with the foreign ministry representative ones. This is demonstrated most clearly in a comparison of a Solel Boneh and Mashav promotional films, in which the first emphasizes the machinery employed, and is reminiscent of what Nye calls the American technological sublime, while the latter focuses on African and Israeli youth working side by side, constructing a school in an African village. See David Eldan, Shalom Africa (place and date unknown), DVD, SSJFA; Solel Boneh Overseas (place unknown, c. 1964), DVD, SSJFA. 306 “The New House Will Be Ready in Time!” Daily Mail, September 28, 1960, 1.

109 involvement in managing the workers and making impromptu decisions on the construction site.307 On the other hand, this also meant the subordination of their professional knowledge to the demands of the clients and contractors. Aviah Hashimshony, an influential educator and the dean of the school of architecture at the Technion (then the only school of architecture in Israel) in the 1950s and the 1960s, explained:

The pre-state architect, was conspicuous for his co-operative attitude toward the material requirements of building work, and sometimes identified his viewpoint with these demands to the stage where he would subordinate his plans to economic consideration and the demands of the client; and would relinquish his formal and schematic ideals when they conflicted with prevailing conditions. This situation often resulted in the erection of incomplete buildings….308

What Hashimshoni does not stress enough is that this professional compromise, which is an occupational hazard common in the field of architecture, was driven by political and militaristic territorial agendas. One of the prominent promoters of these work relations was the engineer Shlomo Gur. By time of the establishment of Israel he has become a sort of a national “project manager” – feared by architects, admired by contractors – who was involved in the state’s first grand projects. A member of the implementation committee of the Knesset parliament building in Jerusalem until the mid 1960s, Gur ordered the beginning of construction while Joseph Klarwein, the architect in charge of the Knesset design, was still in Europe on a study trip to rework his winning but contested proposal.309 Upon his

307 Meltzer, interview.

308 Aviah Hashimshony, “Architecture,” in Art in Israel, ed. Benjamin Tammuz (Philadelphia, PA: Chilton Book Co., 1967), 205-6. (My emphasis).

309 Hattis-Rolef, “Mishkan Haknesset,”142.

110 return, Klarwein discovered that construction had begun with utter disregard to his plans.

Gur explained these contentious actions that are currently known in the field of construction as “fast-tracking” by claiming, “The principle is to start building without plans. All you need is someone who has decision-making power to take upon himself the responsibility and get the wheels turning.”310 There was also an economic aspect that factored into this notorious method: fast-tracking construction was Solel Boneh’s strategy to exceed beyond its preliminary low cost estimates, which was often Solel Boneh’s competitive edge when bidding for tenders.311

Gur developed his methodology “to start building without plans” during the Arab Uprising of 1936-1939, when he conceived the Wall and Tower (Homa Umigdal)312 guerrilla settlements operation in consultation with Yohanan Ratner, a prominent architect and educator at the Technion, and a chief member of the National Command of the Haganah. A

Jewish illegal paramilitary organization, the Haganah enjoyed popular support in the Jewish sector, and the rest of the major Jewish institutions in Palestine, including the Histadrut, supported the operation. The operation’s objective was to erect a network of fortified settlements in order to rapidly seize control of land previously purchased by the Jewish

National Fund, which could not be settled due to the local Arab population’s objection and

British restrictions of Jewish territorial expansion. Due to growing unrest among the Arab population that culminated in the riots of 1929 over the Jewish settlement expansion in

310 Eli Eyal, “Shitot Habniya shel Shlomo Gur,” Ha’aretz, 4 March 1960. Cited ibid, ibid. See also: Hattis- Rolef, “Tiknun Haknesset,” 173.

311 Ibid, ibid.

312 Often translated as “Wall and Stockade.”

111 Palestine, the colonial secretary Lord Passfield issued a White Paper in October 1930 that restricted Jewish immigration and territorial expansion in Palestine. The Wall and Tower operation forcefully contested these restrictions by setting up pre-fabricated settler outposts that were rapidly assembled on site, comprising a wooden wall, a watchtower and four huts.313 Once an edifice was covered with a roof, it was considered legal according to an

Ottoman law still in force. Although this operation was part of an extensive strategic plan, it was largely conceived via action, while Solel Boneh provided the logistics: constructing the road network connecting these new settlements; preparing their wooden structures, walls and towers; transporting the pre-fabricated elements and construction equipment; and having its workers actively participate on site whether in building or as guards.314

Wall and Tower presented what the architectural critic Sharon Rotbard describes as “the origin, the prototype, the model and the mold of Israeli architecture […] it is a metaphor of the Israeli practice of fait accompli […] hasty translation of a political agenda into the act of construction, occupation of territory through settlement and infrastructure.” 315 Displayed as a “‘work in progress,’ a permanent construction site,”316 it was not measured by its aesthetic qualities but rather by the lack thereof; the simplicity of its objects corresponded to the extemporaneous manner of their execution and the cheap raw materials used. Yet despite

313 Sharon Rotbard, “Wall and Tower: The Mould of Israeli Architecture,” in A Civilian Occupation, eds. Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman (Tel Aviv: Babel; New York: Verso, 2003), 46.

314 See Savorai, 63; Biletzky, 235; Dan, 125.

315 Rotbard, 46.

316 Ibid, 51. Rotbard characterizes this performance of production as a masterly hyper activism: the forceful changing of the face of the land in order to claim it as their own. This characterization is comparable to what Sarah Hinsky described as the fetish of work in Israeli art. See Sarah Hinsky, “Shtikat Hadagim: Mekomi Veuniversali Besiakh Homanut Hayisraeli,” Teoria Uvikoret 4 (Fall 1993), 110.

112 their meager appearance, Wall and Tower settlements did present a spectacle comparable to the colonial sublime. Against the “not yet,” there was the element of surprise; the appearing of settlements ex-nihilo within a day or sometimes even overnight.317

Wall and Tower reverberations in the construction of the Sierra Leone parliament are not limited to the precedence given to construction over planning, but are also manifested in the practices adopted on site. For example, the gravel filling of the wooden frames that coated the concrete walls (fig. 18), could be interpreted as an aesthetic on-site improvisation reminiscent of a similar practice used for the Wall and Tower fortifications to thicken the walls.318 The reverse order of construction according to the urgency of function is another such instance. The construction and equipping of the Assembly Hall for the Sierra Leone parliament prior to the construction of the rest of the building is comparable to the precedence given to the wall in the Wall and Tower compounds; the wall was constructed first to secure the builders, who then continued to construct the observation tower, while the dwellings were to be built last.319

As the example of the construction of the Knesset demonstrates, prestigious public buildings did not escape this militaristic operational logic. Binyanei Hauma (The Nation Buildings), founded to host the Zionist Congress and other national and international conferences for world Jewry and thereby to reinforce Jerusalem’s status as the capital, is another case in

317 Rotbard, 53.

318 So is the manual crushing of stones.

319 Ibid, 49.

113 point.320 While construction began in 1950, the convention center was completed only at the end of the decade due to the austerity measures declared by the state. Yet its unfinished condition, which awarded it the witty nickname “Hirbat el-Uma” (in Arabic: “Ruin of the

Nation”), 321 did not hinder its use, as for example when it hosted the “Kibush Hashmama”

(in Hebrew: “The Conquering of the Wasteland”) exhibition at the end of 1953. 322 The building’s frame was covered with a temporary façade for the occasion, while a crane was left in the partly landscaped plaza, forming the perfect setting of “development in the making” for the exhibition inside (fig. 19).

The Sierra Leone parliament followed this “bare necessity” logic as the Assembly Hall was fully functioning while the entire building was still underway at the time of inauguration.

Predicting this eventuality, the Sierra Leone government specified that work under construction should be masked by temporary decorations.323 However, the construction company and architects ignored this demand, as is apparent by the fact that the Sierra

Leonean workers, who were quite embarrassed by the structure’s rough appearance, covered up the walls with flags to mitigate their bareness.324 These flags never made it to the actual celebrations, as they were used to absorb the water of an unfortunate flooding a week before

Independence Day. The road leading to the parliament, also constructed by the National

320 Efrat, 372.

321 The nickname in Arabic demonstrates how pervasive were the Arab ruins that dotted the state as a result of the 1948 war. Their Arabic term, which is close to the Hebrew “Khurva,” became a common parlance.

322 Efrat, 733-4.

323 The Government of Sierra Leone: Minute Paper, January 3, 1961, SLNA RG/4/1B/186.

324 Meltzer, interview.

114 Construction Company, collapsed completely during the flooding, but was repaired swiftly for the celebrations.325

What could be the raison d’être of such inglorious spectacles of deficiencies, exposed bareness and incompleteness? I propose to read them as successes conditioned by their momentary failures: they were heroic because they demanded hard, visible work. As an

American ambassador commented sardonically to Israeli agriculture experts in Togo, they must have had arranged the flooding especially for the occasion to demonstrate their efficiency.326 The moments of breaking and the exposed scaffolding emphasized the human agency involved against the reification of the machinery used, and displaced the fetishistic desire from the technological object to the body of the worker. The Israeli supervisors’ achievements were made visible because they managed to be productive “despite” unfavorable conditions that in hindsight could have been avoided.327 The parliament construction, including the road leading to it, served as a platform for Solel Boneh personnel to exhibit their strength not in careful informed planning, but in the mobilizing and skilling of manpower, and improvisation under emergency conditions. Much cheaper than the colonial spectacles that needed to be constantly enhanced in order to legitimize the British continual presence, the magic cycle of urgency, provisional failures and the crises they generated perpetuated a dependency on Israeli aid.328 At the same time, they enabled local

325 Ibid. “Freetown Gets New Road,” Daily Mail, January 19, 1961.

326 Bar-Yosef, 163.

327 Similarly, failures of Nakhal (youth frontier settlements) projects were explained by the aid personnel’s enthusiasm, over-excitement and eagerness for action. See Bar-Yosef, 166-67.

328 In its visibility, provisional but unsustainable success, Solel Boneh’s mode of operation is similar to Israeli aid agricultural projects that focused on demonstrations farms that had limited implications beyond them. See

115 governments to extract international development funds for repair, as assumed by one Israeli foreign ministry delegate who criticized Solel Boenh’s unfinished road in Ethiopia.

According to him, the Ethiopian government was unwilling to repair the road that opened prematurely because it was using it as a pretext to solicit more funds.329

Reminiscent of what Naomi Klein named “The Shock Doctrine,”330 Solel Boneh’s method of operation utilized crisis to extend its professional capital, if not its economic gain. In fact, the NCCSL suffered severe financial losses, and the Sierra Leone government was unprepared to adminster the large transfers of funds it needed to keep afloat. By 1966, the

Israeli embassy had to step in to cover the losses and fix embarrassing accounting discrepancies.331 Since Israel’s national image as a creative force and miracle maker depended on the performance of crisis management rather than on careful planning, it was prepared to pay the price for this cover up.

This “expected emergency” strategy was useful for making visible the workers engaged in construction as well as the Israeli supervisors who took the credit for their mobilization. The local workforce, in turn, now homogenized, deskilled and re-skilled to constitute “a people,” became the ideological and physical building blocks that could support national

Moshe Schwartz and A. Paul Hare, Foreign Experts and Unsustainable Development: Transferring Israeli Technology to Zambia, Nigeria and Nepal (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000).

329 Aryeh Levin to Asia-Africa Division, Foreign Ministry, July 29, 1963, ISA, MFA 1903/12 A.

330 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).

331 ISA MFA 1763/6. Such oversights and failures were also part and parcel of the process of the Knesset construction in Israel. In 1960, while also orchestrating the construction of the Hadassa Hospital and the Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram, Shlomo Gur was accused for mistakenly paving a road in the wrong place, and for irregularities in the management of budget. See Shaul Ben-Haim, “Al Haikuv Bebitsua Hatokhnit,” Ma’ariv, February 11, 1960, 3.

116 development in spite of meager technological means. Technical transfer in this case actually meant imbuing the workforce with “national spirit” as a managerial technique to subdue class struggles and to increase productivity, while manufacturing a national resource, a perpetually reproducing cohesive body of workers. Thus while Basil Davidson’s sweeping statement that African societies did not want flags but food and shelter may be correct,332 the

Israeli managers exported the notion that the road to food and shelter is paved with national ideology.

Evidence for the work in progress, the incomplete parliament building became a metonymy of the human work invested in it. The “despite” logic that contributed to the heroic depiction of its construction did not escape the dignified members of the parliament. During the festive inauguration of the building, within the comfort of its fully equipped Assembly Hall, an infrastructural island that was supported by a generator, the speaker of the House of

Representatives delivered a speech that referred to the building’s unfinished exteriors:

It is symbolical that at Independence only the chamber of our Parliament Building is as yet in a state of readiness and that vast amount of work has still to be done before the entire structure will be complete. This reminds us that as a new nation the attainment of Independence is only a start on the road, probably hard and long, by which we can ever hope to fill a worthy place among the great nations of the world.333

332 Basil Davidson, Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London: James Curry, 1992), 185.

333 H.J. Lightfoot-Boston, “Parliament Building Will Inspire Deliberations Towards Good Government,” Sierra Leonean, May 4, 1961, 9. (My emphasis).

117 And indeed, this was a hard and long path, whose end seems much further away today. After independence, the Daily Mail stopped covering the parliament’s construction, which was to continue for about four more years. During that time, there was a change of guard of the

Israeli personnel on-site, including the resident architect.334 Ram Karmi, the architect in charge of the plan, who went on to become one of the most influential architects in Israel, abdicated in retrospect his responsibility for the final outcome.335 This abdication of responsibility is a symptom of a much broader phenomenon. As already mentioned, the hastiness in which the building was designed and constructed resulted in a large expenditure that the Sierra Leonean government could not control or foresee. For this reason, the government ordered the slowing down of construction after the celebrations were over.336

The construction company, finding that the building was no longer a pressing concern after independence, finished part of the plan, while leaving less visible areas such as the basement unattended, or, as in the case of the MPs offices’ wing, unrealized. In 1967, due to the military coup in Sierra Leone and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, which intensified the Arab League’s pressure on the Sierra Leone government to sever ties with

Israel, construction came to a halt.337 Since then, Sierra Leone has experienced a succession of military coups, a dictatorship, and a bloody civil war. In 1996, during a cease-fire, Sierra

Leone held its first democratic elections since the 1960s. One of the tasks the elected president determined to pursue as part of the rehabilitation of democracy in the country was

334 Meltzer, interview.

335 Ram Karmi, interview.

336 Ministry of Works to Ministry of Finance, March 9, 1961, SLNA RG/4/1B/186.

337 The relations officially terminated in October 1973. See Peters, 37.

118 the parliament’s completion.338 As if time had not elapsed, the government approached a local branch of Solel Boneh in Cote d’Ivoire with the expectation that it would finish the work that had begun more than thirty years ago. A year later another military coup put yet another end to this plan. More recently, in 2004 a Chinese construction company volunteered for the job. They built a new MPs office building on the cleared and leveled site that was left for the expansion of the original plan, and refurbished some parts of the original chamber. They could not, however, locate the source of some major leaks.339 While the refurbished parliament functions, if not optimally, to this day, it continues to be an infrastructural island, and a symbol of perseverance and hope. Solel Boneh’s privileging of emergency situations over a gradual technical transfer to secure project maintenance resulted in yet another example of the long history of infrastructural violence brought about by fickle geopolitical solidarities across the continent.340

338 Peter J. Kulagbanda, Principal Clerk of Committees at Sierra Leone’s House of Representatives, interview by Ayala Levin, February 20, 2013, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

339 Ibid. See also Rama Musa, “The Al-Aqsa of Africa,” Tablet Magazine, January 3, 2013. I thank Rama Musa for generously sharing with me her sources.

340 Hannah C. Appel, “Walls and White Elephants: Oil Extraction, Responsibility, and Infrastructural Violence in Equatorial Guinea,” Ethnography 13, no. 4 (December 2012): 439-465.

119 2. Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan

In December 1965, the Institute for Planning and Development (IPD) in Israel, headed by

Aryeh Doudai, published a large booklet entitled “Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan.”

The commission for the plan, discussed initially as a survey, was the result of a visit to Israel from the Sierra Leone Housing and Planning Minister Mr. G. Dickson-Thomas and a United

States Agency for International Development (USAID) representative in 1963. During this visit, Doudai, who had acted as a planning advisor in Sierra Leone in 1960-61 and created good working relations with architect Olu Wright, Secretary and Town Planning Officer at the Ministry of Housing and Country Planning,341 presented them a proposal for the conceiving of a national plan. This proposal had a certain urgency attached to it, as Ernest

Weissman, head of the Housing, Building and Planning branch at the UN indicated off the record to a member of the IPD that there might be available funds by the end of the year

(1963) for the implementation of such a project.342 Instilling this sense of urgency proved instrumental, since in March 1964 Sierra Leone’s government decided to allocate 4,000

341 Reuben Johnson Oluwole Wright (1914-1990) graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1940s. After graduation he worked for the Planning Section of the Department of Health for Scotland, and received a diploma in Town and Country Planning at Edinburgh in 1951. The same year he moved to a post as architect with the Sierra Leone government. In 1952 he was appointed a town planning officer and lectured part-time at Fourah Bay College. In 1960 he set up the Ministry of Housing and Country Planning, and became Secretary and Town Planning Officer, responsible for building control, housing schemes, town planning and rent restriction. In 1964 Wright became Permanent Secretary in the Ministry, and in 1967 he became Permanent Secretary in the Department of Works, Transport and Communications, later the Ministry of Works. In this post he was in charge of policy for development and maintenance of buildings, roads, bridges, water supply, electricity and water undertakings. “DSA Architects Biography Report: Oluwole Wright,” Dictionary of Scottish Architects, http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/architect_full.php?id=401047, accessed February 2012.

342 Yehuda Tamir to Aryeh Dudai and Nelly Levin, November 12, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16.

120 pounds for the drafting of a survey by Doudai, whom they asked specifically for the job due to his consulting experience in the previous years.343

Established in July 1962 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Division of International

Cooperation (Mashav),344 IPD’s twofold mission included the guiding and implementation of planning in developing countries, as well as serving as a center of knowledge production and dissemination, where experts’ experience would be gathered and evaluated upon their return.345 As a form of damage control and prevention, IPD provided an institutional infrastructure to coordinate the work of Israeli planners abroad and to follow up on their work. Beyond professional follow up, the IPD monitored the experts, since as Doudai stated, their responsibility was not only professional but also towards the Israeli state, acting as its representatives.346

Although it was not one of the institute’s stated roles, IPD acted as a mediating agency between developing countries’ governments and international or multinational bodies such as the UN, USAID, OECD, and the European Market by identifying funding opportunities

343 Rina Gutman to Yehuda Tamir, November 21, 1965, ISA MFA 469/8; Review of IPD Activities No. 3, Updated to April 1, 1965, ISA MFA 469/8; Report on Doudai’s West Africa Tour, March 3-27, 1964, ISA, MFA 469/7 (130).

344 It was established as a joint department of the Ministry of Interior (Physical Planning Department), Ministry of Work (Public Work Department, Surveying, and the Israel Institute for Productivity), and Ministry of Housing. Soon after the Jewish Agency Settlement Department joined the partnership.

345 Meeting at the Tel Aviv Engineering Club, December 27, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16.

346 Ibid.

121 for development projects and conveying them to interested governments.347 Establishing working relationships with key figures in these organizations was key to IPD’s success. The

IPD relationship with figures in UN planning committees such as Weissman had been established at least three years earlier, when Doudai participated in a meeting held at the UN headquarters in NY, where he took part in drafting the Report of the Ad Hoc Group of

Experts on Housing and Urban Development.348 Doudai instrumentalized this relationship to mediate between the SL government and the UN.349 While they did assist governments, as in the case of Sierra Leone, to recognize available funds and solicit them for such large scale plans, IPD’s objective was also to ensure that Israeli experts gained a foothold – initially as government contractors, not private entrepreneurs350 – in this growing “development market.”

At the same time, as a public institution it avoided competition with Solel Boneh’s planning sub-company AMY (acronym for architects, engineers, consultants),351 whose planning tasks sometimes overlapped with theirs, and both agreed to steer towards each other appropriate projects if they came in their direction.352

347 See for example: IPD Board Meeting No. 11, October 24, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16. Although not a stated goal, apparently soliciting third party funding became so later, as the state comptroller criticized IPD for its failure to secure such funds.

348 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Report of the Ad Hoc Group of Experts on Housing and Urban Development,” (New York: United Nations, February 7-21, 1962).

349 Aryeh Dudali to Ernest Weissman, April 28, 1964, ISA, MFA 469/7 (130).

350 IPD had very little ability to control private commissions. Some architects, such as Shmuel Giron who planned agricultural settlements in East Nigeria returned to Nigeria as a private planner, despite attempts to stop him. See Israel Embassy in Lagos to Foreign Ministry, December 31, 1963, ISA MFA 1932/14; A. Shlush to Foreign Ministry, March 16, 1965, ISA MFA 3569/22. This changed in 1967 when the company reorganize and offer its services in the private market.

351 On AMY’s formation see chapter 3.

352 IPD AMY Agreement, no date (May 16, 1963?), ISA, MFA 496/8. Among the planning projects IPD had been involved in by the time Doudai received the Sierra Leone national plan commission were: preliminary reports for three regions and a study of housing problems in Cote d’Ivoire; an overall survey of the country and urban centers and their surroundings in the Republic of Chad and Central African Republic; a national plan and

122

As the case of the Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan demonstrates, IPD’s mode of operation was not limited to the passive receipt of existing projects, but also involved the creation of opportunities for their conception in the first place.353 The Sierra Leone National

Urbanization Plan marks such a successful attempt, as Doudai convinced the government of

Sierra Leone to invest in the production of the survey, based on the assumption that this investment would yield revenue in the amount of a $300,000 grant from the UN Special

Fund.354 The timing was ripe for such an endeavor, as in 1965 the government had drafted a

Five Year Plan of Economic and Social Development to be effective July 1966 through June

1971, as an elaboration of the Ten Year Plan of Economic and Social Development published in 1962 following the formation of its first post independence government for the period 1962/63-1971/72.355 As the basis for the first national physical plan to be drafted in post-independence Sierra Leone, this survey’s conception could have been therefore incorporated into the Five Year Plan as a government’s achievement, and the future drafting and implementation of a plan part of government’s statement of objectives for the next five

master plans for a few principle towns in Nyasaland; an agriculture school and farm in Upper Volta. In addition, the institute was negotiating the drafting of a national plan and master plans for towns based on preliminary studies it had already taken in Uganda and Ethiopia, the planning of agricultural regions in Tanganyika, pilot projects for low cost housing in the Uganda’s capital Kampala, and consulting on housing problems in Latin America through CENDES: Centre of Regional Planning in Venezuela. In Sierra Leone the institute had already conducted a reconnaissance survey with particular emphasis on town planning and housing problems in Freetown, and submitted preliminary master plans for Freetown and several provincial towns. See: The Aim of the Institute for Planning and Development LTD and its Current Activities, no date (December 1965), ISA MFA 496/8.

353 The same is true for the negotiations with East African countries that were mostly based on a voluntary study tour an IPD representative took.

354 IPD Board Meeting No. 15, October 26, 1964, ISA, MFA 469/7 (130).

355 Sierra Leone Government, Ten Year of Economic and Social Development for Sierra Leone 1962/3-1971/2 (Freetown: Govt. Printer, 1962); Draft, Five Year Plan of Economic and Social Development, July 1, 1966- June 30, 1971 (Freetown, 1965).

123 years. Since Doudai could not resist the temptation and concluded the survey with a plan proposal, the Sierra Leone government could present this survey as a preliminary plan.

As we shall see in the following chapter, the urgency that the institute instilled in the Sierra

Leone Government to take advantage of UN available funds also informed the planning methodology itself. Based on planning lessons in Israel and in the African states in the

1950s and beginning of the 1960s, together with Otto Koengisberger’s Singapore Plan, the

Sierra Leone survey-turned-into-plan marks a paradigm shift in Third World planning in which a survey did not precede planning but became an integral component of its continuing redrafting. This chapter argues that in the mid-1960s the high modernist planning paradigm, as had been influentially formulated by anthropologist James Scott, was supplanted by a more responsive and flexible planning approach in which the plan itself became a generator for policy making and information gathering rather than a fixed future projection. I argue that in this shift, the planner no longer functioned as a top-down technocrat or “engineer,” but rather as a “bricoleur,” to use anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss’ famous distinction.

Consequently, the plan’s status evolves from a static blueprint to a flexible tool comparable to a petri-dish, generating change in a seemingly natural process.

While never implemented, the Sierra Leone Urbanization Plan marks an important threshold in the history of physical master planning. Situating this disciplinary shift in the international development discourse, I nonetheless trace its origins in the Israeli planning context from which both Doudai and Koenigsberger drew to varying extents, and to the planners’ response to the problems facing postcolonial governments upon independence,

124 specifically the encouragement of local “participation” in the development process. In Sierra

Leone, these concerns included the willing collaboration of the local chiefs, who inherited their political power from the governing role assigned to them in colonial indirect rule, in implementing government initiatives beyond tribal interests. Thus despite its title, the Sierra

Leone Urbanization Plan sought to balance urbanization with maintaining the traditional social structure, which was based primarily on agriculture. In order to avoid tribal conflict and to emphasize “natural” economic development that would strengthen the hinterland and preclude migration to the capital, Freetown, the plan generated the category of “the region” as a mediating scale between the village or chiefdom and the state.

Defining the Problem: African Urbanization

Adhering to the same epistemological framework and discursive procedures of the UN planning committees in the Third World, Doudai opens the booklet by stating the African city is an emergent problem. As the prime locus of African societies’ rapid modernization process, Doudai explains, the city is both the symbol and manifestation of this change. In development planning discourse, Third World urbanization presented an impending crisis that was informed by the American-European experience. Coupled with the image of crisis with which the American city was associated in the 1960s, perceived as a hotbed of poverty and racial conflict leading to communal and infrastructural decay,356 the European experience of modernization and urbanization following the World Wars presented the unfavorable political outcomes of such scenarios as manifested by the rise of fascism. Seen as stemming “directly from the failure of the European citizenry to negotiate the supposedly

356 Arindam Dutta, ed. A Second Modrenism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment (Cambridge, Mass: SA+P Press, MIT Press, 2013), 10.

125 contradictory demands of modernity for cultural preservation and technological progress,” architectural historian Ijlal Muzzafar argues, “the rapidly expanding Third World city appeared as the next site where such a crisis might repeat itself.”357 While in 1940, only 7 per cent of Africa’s population lived in urban areas, between 1940 and 1960 urbanization in

Africa proceeded more rapidly than on any other continent, and by 1960 almost 20 per cent of Africans were city dwellers.358 In the Cold War context, this menacing crisis was mainly associated with the spreading influence of communism.

For the development agencies this was an historical opportunity to intervene and direct the process of African cities’ becoming, and to mitigate the forces of change with cultural preservation. At stake was how to facilitate modernization while avoiding the dangers entailing the abrupt collapse of traditional social and economic systems. While acknowledging the dialectic “of continuity and interruption implicit in the project of forming patterns of development,” Muzzafar defines this project mainly as one of prevention. This postulate is supported by social scientist Doug J. Porter’s analysis of the development agencies’ rhetoric that emphasized the primacy of control, order and stability in creating an environment of certainty and boundaries. This environment, Porter argues, was stipulated simultaneously as the project goal and its operational requirement.359

357 M. Ijlal Muzaffar, “The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World,” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007), 286.

358 Richard Harris and Susan Parnell, “The Turning Point in Urban Policy for British Colonial Africa, 1939- 1945,” in Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa, ed. Fassil Demissie (Farnham, England; Burlingron, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 131.

359 Doug J. Porter, “Scenes from Childhood: The Homesickness of Development Discourse,” in The Power of Development, ed. Jonathan Crush (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 77-8.

126 This preventive approach to urban development can be traced back to colonial policy towards urbanization in the colonies. In their blow-by-blow analysis, geographers Richard

Harris and Susan Parnell show how the British Colonial Office had only gradually and reluctantly come to terms with the need for urban planning in their African territories. When it did, the motivation behind it was to prevent colonial unrest rather than encourage urban growth.360 Drawing a link between colonial advisory professional bodies and their UN offshoots, they identify a continuity of personnel and their anti-urbanization tendencies in the earliest attempts by United Nations agencies to deal with postcolonial urbanism. Such an institutional connection existed between the Colonial Housing Research Group, an interdisciplinary professional group that was established in 1944 and acted as an advisory committee to the Colonial Office, and the United Nations Housing and Town Planning section, headed by Ernest Weissman and Charles Abrams.361 The move to scientific modernist planning therefore designated a shift from retroactive planning to a more proactive - yet still prohibitive - approach.

While this emphasis on prevention continued to predominate development discourse in the

1950s, I argue that by the 1960s, at least in the sphere of physical planning, there was a paradigm shift from control and prevention to a more “positive” and “flexible” approach.

360 Until WWII, African migration into urban centers was barely tolerated in West Africa, while it was actively discouraged in East and Southern Africa. A more active approach to urban planning was introduced following the successive waves of colonial unrest in urban concentrations during the 1930s, especially in the West Indies but also in Africa, and by 1939 the social and political effects of urbanization were on the official agenda for action. As a response to riots, this action was prohibitive in character. Gradually acknowledging that the government cannot stop this growth, its role was limited to controlling the inevitable by planning. Even with the introduction of the Development and Welfare Act of 1940 (became effective in 1945) that a marked a change of colonial policy and the placing of new emphasis on development, Harris and Parnell argue, “the British were slow to accept that urbanization might be essential for colonial development.” This trend continued as late as the 1950s and even early 1960s. See Harris and Parnel, 132, 139-140.

361 Ibid, 140.

127 Marking this shift was Charles Abrams, Susumu Kobe and Otto Koenigsberger’s 1963 report on “Growth and Urban Renewal in Singapore,” commissioned by the UN Center for

Housing, Building and Planning (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs under the

UN Technical Assistance Program).362 By then Koenigsberger had undergone a rich planning experience in India, where he acted from 1939 as Chief Architect and Planner for the State of Mysore, and from 1944 as Director of Housing for the Government of India.363

The Singapore commission followed the completion of the Lagos Report by the same team a year earlier.364 The main objective of this report was to revise the planning methodology of the master plan prepared for Singapore in 1955. Disillusioned by the latter, which shortly became outdated since the previous planners had failed to predict the rapid rate of population growth, the Singaporean clients did not want the UN planners to repeat the elaborate process of survey and study that preceded the 1955 Master Plan. Instead, they requested “a more flexible plan” and “a more positive approach.”365 Koenigsberger interpreted these terms as indicators of the “dissatisfaction with methods and procedures which were instituted in England in the 1940s and, in the enthusiasm of the post-war heyday

362 Charles Abrams, Susumu Kobe and Otto Koenigsberger, “Growth and Urban Renewal in Singapore,” Habitat INTL 5, nos. 1/2 (1980): 85-127. This publication is an edited selection from: Charles Abrams, Growth and Urban Renewal in Singapore: Report Prepared for the Government of Singapore, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (under the UN Technical Assistance Programme), November 1963. 363 Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, “In-dependence: Otto Koenigsberger and Modernist Urban Resettlement in India,” Planning Perspectives 21 (April 2006): 159.

364 In addition to Abrams, Kobe and Koenigsberger, the Lagos planning team included Maurice Shapiro and Michael Wheeler. UN Technical Assistance Administration, Metropolitan Lagos: Prepared for the Government of Nigeria (New York: United Nations, Commissioner for Technical Assistance, Dept. of Economic and Social Affairs, 1964). The report was submitted in April 27, 1964.

365 Abrams, 94.

128 of British planning, transferred to other countries under British influence.”366 This was a call to draft planning procedures and models specifically appropriate for the Third World.

Koenigsberger, who had practiced these very same methods of British planning in India, especially from 1944 to 1951 when he oversaw the planning of nine New Towns,367 now became critical of the transposition of European planning concepts to the Third World.

Questioning the very notion of the Master Plan, he attributed its key assumptions to a

European experience consisting of a “slow and steady rate of social and economic change,” a liberal economy that “relegates public action to matters of economic substructure and to relief of distress,” and “a society that is fundamentally conservative in outlook and practically unanimous in considering the preservation of the achievements and institutions of the past as a main objective of all planning.”368 While the first and third assumptions are concerned with temporal aspects of planning, the second touches upon the question of state regulation of economy. For Koenigsberger, this is where the role of the plan as a tool of control and prevention became most acute, and indeed faulty, in planning for Third World cities. Following his visits in Lagos and Singapore, Koenigsberger realized that in both cities the local governments expected that the public sector would take the lead in matters of development.369 Consequently, Koenigsberger argued that rather than a tool for control of private investment, planning should be conceived as an aiding tool for public action. The goal of planning, he claimed, was “to encourage development and not frustrate it, to assist

366 Ibid, ibid.

367 Liscombe, 159.

368 Abrams, 98.

369 Ibid, 85.

129 social change and not to retard it.”370 In the context of Third World challenges of self- governance, “public action” was interpreted as the shared terrain of governmental initiatives and private entrepreneurship.

As an alternative to the 1955 Master Plan, Koenigsberger proposed conceiving “a series of action programmes” that would be “comprehensive insofar as they should deal with all aspects of urban life (…) [and] should provide opportunities for private as well as for public investment…”371 In order not to repeat the mistakes of the earlier Singapore Master Plan, information was not to be gathered prior to planning but simultaneously, and the action programs would be constantly updated. Produced piecemeal in a mosaic manner, this series of plans would gradually supersede the master plan in various designated areas, until it would replace it all together.372 While moving away from the master plan as a tool for control and prevention, this action planning method nonetheless reinforced UN objectives. It not only enhanced the intervention of the planner, who was now much more involved in policy making and urban processes, but also ensured his continuous involvement in revising plans and their implementation. This modification of the planning methodology to improve its responsiveness to unpredictable changes and factors stemmed from the increasing narration of the non-western city as presenting new challenges that could not simply be computed and formulated into models based on the American-European experience.

370 Ibid, 89-90.

371 Ibid, 89.

372 Ibid, ibid.

130 The fragmentation of the plan in the shift from total to action planning did not attenuate the

“comprehensive” reach of the plan, as it was called in the U.S., but rather perfected it. By total planning I refer to the practice of master planning that, based on computations of existing data, rigidly defines a prognosis and set of goals for long-term planning operations.

While its implementation is typically phased, it serves to delineate a pre-conceived future. In the Third World, the totalizing aspects of this practice could be found in the “clean slate” conceptual undergirding that empowered technocrats to exercise the authority of the state.

Radically transformative even in cases where it did not introduce the building of entirely new towns and rural settlements, the comprehensive master plan often entailed the displacement of population, rigid spatial zoning, and the building of large scale infrastructure. In visual terms, it produced a coherent image of a fixed pre-determined future.

Focusing on development projects in the Second and Third worlds, anthropologist James

Scott defined this planning paradigm as “high-modernist.” While the shared authority of the state and the technocrat is manifested most clearly in authoritarian regimes, these planning procedures originated in democratic western regimes.373

In contrast, the action plan has no determined boundaries, fixed prognosis or aims. Instead of reduction and isolation of the elements factored in it, the plan keeps growing according to the planner’s response to an influx of new data. Dealing with all aspects of life, the plan becomes not just a machine containing an ever-rising accumulation of data, but becomes itself a generator of data. Its aim is not to control or prevent but to remove constraints in order to facilitate the maximization of the social and economic potentialities of its object.

This paradigm shift in physical planning, which architectural historian Arindam Dutta

373 The paradigmatic example is Le Corbusier’s urbanism. See Scott, Seeing Like a State, 87-117.

131 dubbed “Second Modernism,” was a part of shifting trends in economic development policies, associated with the American development economist McNamara’s recasting of functionalist organic metaphors into system language in the 1960s.374 According to Porter

“the derivative metaphors of ‘system’ provided the context in which diverse needs could be incorporated or integrated. According to UNESCO, integrated development is ‘a total, multi-relational process that includes all aspects of life of a collectivity, or its relations with the outside world and of its own consciousness.’”375 Playing a part in this “action plan” was a mechanism to incorporate and generate the active participation of as many agents of society as possible, so as to support and complement government initiatives. This shift of emphasis was particularly in demand in African governments, who were disillusioned by the results of the First Development Decade.376

Rooting Population

Contrary to the preventive logic that had dominated late British colonial planning and early

UN planning in the Third World, Doudai’s Urbanization Plan for Sierra Leone embraced change as part of its inner logic. For Doudai, the city in and of itself was not considered as a problem. The problem was to be found elsewhere, in the city’s inhibiting factors:

Although the role of cities as catalysts and levers for national development is of vital importance in the developing countries, their function as such is being impeded. The cities are separate, insular entities sharply differentiated from the country of which they are an

374 Porter, 76. For the effect of this shift to a systems language in the field of architecture see Dutta, n. 356.

375 Porter, 77. Porter still emphasizes order and stability, certainty and boundaries, while the system metaphor in planning allows to work exactly against these parameters.

376 Akin L. Mabogunje and Adetoye Faniran eds., Regional Planning and National Development in Tropical Africa (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1977), 5.

132 element. The physical, social, economic and political linkage between town and country, that is essential tor [sic] balanced and optimum development, is lacking …377

In this redefinition of the postcolonial problem of urbanization, Doudai enlarged the framework through which the city should be addressed. In late colonial planning the problem was how to integrate the disjointed haphazardly growing “native town” which was

“made up of all sorts of small parts with little relationship to the whole.”378 In this formulation of the problem, the desired “whole” was determined locally, in the scale of the city. In Doudai’s approach, on the other hand, the resulting insularity of such a planning approach was interpreted as the very cause of urban malaise. The differentiating treatment of cities as divorced from the country was rendered too restrictive for both urban and national development. As a remedy, the “whole” in question was reformulated and enlarged to the scale of the national territory.

According to Doudai, the problem of insularity was further enhanced by the “tendency of the cities to be oriented outwards towards factors beyond the borders of the country, rather than to the hinterland of their country.”379 This diagnosis touched upon one of the most acute colonial territorial inheritances, that is, the divorce between the administrative capital, often located on the coast, and the vast territories of the inland. While colonial powers’ control over Africa’s hinterland was technically declared at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, it was not until several decades later that they managed to exercise formal authority over the

377 Doudai and Oelsner, 4. (My emphasis).

378 According to a British planning consultant in Nigeria, reporting in 1932. Cited in Harris and Parnell, 139. 379 Ibid, ibid.

133 territories.380 In Sierra Leone, as in other territories under British rule, this division was created formally by the different status assigned in 1924 to the western peninsula including the port city Freetown, a colony, and the hinterland, a protectorate. This administrative division further deepened the divide which already existed occupationally, socially, and economically between the Krio British subjects of the colony, concentrated in Freetown peninsula, and the “protected aliens” of the protectorate.381 This division also constituted two simultaneous land tenure systems that still predominate today: statutory tenure in the

Western Area, customary law in the rest of the country’s land.382 Under indirect rule, the protectorate was divided into 146 chiefdoms, and as part of the Colonial Welfare and

Development Act consolidated in 1946 into 12 districts to administer funds efficiently or carry out large scale projects, and as a result some towns developed as district headquarters.383 The previous orientation of towns outwards as the collection nodes for taxes and raw materials before they were shipped to the metropole through Freetown’s port continued to a large extent even with the new development policy. An indication of the lack of considerable effort in planning these administrative towns is the fact that as late as 1944 and 1948, reports show that only one town in the protectorate, along with Freetown, was chosen for urban renewal.384

380 Herbst, 78.

381 See chapter 1.

382 Ambe J. Njoh and Fenda Akiwumi, “Colonial Legacies, Land Policies and the Millennium Development Goals: Lessons from Cameron and Sierra Leone,” Habitat International 36 (2012): 214.

383 Ambe J. Njoh, “Urban Planning as a Tool of Power and Social Control in Colonial Africa,” Planning Perspectives 24 no. 3 (2009): 312. Doudai and Oelsner, 38, 40.

384 The other one was for Bo, the second largest city in Sierra Leone located in the geographical center of the country. See Michael A. O. Johnson, An Assessment of Physical Planning and Planning in Freetown and the Regional Towns, June 14, 2011 (first draft, prepared as part of the current Urban Planning Project fuded by the European Union Commission Delegation to Sierra Leone). However, there is no indication that any plans were

134

From the Israeli point of view this problem, identified as the unbalanced process of urbanization with an emphasis on export markets, was not formulated strictly as a critique of colonialism. Nor was it a proposed alternative to western planning paradigms. In drafting the

Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan, Doudai followed recent trends in Israel’s planning that deplored the polarization of 82 percent urban vs. 18 percent rural Jewish settlements under the British mandate. The architect and town planner Arieh Sharon, who headed the

Government’s Planning Department (Agaf Hatiknun Hamemshalti) at the Prime Minister’s

Office in 1948-1953, based the Israel National Master Plan on the assumption that small countries in central and west Europe were more appropriate examples to follow than “rich colonial countries” such as Australia and Argentina.385 Unlike their unbalanced distribution of population, in which the majority lived in large coastal-cities at the expense of the hinterland “without taking root,” “in the small European countries in central and west

Europe, that are similar in their economic, physical, and sociological countries to ours, the population’s distribution is balanced and covers the entire territory.”386

Sharon’s reasoning discloses a political agenda that was not oriented towards the amelioration of the exploitation of the hinterland population as much as it was a critique of settler societies that failed to “take root.” Sharon continued to hold the Labor-Zionist made for Bo. For example, there is no mention of it in a 1969 UN report that reviewed planning in the country for the purposes of planning water supply. See Prof. L. R. Yagale, “Report on Physical Planning Aspects,” United Nations Special Fund, Freetown, December 1969.

385 Arieh Sharon, Tikhnun Fisi Beyisrael (Jerusalem: Ministry of Housing, 1952), 6.

386 Ibid, ibid. (My translation). This preference to the European model may go back to the early pre-state colonizing model from 1880 to 1930, that historian Ilan Troen characterized as anti-historic and romantic. See Ilan S. Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 15-41.

135 hegemonic agricultural settlement ideology to which he adhered as a young man, when he was a founding member of kibbutz Yad Shmuel. In the “pioneering” period of the third and fourth waves of Zionist immigration, “taking root” meant establishing an unmediated relationship with the land through communal Jewish agricultural settlements.387 Formal ownership of land through purchases made by the Jewish National Fund, established in 1901 for this purpose, was deemed insufficient: only actual settlement and the physical presence of Jews who were themselves engaged in productive labor could provide the moral and political weight to claim rights over the land.388 This “facts on the ground” approach was further enhanced in the 1930s with the Wall and Stockade operations, when the creation of these settlements was motivated by security and strategic concerns.389 The underlying logic that predominated this form of settlement was the dispersal of a minimum population over a maximum amount of land.390 The proliferation of kibbutz and moshav agricultural settlements that began in the 1930s continued through the 1940s and into the first years of

Israel’s establishment. With the establishment of the state, these agricultural settlements were complemented by a network of “development towns” as part of Sharon’s plan.

Established in July 1948, in the course of the Arab-Israeli War, the Government’s Planning

Department headed by Arieh Sharon inherited most of the British Mandate planning

387 The withdrawal of Baron de Rothschild’s funding at the turn of the century that financed the first immigrant waves settlements entailed a shift to a system of independent agents and institutions in the region. While this transition from centralized European control to local management “was initially conceived in purely economic terms, the reformulation of settlement policy and administration quickly devolved into a cultural project of reframing land as the product of Jewish work.” Eric Zakim, To Build and to be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 59.

388 Troen, 73.

389 See chapter 1. Troen, 62-3.

390 Shalom Reichman, Mima’akhaz Le’erets Moshav (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1979), 240-241.

136 system.391 From 1948 to 1953, before it was incorporated into the Ministry of Labor and

Sharon resigned, the Government Planning Department had enjoyed considerable autonomy, working directly with the government’s offices. Enhancing this autonomy was the fact that the department operated without the limitations and responsibilities set by a statutory law, which was only legislated in 1965, sixteen years after the establishment of Israel.392

Operating under an emergency decree announced immediately upon the declaration of the state in May 1948, the department faced the urgent task of settling the Jewish mass immigration. Influenced by Britain’s Barlow Report (1940) that recommended “planned decentralization” and was followed by the New Towns Committee (1945), the Charles

Abercrombie plan for Greater London (1944), and the New Town Act (1946),393 Sharon and his peers saw the immigrant population as an instrument for achieving a balanced population distribution over the country’s territory. In Israel, Sharon claimed, perceiving the country’s territory as a clean slate that could be dotted with settlements, it would be easier than in

England to create new towns by populating them with the expected mass immigration.394

Following the British model, this plan’s emphasis was the introduction of mid-size and small towns as an intermediary form of settlement that would balance the urban-rural polarization of Jewish pre-state settlement distribution. In the 1952 Physical Plan, the agricultural sector continued to consist of 20 percent of the population, while of the

391 Smadar Sharon, “Hametakhnenim, Hamedina, Vehatikhnun shel Hamerkhav Haleumi,” Teoria Uvikoret 29 (Fall 2006): 34. On the British planning administration in Palestine see: Roza I.M. El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929-1948 (London; New York: Routledge, 2006).

392 Eran Razin, “Hador Harishon shel Hatikhnun Hamekhozi Beyisrael,” in Tiknun Artsi, Ezori, Umetropolini: Khoveret Lezikhro shel Professor Aryeh Shachar, ed. Eran Razin (Jerusalem: Floresheimer Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010), 54-6.

393 Sharon met Abrecrombie (who made a plan for Haifa during the Mandate period) in London prior to submitting his plan. See Troen, 192-3.

394 Sharon, Tikhnun Fisi, 6. For a critique of the coerced settlement the plan assumed, and its defense priority over economic ones, see Efrat, 456.

137 remaining urban population, 45 percent was expected to reside in the existing three major cities and 55 percent in mid-size and small new towns spread across the country.395

Similarly to its political agenda in the pre-state years, during the war and the following decade Israeli leadership saw planning new settlements as a strategic device to preempt Arab refugees’ claims over the occupied territory.396 As the geographer Arnon Golan has suggested, planning in the immediate post-war period should not be confused with peacetime planning. Instead, he defines the post-war period as a transition between the war and the calming period. At this time, national planning was coordinated with the military establishment’s planning division. In 1953, Lieutenant Colonel Yuval Ne’eman, the head of the Planning Division of the IDF, explained that immediately after the 1948 War “it was clear to us that the war is not over, as long as the country is not fully settled and

[agriculturally] cultivated we will not have control over its entire territory. It was clear to us that every territory we would neglect will be invaded by the Arab, whether a resident of the country or from outside the borders, who will stick a peg and re-root himself.”397 The establishment of the Government Planning Department during the course of the war should thus be understood as both a reaction to the mass immigration waves that arrived in Israel following the declaration of the state and a proactive measure taken as part of the stabilizing procedures that characterized this transitional period. Such stabilizing processes included preliminary rehabilitation; the dismantling of the wartime economic system; and

395 Sharon, Tikhnun Fisi, 6.

396 Smadar Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim ela Meyushavim: Defusey Hagira, Tikhnun Vehityashvut Beezor Lakhish Beemtza Shnot Hakhamishim,” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2012).

397 Cited in Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 92. (My translation).

138 reinforcement of the control of space by the winning party.398 According to Golan, these processes were a consequence of actions taken in the framework of emergency decrees or military control. The fact that the planning authorities in Israel did not have statutory power until 1965, in addition to the military rule to which the remaining Palestinian population was subjected from 1949 to 1966, underlie the appropriateness of this differentiation between post-war stabilizing planning and “peacetime” planning to the Israeli case. The national scale and comprehensiveness of Government Planning Division’s approach, despite the wartime urgency in which it was conceived, indicates that its main agenda was to seize control through planning procedures over the territory that could still be disputed by the international community399 and to fortify the military conquests with civilian means.

The 1952 Physical Plan proposed creating a range of new settlements, from rural centers of

2,000 people through rural-urban centers of 6,000 to 12,000 people to medium size towns of

40,000 to 60,000, in order to gradate the contemporary polarization of villages and urban concentrations on the Mediterranean coast.400 As Zvi Efrat has noted, this hierarchy of settlements is reminiscent of the German geographer Walter Christaller’s Central Place

Theory that became influential in the West in the 1950s and the 1960s, and by the 1970s also in Third World planning,401 despite the fact it was developed under the Nazi regime.402

398 Arnon Golan, Shinui Merkhavi: Totseot Milkhama (Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University, 2001), 6.

399 Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 43. UN 194 Resolution of 11 December 1948 called the government of Israel to allow refugees to return to their homes. See ibid, 76.

400 Sharon, Tikhnun Fisi, 8.

401 Akin L. Mabogunje, “Urban Planning and the Post-Colonial State in Africa; A Research Overview,” African Studies Review 33, no. 2 (Sep., 1990): 129-131. Alongside Christaller’s “Central Place Theory,” Mabogunje mentions 1950s theories by the German August Losch and the “growth pole strategy” of the French economist Francois Perroux.

139 Initially conceiving his thesis for Southern Germany in 1932, by the mid 1930s Christaller had modified it to correspond with the National Socialist agenda to create a Volk- community (Volkgemeinschaft), and from 1939 he applied it in the Planning and Soil Office headed by Heinrich Himmler for the colonization and Germanization of the occupied

East.403 While this planning method was based on rational geometric patterns, with small villages organized around main villages (Hauptdorf) that connected to urban centers, it was inspired by medieval settlement patterns that were romanticized as a healthy symbiosis between urban and rural life.404 This nostalgic yearning for a restoration of the harmony of pre-industrial life stemmed from the mid-nineteenth century Volkish movement, whose thinkers exalted the notion of “rootedness” (Verwurzelung), that is, the connection of the

Volk to their native soil and landscape.405 Christaller’s planning method was perceived as particularly appropriate for the German occupied territories, where as part of the German

Lebensraum it could regenerate this rootedness by means of superimposition of a landscape of settlements over the ethnically cleansed space.406

The lack of “rootedness” in settler-colonial societies that Sharon deplored in 1952 should be therefore interpreted in the context of the government’s agenda to rapidly resettle the territories not included in the Israeli state according to the 1947 UN Partition Plan for

402 Arnon Golan, “Teoryot Hamekomot Hamerkaziym Vehageografia Hayisraelit: Merkhav, Shoah, Modernism Veshtika,” Ofakim Begeografia 74-6 (1997): 39-52; Efrat, 998-1000.

403 Mechtild Rössler, “Applied Geography and Area Research in Nazi Society: Central Place Theory and Planning, 1933-1945,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (1989): 419-431.

404 Trevor J. Barnes and Claudio Minca, “Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2012): 6.

405 Mark Bassin, “Race contra Space: German Geopolitik and National Socialism,” Political Geography Quarterly 6 no. 2 (April 1987): 123.

406 Barnes and Minca, 4-6.

140 Palestine. Following the displacement of the Palestinian population in the 1948 War, the rapid planning and resettling of these “empty” territories were preemptive strategies to counter Palestinian refugees’ claims of return. Referring to European historical settlement patterns as the appropriate model for Israel, Sharon simply superimposed these patterns over

Israel’s contested territory.407 Similarly to Christaller’s methodology, the plan’s simulation of an accelerated historical process nationalized the territory with an image of organic rootedness, albeit created ex-nihilo, and through the erasure of Palestinian settlements whose historical and contemporary presence would have disturbed the coherence of that image.

The historical homology with Christaller’s planning methodology becomes even more pertinent in the planning of the Lakhish Region Settlement Project in 1954 -1959, developed in 1953 by Raanan Weitz, the General Director of the Settlement Department of the Jewish

Agency that controlled the planning of agricultural settlements.408 Even more than Sharon’s plan, this scheme became a flagship project that was exported to the Third World.409 While in Sharon’s plan the emphasis was on urban dispersal in small and medium towns, in the

Lakhish scheme the planning scale was regional and the emphasis was on rural and semi- urban settlement clusters, expressed in a diagram where clusters of six villages formed around a central village, and six such clusters formed around a provincial town (figs. 22-3).

Reminiscent of Christaller’s Central Place Theory diagram, it too is based on the principle of

407 Efrat, 997-8.

408 It is uncertain whether Weitz based his planning methods on that of Christaller. In an interview from the late 1990s he mentions his theory, but this may have been a retroactive acknowledgement. John Forester, Raphael Fischler, and Deborah Shmueli, eds. Israeli Planners and Designers: Profiles of Community Builders (Albany, NY: State University New York Press, 2001), 325.

409 Schwartz and Hare, 13.

141 the shortest possible distances between the villages and their central village cores.410

Together with the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Agency was an ex-territorial body funded by the world Jewry, and in the pre-state period was the central body that coordinated

Jewish colonization in Palestine. With the establishment of the state, it received governing power to manage immigration and set up agriculture settlements. The relegation of these functions to a Zionist body that operated exclusively for the Jewish population was a convenient apparatus the state could use to bypass legally the universalism expected from a democratic regime.411 With this legal continuation of colonial institutions within the operative matrix of the state, the Lakhish region project, similarly to the Nazi plans for the

Germanization of the East, became an instrument for the Jewification of a previously densely populated Arab territory.412

According to sociologist Smadar Sharon, the two areas that were subjected to regional planning, the Ta’anakh region in the north (south of Jezreel Valley and east of the Wadi Ara region), and Lakhis in the south (west to South Mount Hebron and north to the Gaza Strip), were strategic areas in relation to the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Both were located in the

410 Weitz studied agronomy at Florence University during the fascist regime, and was influenced by contemporary Italian agricultural settlements schemes. While Smadar Sharon focuses on the connection to Italian colonization practices in Libya, Weitz was particularly influenced by internal colonization schemes in Italy, especially the one in the Pontine Marshes that was conceived and implemented by his professor Arrigo Serpierri. See: Forester, Fischler and Shmueli, Israeli Planners, 320; Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 80-8. On the Pontine Marshes see Federico Carpotti, Mussolini’s Cities: Internal Colonisation in Italy, 1930-1939 (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007); Federico Caprotti, “Destructive Creation: Fascist Urban Planning, Architecture, and New Towns in the Pontine Marshes,” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007): 651-679; Federico Caprotti, “Internal Colonisation, Hegemony and Coercion: Investigating Migration to Southern Lazio, Italy, in the 1930s,” Geoforum 39 (2008): 942-957; Federico Caprotti and Maria Kaïka, “Producing the Ideal Fascist Landscape: Nature, Materiality and the Cinematic Representation of Land Reclamation in the Pontine Marshes,” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 6 (September 2008): 613-634.

411 Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 54-5.

412 For info on the Palestinian villages that existed in the area see ibid, 117-9.

142 “bottle necks” of the designated Jewish state and were supposed to be surrounded by the territories of the Arab state. According to her, it was fear of the reversibility of the political situation, enhanced by Israel’s deteriorating international position in 1953-4, that was the prime impetus for conceiving such large scale settlements schemes, for which masses of

Moroccan Jews were especially recruited even prior to their immigration.413 The strategic motivation was coupled with an economic urgency. As a result of America’s withholding of grants in the latter part of 1953 in response to Israel’s diversion of the Jordan River, alongside American pressure to consider territorial concessions and to absorb some of the

Palestinian refugees, the Israeli leadership sought an economic plan that would free Israel from its dependence on American grants.414 The agricultural reform Weitz promoted as part of the Lakhis region scheme addressed this issue by increasing Israel’s agricultural domestic production and its localized processing.415 Creating a self-sustaining economy through industrial processing of agricultural production of field crops (such as cotton and beet-sugar), while avoiding the expense of transporting the crops to overseas industrial centers, was seen as a way to achieve economic self-reliance and increase Israel’s export market.416

In the Sierra Leone planning proposal, Doudai incorporated planning lessons from the

Lakhish model while accommodating it to address UN concerns and African desire for rapid modernization. Unlike the Lakhish model, and similarly to Sharon’s 1952 physical plan, the

413 Ibid, 43-4, on the IDF’s involvement in civilian planning see 56-9. The novelty of her argument is that according to her, this mass immigration was initiated in order to fill in these bottlenecks, and not the other way around.

414 Ibid, 43, 45.

415 From mixed farming (meshek meorav) of vegetables and cattle to specialized farming of cash crops such as beet sugar and cotton (meshek sade) that would be processed in the near-by towns. See ibid, 88-99, 142-145.

416 Ibid, 45, 89-90.

143 Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan referred to the national scale and focused on a hierarchy of urban rather than rural centers, suggesting a network of urban centers at differing sizes. However, this urban hierarchy was conceived as part of regional development, as in the Lakhish scheme, with an emphasis on preserving the countryside intact. The focus on an urban network derived, according to Doudai, from a growing reluctance of international bodies to fund physical development plans on a national scale.

On the other hand, as Doudai explained, plans that aimed at urban concentration and transport networks found a sympathetic ear in international institutions.417 Moreover, in an

African setting dominated by rural chiefdoms, focusing on urban centers provided an image of accelerated modernization, second only perhaps to the spectacular promise of a new hinterland capital. Yet Doudai’s proposed plan not only avoided the allocation of vast resources the creation of a new capital necessitated, but also the creation of any new towns or villages. Instead, it focused on identifying potential urban centers from within contemporary trends of existing towns’ growth, developed mostly out of villages.

As evident from this refrain of creation of new towns, by the mid-1960s Israeli planners became wary of resettlement projects, urban or rural.418 In the Sierra Leone National

Urbanization Plan, Doudai raised concerns regarding “major changes in the scale and organization of agricultural production” and “the resettlement nature of some of the schemes” introduced by the Sierra Leone government.419 The falling out of favor of new towns and villages can be explained by the growing criticism in the Israeli public sphere following the

417 IPD Board Meeting No. 15, October 26, 1964, ISA, MFA 469/7 (130).

418 Schwartz and Hare, 5.

419 Doudai and Oelsner, 60, 62.

144 mass settlement projects of the 1950s. The negative effects of the coerced settlement of

“shock populations” brought “from boat to the village” as was the case in populating the

Lakhish region, were already visible at the time, and criticism began to grow even in the professional planners’ community.420 Yet despite its failures, the Lakhish project continued to be exported as a novel model for Third World planning, as in the case of the plan for

Sierra Leone. As will be argued in the following sections, some fundamental aspects of the method of planning and implementing the Lakhish region were borrowed, only now implemented in regard to the already existing conditions of Sierra Leone’s settlement patterns. If in the Lakhish region and other newly settled parts of Israel the goal of planning new urban and rural settlements was the rooting of population at the periphery against the urban concentration at the coast area, in the case of Sierra Leone’s provinces the goal was to discourage immigration from the rural hinterland to the capital Freetown. By following the

Lakhish paradigm, the planners identified existing urban centers to be developed as regional centers in order to keep the agricultural sector intact and keep the young generation “rooted.”

Since, as Doudai explained, unlike far-away Freetown, these urban centers would provide an opportunity for young men who were needed for work at their family farm to seasonally migrate from country to town.421

A Lab in the Working

Sub-Saharan African governmental delegations, including Sierra Leonean ones, were frequent visitors to this “Israeli experiment” at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the

420 Schwartz and Hare, 13; Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, “The Lakhish Settlement Project: Planning and Reality,” Tijdscrift voor Econ. En Soc. Geografie (November-December, 1970): 334-347. On Lakhish Region settlers as “shocked population” see Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 119-121.

421 Dooudai, SLNUP, 32.

145 1960s (figs. 20-2). The new state was presented as a site of experimentation, a “field-trial” in the science sociologist Bruno Latour’s term, where planning and development could be seen in action, rather than as a technical projection on a drafting board or as an already achieved fait-accompli. The high modernist clean-slate paradigm was instrumental for such a performance, since it simulated the settings of a controlled lab, in theory at least. The busy schedule of the tours, in which the Lakhish region was a prime destination, ensured that the spectacle was tightly framed. Not only African dignitaries visited the sites of Israel’s experiment in mass settlement of immigrants, or “refugees” as they were described in

African media. International experts, too, came to learn from this lab, including UN experts like Otto Koengisberger himself. Koenigsberger had visited Israel at least twice by spring

1962, and reported “the value of Israeli experiences for other countries” in a UN study. He was so enthused by what he saw that he suggested extending his report to urban settlements and addressing it beyond the academic and UN readership to administrators and politicians.422 That these visits coincided with his work on the Lagos Report and occurred before he began working on the Singapore Plan raises the possibility that witnessing Lakhish planning influenced his paradigm shift to “action planning” in his plan for Singapore.

Through this spectacle of development in the making, Israel could present itself as a success story with which the Africans could identify and emulate. Tom Mboya, the Kenyan trade

422 Otto Koenigsberger to Aharon Remez. July 6, 1962, ISA, MFA 1908/18. In this letter, addressed from Lagos after Koenigsberger’s second visit in Israel in April-May 1962, Koenigsberger explains that following Israel’s experience in the settlement of newcomers, which he found valuable to other countries, he would like to extend his research in Israel to include settlements in cities, and publish a study that does not only address academic audience but also administrators and politicians. For more on this visit see ISA, MFA 1900/5. The date of Koenigsberger first visited in Israel is unknown. He may have attended informally the International Housing Seminar held in Kefar Vitkin, Israel in May 4 - June 15, 1960 (the program included Ernest Weissman and Oscar Niemeyer). For details of the conference see ISA MFA 2025/18.

146 unionist, commented for example: “Any African who tours Israel cannot fail to be impressed by the achievements made in such a short time from poor soil and with so few natural resources. We all tended to come away most excited and eager to return to our countries and repeat all those experiments.”423 The political neutrality Israel assumed between the Eastern and Western blocs enabled this presentation of the state as an experimental lab, unbiased by political associations. At the same time, these visits relieved any concerns of economic or political domination, since as one African leader commented, the Israelis could “barely manage to dominate” themselves.424

Israeli experts who traveled back and forth to African countries as advisors persuaded

African officials that their problems were similar to Israeli ones and thus could be approached in a similar fashion. One of the common issues was the discrepant temporality of planning and implementation, or to put it simply, the satisfying of the urgent needs of the state versus undergoing a gradual process oriented towards future objectives. A cause of disciplinary anxiety in Israel in the 1950s that was even expressed in Sharon’s 1952 Physical

Plan - “time” being one of its three constitutive elements, together with “the country” and

“the people” - this urgency determined considerably the methods of operation in the planning of the country.425 In this battle between the professionalism of the planners and the urgent needs of the state, the state had the upper hand and the planners had to adapt their

423 Cited in Peters, 3.

424 Peters, 6. Africans who stayed longer even commented on the “Third World” qualities they witnessed first hand. See chapter 1.

425 Sharon, Tikhnun Fisi, 5. Time is the third element after “the country” and “the people.”

147 methods effectively to provide cheap and fast mass housing and to settle the contested territories.426

One of the challenges the planners faced was the time needed to undertake surveys; these tended to prolong significantly the planning process. As a way to bypass this problem, undertaking the survey was sidestepped in favor of moving ahead with planning without the proper information needed for the task. As Raanan Weitz proclaimed, the planning- implementation process of the Lakhish region was to be advanced on a trial and error basis, not only at the stage of the settlements’ inhabitation, but even at the level of its underlying information:

One difficulty was getting topographical maps quickly… I called my team and told them that we had a basic map which the British had done, on the scale of 1 to 20,000, with one meter levels. I told them to enlarge it and work on it. The answer was that this was not accurate. The team said that in order to plan houses, roads, and villages, you need to do topography. I said, “Yes, you do need to do topography. If we mobilize all the certified surveyors in Israel, how many topographies could we produce in a year? The one we need is with levels of ½ meter, 10 centimeters, with details 1 to 1,000.” They said, “Well, maybe between 10 and 15.” I said, “Since this year we are establishing 120 villages, we would have to wait for the topographies. Some of us would have to wait ten years. In the meantime, what will people do? Who will build their houses?” So, I said, “the mistakes you’ll make by waiting to do it without mistakes will be a hundred times bigger than the mistakes you will make by using the maps we have.”427

426 Sharon, “Hametakhnenim,” 31-57.

427 Forester, Fischler, and Shmueli, Israeli Planners, 325.

148 Doudai shared much of Weitz’s pragmatism. As Doudai explained in a talk he gave at the

Engineering Club in Tel Aviv in December 1963, this pragmatism should dictate the planning methodology in the developing countries as well, where the challenge was to plan despite the unavailability of data. To make his point, Doudai brought up the example of a

European planner whose survey in one developing country lasted for three years. By the time he had finished, he realized that the conditions had completely changed.428 Other cases demonstrate that this was not a one-time incident. As mentioned above, the survey that the

1955 Singapore Master Plan was based upon became outdated by 1963, when

Koenigsberger, Kobe and Abrams were commissioned to re-plan the island.429 Similarly,

Michel Ecochard’s plan for Dakar, which was commissioned in 1963, had become outdated by the time he completed the survey and plan.430 Other examples include the master plan for

Abidjan, produced in 1961 by the French engineering office SETAP under the authority of the French cooperation program FAC (Fonds d’Aide at de Coopération), and the master plan for Kinshasa that became obsolete the moment the MFU (Mission Française d’Urbanisme) published it in 1967, three years after its commissioning.431 The problem, Doudai maintained, was that these countries could not afford to wait for the planners to catch up:

To establish a national plan takes years. During all that time the country continues to develop and change. I do not believe that such plans must be absolutely exact for what will emerge in fifty, sixty or seventy years. In my life I have already seen so many enormous and

428 Meeting at the Tel Aviv Engineering Club, December 27, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16.

429 Abrams, 94.

430 Tom Avermaete, “Framing the Afropolis: Michel Ecochard and the African City for the Greatest Number,” OASE 82 (2010): 97.

431 Luce Beeckmans, “French Planning in a Former Belgian Colony: A Critical Analysis of the French Urban Planning Missions in Post-Independence Kinshasa,” OASE 82 (2010): 63, 69.

149 sudden changes that I realize that any plan one makes today will be outmoded in five or ten years.432

Israeli planners, who like himself were accustomed to drastic changes,433 “found a way to integrate scientific planning with sound human intuition”434 and thus were more competent, according to Doudai, at planning in developing countries than their colleagues from the developed world. In IPD, Doudai explained, their goal was first and foremost to achieve a national comprehensive plan that was not based on scientific exactness, but based on the knowledge already available in the Third World country.435 In the Sierra Leone National

Urbanization Plan “intuitive decisions” became an effective tool that compensated for lack of sufficient data.436

The use of the term “intuition” here is not an accidental misnomer chosen for lack of better words. It was used by Doudai himself earlier, in a lecture he gave in 1961 at the

International Seminar for Rural Planning organized in Israel under the auspices of the foreign ministry Department for International Cooperation, in his capacity as the Director of

Planning and Engineering Department at the Housing Administration in the Ministry of

432 Aryeh Doudai, “The Relationship between Physical and Social Aspects in Urban Communities,” A paper presented at the International Seminar on Social and Cultural Integration in Urban Areas, November 1964, Haifa: Mount Carmel International Training Centre for Community Service, 3. (My emphasis).

433 Raanan Weitz too attributed his planning experience to the fact that by the age of 36 he had experienced two wars. Raanan Weitz father was Yoesf Weitz, the Director of the Land and Forestation Department of the Jewish National Fund and one of the planners of the Wall and Stockade operation.

434 Meeting at the Tel Aviv Engineering Club, December 27, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16.

435 Ibid, ibid.

436 Doudai and Oelsner, 5.

150 Labor.437 The term appears as he quotes famed TVA Board chairman David Lilienthal:

“Although TVA was concerned with aspects of flood control, navigation, power development, soil concentration, forestry, and fertilizer production, it advanced not by implementing a formal master plan, but by a flexible, and to critics a highly intuitive, system of partial plans, each linked through the control of the master stream.”438 While Lilienthal used the term in response to a critique of TVA’s planning methods, in Doudai’s account the term is divested from its derogative meaning to become a legitimate planning approach authorized by Lilinthiel’s expertise.439

This emphasis on expertise that stems from a particular experience or extreme circumstances, such as stealthy paramilitary operations in the pre-state period and emergency planning in

Israel in the post-1948 war transition period, is reminiscent of “metis,” the category of knowledge James Scott posits as the “missing link” of high modernism. According to Scott,

“formal order (…) is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain (…) actual work processes depend more heavily on informal understandings and improvisations than upon formal work rules.”440

Scott distinguishes between the abstract “Imperial scientific knowledge” of high modernism and the localized, situated knowledge of “metis,” which designates practical skills, common

437 Aryeh Doudai, “Regional Planning and Development,” paper presented at the International Seminar on Rural Planning, Israel, October-November 1961 (Jerusalem: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Department for International Cooperation).

438 Ibid, 20. (My emphasis.)

439 For early contacts with American planners such as Walter Clay Lowdermilk, who proposed for Palestine a Jordan Valley Authority based on the TVA model see Troen, 29-34, 174-78.

440 Scott, 310. (My emphasis).

151 sense and experience, namely the ability to adapt to new situations and to respond quickly and decisively in difficult natural settings, such as pursuing agriculture in a challenging climate, or in human interactions of the sort used in politics and war diplomacy.441 Scott consciously refrains from using the term “traditional knowledge” because of the demeaning connotation attached to it as backward and static.442 However, the distinction he maintains between the scientific generalizable theory and the local ungeneralizable practice retains the very binary opposition he is trying to circumvent.443

The case of exporting Israeli planning experience, based on “hands-on” approaches, presents a challenge to Scott’s formulation. While methods of planning in Israel were to a large extent a result of “practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment,”444 attained and developed first in the pre-state period, after the state formation, they continued to be deployed by the state and its technical agencies, a realm belonging, according to Scott, to high modernism.445 The continuity of personnel and Zionist institutions from pre-state to state institutionalized their metis mode of operation, which was put in the service of state domination and control. This strange mix of formal and informal practices of knowledge production is exemplified by the anecdote of

441 Ibid, 311, 313-5.

442 Ibid, 323, 331-2.

443 While criticizing the binary opposition created between these two forms of knowledge, Scott nonetheless still retains the distinction between scientific and indigenous knowledge – “the art of the locality.” See ibid, 316-317. Similarly, Mitchell also reproduces this distinction while criticizing it. See Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 35-9.

444 Scott, 313.

445 Ibid, 311.

152 professional ingenuity in data gathering that Doudai shared with the Tel Aviv Engineering

Club audience:

I was told, accidently, in a visit to one country, that the air force of another country took aerial photographs of that country, and that they should be available somewhere. When I began searching, I found an Israeli that happened to know one sergeant in the air force who has them. So we found this sergeant, and this is how we found the photographs that immediately became instrumental to draw the topographic maps for that country.446

Alongside the clear relationship between civilian and military planning demonstrated here, this example shows that the pre-state operative mindset continued to prevail after the Jewish population became sovereign. Parallel to formal institutional channels, information was obtained during the pre-sovereign years through personal contacts and stealthy operations.

Doudai’s professional prestige, as presented before the club audience, drew from this operative informal logic. When introducing Doudai, the club’s chairman made a point of the fact that Doudai’s formation did not consist solely of education at the Technion and in schools in Brussels and London, but was complemented by his experience at the Haganah (a

Jewish paramilitary organization): “he was among the few Haganah members that during the

[Palestinian] Riots of 1929, were sent to break the path to Jerusalem. It seems to me,” the club’s chairman S. Sirkin noted, “that this learning HOW to break [actual] paths has enabled him to learn how to break [metaphoric] paths in national and regional planning…”447 The fact that the club’s chairman felt the need to emphasize Doudai’s role in the Haganah as a significant part of his professional credentials is symptomatic of the formation of Jewish

446 Meeting at the Tel Aviv Engineering Club, December 27, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16. (My translation).

447 Meeting at the Tel Aviv Engineering Club, December 27, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16. (My translation).

153 elite in Palestine. According to the historians Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, in the pre- state period professional qualifications were not perceived as requiring formal-professional training, but more diffused qualities such as initiative, flexibility, and the ability to improvise, alongside a clear ideological identification with the Labor Movement required for elite positions.448 Doudai’s role in the Haganah demonstrated both his ideological commitment and a set of skills that was seen as much more effective than formal training.

This ingenuity, which was promoted in Israeli foreign aid literature as a particular national genius,449 was demonstrated in this case as the ability to obtain information outside the proper formal channels. “To think outside of the box” meant in this case not a revolutionary reformulation of fields of knowledge, but simply the ability to reach the content of other’s

“boxes,” and make them available for new uses.

This method of appropriating and redirecting the use of available means was also used by

Israeli agriculturalists in projects in Africa. For example, “when Rumanian tractors turned out to be useless in Zambia, their motors were used to operate water pumps. When the head of the Khajura settlement project found at headquarters a truck with drilling equipment donated by AID, he drove the drilling equipment to his project and succeeded in finding water and drilling a well.”450 Social scientists Moshe Schwartz and A. Paul Hare characterize these agriculturalists as “tinkers” or “bricoleurs.” The latter term derives from

448 Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Miyishuv Lemedinah: Yehudye Erets Yiśra’el Biteḳufat Hamandaṭ Habriṭi Keḳehilah Poliṭit (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1977), 149. On the tension between professional and technical expertise and pioneering see also Reuven Kahana, “Emdot Ha’Ide’ologia Hadominantit Klapey Mada, Mad’anim, Uprofessionalim Bitkufat Hayishuv,” in Revadim Beyisrael, eds. Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt et al. (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1968), 181-236; Derek J. Penslar, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (London; New York, 2007), 150-166.

449 See for example Amir, Israel’s Development Cooperation, 1974. 450 Schwartz and Hare, 19.

154 the comparison anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss made between scientific and mythical thinking. Parallel to Scott’s attempt to describe indigenous knowledge, this distinction precedes Scott’s and provides a more nuanced articulation of the indigenous “tool box”.451

Unlike the engineer or the scientist, the bricoleur has a “heterogeneous repertoire” with which he can perform a large number of diverse tasks that cut across professional boundaries. This freedom is nonetheless limited, since the bricoleur operates within the realm of what he has been given, rather than attempting to invent concepts and break out of the conditions of the civilization in which he operates: “his universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand.’”452 However,

Levi Strauss’ description unwittingly discloses that the engineer is no less restricted in his execution of projects, since inventing concepts and thinking “outside of the box” entails restricting himself to the materials and tools “conceived and procured for the purpose of the project.”453 Once the engineer “invents” his concepts and tools, they bind him. The success of his projects is conditioned by the linear, predetermined, and rigid method of their implementation.

The inappropriateness of a rigid plan in the Lakhish project, due to its urgency and lack of information, led instead to an approach based on “a series of specific actions” and “a planned chain of concrete projects such as bridges, roads, factories, schools; and so on.”454

451 Although the resemblance between the concepts begs an analytical comparison, Scott refers to Levi Strauss only in passing.

452 Claude Levi Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,” in The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfield and Nicholson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), 19-21.

453 Ibid, ibid.

454 Ra’anan Weitz, interview with Shimeon Amir, Kidma 33, 9, no. 1 (1986): 25.

155 The phased implementation of the plan would thus take place as part of this series of actions, in which planning and implementation combined and at times overlapped. Unlike

Koenigsberger’s Singapore plan, which was developed almost a decade later based on previous experience in planning (including Lakhish), Weitz may have developed his methodology in retrospect, to compensate for the planners’ inability to prepare in advance and accommodate the settlers as they originally planned. In her research, Smadar Sharon observed that beginning with the inception of the project, the planning/implementation process was executed in a haphazard, improvisatory manner due to the unexpected arrival of immigrants before the plans were even halfway complete.455 The villages were populated during planning and construction and before basic infrastructure such as transportation, electricity, phone cables, and medical and educational facilities were laid. The electrical and phone lines, to note a couple of examples, were put in place only in July 1955, six months after the arrival of the first settlers, and by that time nine villages had already been established.456 Such an asynchronous planning method could also justify retroactively unplanned changes and failures to meet stated goals. As Weitz explained from the safe distance of half a century later,

I once said that after 25 years Lachish [sic] will look exactly as we described it in the beginning, then we failed. Implementation is never exactly like plans. It’s not a bridge which you are building which must be exact. Because a bridge is a dead thing. A region is a living thing, and living things develop forces from within, which bring some healthy modification

455 Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 113-4.

456 Ibid, ibid. Immigrants were accommodated in provisional housing, and jobs were created for them haphazardly. See ibid, 127, 141.

156 to the plan. The planning should be readjusted to reality, and implementation needs planning to direct it.457

From this description, it is inferred that he saw the planner’s role was to gather information in this back and forth between planning and implementation, based on changes introduced both by the plan and the “forces from within.” Weitz’s reasoning is particularly fitting to the bricoleur’s approach, since for the latter, the continual reconstruction of the elements of the plan dictated an immanent open-endedness; as Levi Strauss put it, “Once it materializes the project will therefore inevitably be at a remove from the initial aim (which was moreover a mere sketch).”458

As a lively discussion among Mapay (Labor Party) members in the early 1960s demonstrates, the position of the Israeli expert as bricoleur was elevated to a level of an anti- doctrinaire doctrine when exported to the Third World. While some thought it was impractical, uneconomical and inefficient to operate without a theory or a doctrine, others thought this lack of general theory, and the experts’ ability to respond on a case-by-case basis, was exactly Israel’s area of strength compared to other nations’ aid.459 This approach enabled the Foreign Ministry to respond quickly to African countries’ requests to dispatch experts, or to tailor specialized training programs in Israel, that often necessitated immediate action. The example that became a leading motif in this discussion was the arrival of “an airplane full of Africans descending from the black skies,” whose notice of arrival came last minute, and necessitated the rushed organization of a welcoming committee. This aeronautic

457 Forester, Fischler, and Shmueli, Israeli Planners, 323.

458 Levi Strauss, 14.

459 Malkhin and Goldberg, especially 46.

157 metaphor is complemented by the criticism made by an Israeli expert comparing Israeli projects in Africa to missiles launched into space from Cape Canaveral.460 Unlike the

American development economist Walt Whitman Rostow’s spirited metaphor of Third

World countries’ “take off,” the Israeli metaphors focused on the moment of anxiety of hitting the ground.

From Survey to Plan

By referring to intuition as a component that would compensate for lack of data and that would replace meticulous long studies, Doudai did not imply that planning should support ad hoc solutions. On the contrary, he criticized ad hoc planning as it was being practiced in developing countries where there was no comprehensive planning program that coordinated the various projects taking place once funds and expertise became available.461 In fact, what

Doudai suggested was far more radical: if the plan is not oriented towards a preconceived future, and if it is destined to become irrelevant in just a few years, the status of the plan as a blueprint in the high-modernist sense becomes obsolete. Instead, he proposed that the plan should act as a catalyst that stimulates feedback mechanisms. This feedback will be translated into information, which, in turn, will be reinvested back into the plan in a continuous dynamic process:

The planning process should be multi-dimensional. (…) In terms of time it should be designed not for a predetermined sequence of activities, but on the basis of an ever-deepening process in which the first broad intuitive decisions feed back as information and experience on which to

460 Paraphrased by Doudai. Meeting at the Tel Aviv Engineering Club, December 27, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16.

461 Ibid.

158 set off another series of processes, in a continuous, on-going, succession (…) First decisions have to be made on an intuitive basis from an overall comprehensive examination of material available, and studies that are undertaken while the decisions are taking effect should be utilized primarily to deepen the understanding for planning decisions at a later stage (…) To some degree survey, research, planning, programming, decision making and implementation overlap in all situations, and in Africa one single and continuous process is particularly suitable. Incorporating research, planning, and implementation interwoven in time and place.462

For this reason, the temptation to proceed from survey to first broad intuitive decisions was so strong that Doudai ended up producing a plan while he was still only commissioned by the Sierra Leone government to conduct a survey.463 This need to hasten planning while incorporating the gathering of information into the planning and implementation process is reminiscent of Koenigsberger’s formulation of action planning for Singapore: “we recommend that a series of action programmes be drawn up for urban development and urban renewal on Singapore Island (…) the operation of these action programmes should be combined with market research, with annual reviews of population forecasts and housing targets, with annual surveys of social and economic changes and the feed back of survey results into new programmes.”464 Koenigsberger too differentiated his approach from ad hoc planning. While the plan was constituted of a “mosaic of plans,” similarly to the TVA

“system of partial plans,”465 it was nonetheless comprehensive because it addressed all

462 Doudai and Oelsner, 4-5.

463 IPD Board Meeting No. 23, November 24, 1966, ISA, MFA 2899/19. Also the printing costs ended up twice as much as the Sierra Leone government covered.

464 Abrams, 89. Emphasis in the origin.

465 Aryeh Doudai, “The Relationship between Physical and Social Aspects,” 22. (My emphasis).

159 aspects of urban life.466 The multivariate process of planning, implementation, and information gathering is thus pursued simultaneously through local and continuous interventions that are coordinated step by step with no fixed grand master plan.

As Koenigsberger’s and Doudai’s planning methods demonstrate, following the experience of the rapidly changing conditions, planners arrived at the conclusion that information gathering cannot precede, and thereby lay sound scientific grounds, for planning. This problem may have had to do with the kind of information that the planners attempted to gather. In his critique of the “development practitioners” of the 1950s, Porter argues that their main role in practice was to provide “the rational nexus of capital, technology and rationality represented by [development] projects.”467 The results of the survey, which served as the basis for the planning and implementation of projects, provided the raison d’être of such projects to begin with. The survey was used as a rational substrate that was carefully crafted to fit the development projects’ aims. Since the survey was very much predetermined by western economy’s scientific reasoning, it had to be based on the kind of data western scientific reasoning could recognize as computable and thus usable. In the early

1950s, the UN had recognized information gathering as an urgent problem since “‘defective knowledge and consequent inability to make rational plans’ was a major constraint…”468

Thus the task of the development expert expanded from the mere processing of data to that of information gathering: the production of knowledge on the Third World, and the simoultanous production of the “Third World” as a cognitive category. By the 1960s, as

466 Doudai and Oelsner, 89.

467 Porter, 72.

468 Ibid, ibid.

160 demonstrated by the examples above, planners gradually acknowledged that the gathering of information, without planning intervention, is futile. The Third World city presented an epistemological problem that could only be overcome by the application of western categories and paradigms of action, that would, in turn, create the framework for the gathering of knowledge within these categories.

Both Doudai and Koenigsberger used the term “feedback” to describe this model of information gathering through planning and implementation. While it is unclear whether

Doudai read the Singapore report, since he did not use the term “action planning,” both planners were familiar with Margaret Mead’s work that mediated this borrowing from the language of cybernetics. Mead visited Israel in 1956, and while her visit was not very effective in terms of policy-making in the Health department that hosted her, or conversely in the anthropology circles,469 it seems that at least on planners Mead made a lasting impression, probably due to her high standing in the UN development programs circles.

Three years prior to her visit Mead had edited a “manual for technical experts,” published jointly by UNESCO and the World Federation for Mental Health, in which she presented the feedback mechanism as a new model of social intervention. In this new model of

“participatory” social sciences by way of “learning from the ground,” the expert created new patterns out of old ones, and thus managed development through a collaborative approach with the local population.470 The expert thus became a mediating figure that communicated the idea of development across cultural contexts by stripping down scientific techniques and

469 Tali Lev, “Mesima Beyisrael: Bikura shel Margaret Mead Beyisrael Bekayits 1956,” Teoria Uvikoret 36 (2010): 231-239.

470 Muzzafar, 301-2.

161 translating them into a new accommodating pattern that would become meaningful in the new context.471

The preservation of culture while socializing gradually into a modern way of life was also the goal of the Lakhish regional development model. Against the predominant melting pot approach in Israel at that time, advanced by the former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and subject to a harsh critique by Mead on her 1956 visit,472 Weitz advocated the retention of old country community ties of the immigrants-settlers.473 For this reason he kept the village size limited to eighty families, so that each village would be composed of members of a shared community, while the integration with immigrants from other communities would occur at the central village level.474 He even invited Dorothy Willner, an American anthropologist, to follow and assist in these processes.475

Weitz’s planning scheme for the Lakhish region was based on two correlative and complementary gradual transitions: from traditional mixed farming to specialized industrial farming, and from traditional societies to modern ones. Thus the immigrants were supposed to go through a transitional period of socializing into the state through their role as farmers, guided by socializing agents from veteran kibbutzim and moshavim,476 before they would

471 Ibid, 297-9.

472 Lev, 235-6.

473 Forester, Fischler, Shmueli, Israeli Planners, 324-5.

474 Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 67, 127.

475 Forester, Fischler, Shmueli, Israeli Planners, 325. This work resulted in the study: Dorothy Wilner, Nation- Building and Community in Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). 476 Kibbutz and moshav in plural form, respectively.

162 acquire ownership of the land and become self-governing.477 The Lakhish region’s planners lived in the regional urban centers Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat and supervised the process on- site.478 Doudai supported the gradual transition methodology, as evidenced from a letter he wrote to Weitz in November 1955:

People would probably argue that the human material that settles in this region is not mature enough for self governing, and guidance and orienting are necessary for him to form his life within the life of the nation. This claim, in my opinion, strengthens my position… the new settlers will be incorporated, as much as they can, in the establishment of the region and will advance step by step with the development and the maturing of the region, until they become whole and arrive at self governing.479

Doudai’s word choice betrays an Orientalist view of the North African immigrants as immature and lacking subjects who must be governed. At the same time, it follows an inherent Zionist axiom in which settling and cultivating the land is a reciprocal, mutually dependant process in the regeneration of the land and the becoming of the national subject.

In this mutually transformative process, the Oriental subject will mature and arrive at self- governance together with the region, in which now he will be rooted, or at least tied to economically. In Sierra Leone, rooting population in the agricultural hinterland ensured the preservation of traditional authority (without which the government would lose its main source of legitimacy) as well as the food production necessary for domestic consumption, if not for export.

477 See Ben-Arieh, and Sharon, “Lo Mityashivim.”

478 Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 113.

479 Cited ibid, 103. (My emphasis). See discussion on “human material” in chapter 4.

163 Taking the Lab back to Sierra Leone

The feedback mechanism between the plan and “reality” Doudai referred to corresponds to the continuum Latour describes between inscriptions and “things.” However, even at the initial moment of planning, as Latour reminds us, the “things” Doudai gathered were already inscriptions produced by various interested actors, including British administrators, historians and sociologists, the Sierra Leone government, and U.N. experts.480 Doudai spent less than two weeks in May 1964 in Freetown for this data-gathering mission,481 and most probably did not visit, at least not on this occasion, the hinterland that was his plan’s main objective. In order to produce his preliminary plans, Doudai first had to transport all the different available inscriptions to his “lab,” that is, the IPD office in Israel. He then scaled down the state’s territory to a unified page-size template that could fit in a booklet that traveled back to Sierra Leone and was handed over to the client, the Sierra Leone government, as well as distributed among the international expert community, especially representatives of institutions that coordinated and financed such projects.482

By isolating variables such as soil, agriculture, population movement, and services on a repeatable homogenous plane, Doudai created a legible template that simplified the presentation of existing information. This simplification allowed for the juxtaposition and superimposition of various maps by using the trace paper that was incorporated into the booklet format. The layering of trace paper over maps presented a playful platform for

480 Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representations, eds. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (Chichester, England; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 65-72.

481 ISA, MFA 469/8.

482 For the board discussion on the plan’s circulation see IPD Board Meeting, December 26, 1963, ISA, MFA 1898/16; IPD Board Meeting No. 23, November 24, 1966, ISA, MFA 2899/19.

164 information processing and a narrative-like development from findings to conclusion accessible even to laymen such as the Sierra Leone government officials and possibly the regional chiefs.

While the use of computer technology in cartography was at the time in a nascent stage, such use of maps was part of a disciplinary shift that saw graphics, and by extension cartography, as an instrument for information processing. In his seminal work of 1967,

Semiology of Graphics, the cartographer Jacques Bertin argued that graphic representation has two distinct functions: it can serve as a storage mechanism and as a research instrument.483 He distinguished between the “dead image” which functions as a mere illustration and the “living image” that could serve as a research instrument:

When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings [sic], the graphic image passes from the dead image, the ‘illustration’, to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the ‘representation’ of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing.484

The superimposition of information, reduced to distinct and isolated graphic sign systems, prepared the ground for a move from static representation of information to a more dynamic form that depicted current trends of change as well as future predictions and prescriptions.

483 Jacques Bertin, “General Theory, from Semiology of Graphics,” in The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representations, eds. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (Chichester, England; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 9.

484 Ibid, 10.

165 Advocating “to put cartography back into action,” Bertin went even further to propose in a later book that "(t)he best graphic operations are those carried out by the decision-maker himself.”485 And indeed, the Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan offered a useful and flexible tool for the policy maker, almost to the point that it would be doing his job for him.

According to Dudai, “the urbanization plan can pick up the focal points at each section of development and organize a guide for policy that can become at some point effective for immediate action and at others a clarification of areas where subsequent investigation is necessary.”486 As a flexible template to be used by the policy maker, the more schematic and general was the plan, the better.

Levi Strauss’ characterization of the bricoleur’s plan as no more than a sketch is an apt description of the visual technique Doudai employed in his plan for Sierra Leone. The visual analysis in the book concluded in a series of flow maps depicting Population Movements,

Regional Pattern: Social, and Urban Framework (figures 24-6). Unlike the first two maps, however, “Urban Framework” does not depict existing conditions and patterns, but re- organizes circulation by creating and reinforcing peripheral urban centers deduced from previous maps. In an almost seamless transition from representation of existing patterns to prescribing new ones, “Urban Framework” becomes a diagrammatical hybrid rather than a static territorial representation. It functions as a schematic representation of desirable relationship between urban centers based on existing ones.

485 Cited in Denis Wood, Review of Graphics and Graphic Information Processing by Jacque Bertin, Association of Canadian Map Librarians 54 (March 1985): 118.

486 Doudai and Oelsner, 5.

166 Designed as a tool for the hands of policy makers rather than physical planners, the plan’s significance lay not at the level of specific prescription, but at the rhetorical level. Similarly to a speech act, its very existence in the hands of the political administration was often presented as an actual achievement. As sociologist Raymond Apthorpe explained in regards to the rhetorical effects of development policies: “sometimes the whole of policy as uttered is seen as equivalent to an actual achievement of what it supposes ought to be, can and will be done.”487 With the plan in hand, the policy maker was now turned into the bricoleur, to speak with and through things.488 The obscurity of the plan as an open-ended guide for the future, masked by the pseudo-scientific process that led to its formation in a series of deductions and juxtaposition of information, relinquished both the policy maker and planner from the responsibility of its full and complete implementation, since its success could not be measured in any concrete terms. This flexibility was especially useful in the hands of weak governments, such as in Africa, where the lack of administrative infrastructure far from the capital presented a challenge of governance. The inheritance of the colonial divide between direct and indirect rule presented a particularly acute obstacle in relation to any physical plan implementation since it set in stone the customary land tenure system in the hinterland, which precluded any government intervention without local chiefs’ concession of land.489 It is exactly for this reason that the plan was more important at the level of a speech act than as a binding document, since it had the potential to set in motion a chain reaction flexible enough to address and include the input of various “populations of interest” from

487 Raymond Apthorpe, “Development Policy Discourse,” Public Administration and Development 6 (1986): 381-2.

488 Levi Strauss, 21.

489 Apthorpe, 381.

167 the level of international aid and national institutions down to the level of customary leadership across the country.490 From this perspective, what Koenigsberger referred to, following his experience in Lagos, as the government’s need to encourage local “private initiatives,” meant in the Sierra Leone context not private entrepreneurs but the cooperation and investment of chiefs in local projects, which in turn would entail the participation of the entire populations under their purview. Similarly, Raanan Weitz clarified that in the subject of coordination of government intervention and private initiative, “when I say “private initiative” I don’t mean the initiative of a few individuals. I mean the initiative of almost every individual in the society concerned.”491

The reciprocity between the plan and interest groups was therefore another layer of the plan’s intervention as an active agent within “reality.” Only in this sense could the plan constitute a chain of actions and engage in feedback relations with “things in reality.” But even prior to that, the relationship between the plan and “things” was exercised at the level of the plan itself. Here too Levi Strauss’ description of the work process of the bricoleur is an appropriate one: “…in the continual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa.”492 The shift the concluding plan Urban Framework marked from existing conditions to future relationships was already constituted on the rhetoric construct of the region. In a series of renderings, the region transformed from a subject of analysis to a

490 Mabogunje and Faniran, XI. The encouragement of private initiative, as in Singapore plan, is oriented here toward the chiefs and their communities.

491 Weitz, 25.

492 Levi Strauss, 19-21.

168 given fact. Starting with “Regional Analysis,” a printed map that showed multiple overlapping amorphous forms in various colors, the planners went on and superimposed upon it a trace paper bearing five amorphous forms, in monochromatic shades to represent five regions that ostensibly emerged from the chaos (fig. 27-31). In this case, therefore, the printed map functioned as a “storage mechanism,” following Bertin’s terminology, while the trace paper indicated the resulting conclusion of the data analysis. However, in a further stage, indicated in the map “Urban Centers,” these five regions became the printed map on which another trace paper was superimposed (fig. 32). Following the logic of the previous map, the five regions now shifted position from a product of analysis to a given reality. This process of data analysis, in which the projected conclusion becomes the given factual substrate for the next stage in the analysis process, created the illusion of a linear evolution of argument while it was actually a circular one, where the conclusions are based on the hypothetical given. The circularity of the argument by this simple use of trace copy was marked from the start with a trace paper image of Urban Framework, now containing both urban centers and regions, superimposed on Sierra Leone’s map that preceded the entire analysis.493 At this early stage, the conclusion was already presented as a future projection to be established as the book developed, or rather as an axiom that the book was determined to prove. Having both urban centers and the regions from which they would grow superimposed over the national territory demonstrated that even the regions that served as substrate were a hypothetical construct rather than a given – a fact that dissolved by the end of the analysis.

The seemingly seamless shift from signifier to signified to signifier again helped to

493 Doudai and Oelsner, 10-11.

169 constitute the five regions Doudai delineated as naturally given.494 Emerging as organic units that slightly overlap in their edges, the regions were superimposed over the colonial demarcations of the provinces, districts, and chiefdoms.495 Presented as the calculated result of physical as well as cultural (ethnicity, language) variables, they were constructed as natural economic units of specialized activity yet to be consolidated. Their economic differentiation “can be expected to increase,” according to the planner, “as urbanisation and industrialization proceed and as natural, human and economic potential known to exist in

Sierra Leone are exploited.”496 Thus the key to successful regional development was the urban framework that was proposed to act as the regions’ pumping and diffusing organs:497

The towns constituting the urban framework represent only the upper levels of a total national structure that will have to be developed. As collectors, transmitters, mixers and magnifiers of the diverse material that constitutes a society and generates development, they are selected as the foci most likely to optimize forces between Freetown and the rural hinterland (…) The role of these towns is to gather their regional forces and to transmit them to Freetown and similar towns in other regions.498

494 Doudai reconfigures Sierra Leone’s territory into five regions: northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast, and the area of Bo, located south to the center of the country.

495 These organic shapes are reminiscent of Arieh Sharon’s “neighborhood units” in development towns. See Sharon, Tiknun Fisi. The organic form enabled the future changing of the boundaries of the region, following the shifts in the Lakhish region’s boundaries caused by the challenges presented by municipal administrative boundaries. See Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 100-107.

496 Doudai and Oelsner, 80.

497 Doudai identified urban potentialities in four towns besides Freetown: the adjacent Magburaka and Makeni as centers of the northeast region, Kenema in the southeast, and Bo, located at the center of southern region. Bonthe and Moyamba (administrative centers), located in the thinly populated southwest are indicated on the map as secondary centers, as well as Kambia in the northwest and Kabala (administrative headquarters of its district) in the far northeast. The fact that the five regions do not cover the whole territory, and leave blank areas in their midst further suggests that population concentration and planning flexibility were the determining factor in the delineation of the regions.

498 Ibid, 82.

170 At the same time, as an intermediary category between the national territory and the urban, the regions did not precede urban centers, but were defined in relation to them: “On the basis of the present survey, those regions on which development should be concentrated can be selected, and within each region the various town plans can become the springboard for planning.”499

As an intermediary category, “a link in a chain between national programming and local activity,”500 it seems that it was the regions, rather than urban centers, that were the ultimate objective of the Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan. Despite its title, the plan was oriented toward preserving existing patterns and maximizing existing resources, including agricultural production in the rural sector. As Doudai made clear, “it is with the intention of stimulating progress in the smallest rural villages that the present urban framework is

501 proposed.” The regions stand in for the villages that were practically absent from the plan:

Planning must include factors which will maximize the influence of the town on its surrounding region in order to encourage the population to remain in rural villages. Some of these factors are extension into the hinterland of social services, organization of central markets for buying and selling of agricultural products, and establishment of an adequate transportation system between the town and the rural areas. The regional services become an integral part of the regional plan.502

499 Ibid, 90.

500 Weitz, 25.

501 Doudai and Oelsner, 82.

502 Ibid, 88. (My emphasis).

171 Located in feasible proximity to the villages, urban centers would strengthen the villages’ agricultural production by providing the necessary facilities for their survival in a modernizing economy, albeit without modernizing its society. In this process, Doudai promised, “chiefdom units (will) be disturbed as little as possible.”503 Thus instead of introducing a gradual process of modernization guided by the planner and the anthropologist, as suggested by Margaret Mead and exercised in the Lakhish project, here the objective was to keep traditional society intact. In this plan, modernization of production and consumption would therefore not necessarily lead to the loss of the chief’s traditional authority. The tension the planner wished to resolve here was not simply between modernity and tradition at the level of daily life, but also at the governing level between the government and the chiefs, who acted as “brokers of political power” in Ajayi’s apt phrasing, whose cooperation was essential both in terms of electoral support and in terms of active implementation of governmental policy and projects at the local level.504 Moreover, the plan’s emphasis on inter-regional reciprocity and economic balance was meant to assist the government to relieve tensions concerning tribal favoritism in a government controlled by a Mende (one of the two most powerful tribes in the country) prime minister.505

The Plan as a Petri Dish

Doudai was well aware of the struggles and deficiencies of the Sierra Leone government:

503 Ibid, 90.

504 Ajayi, 4. In Sierra Leone 12 Paramount Chiefs, on for each district, have a seat in the parliament, in addition to elected members of parliament.

505 At this point the Prime Minister was Albert Margai, Milton Margai’s brother. Mende is one of the two most powerful tribes in Sierra Leone alongside the Temne.

172 Efforts to organize a hierarchically structured decentralized government are proceeding, but imbalances and conflicts are still severe. Areas of responsibility are ambiguous, leaving some sectors with overlapping authorities and others untouched. Sufficient technical and administrative staff are unavailable. The role of government in development is not clear. A comprehensive operating procedure for government administration is lacking, and a national framework assigning functions and responsibilities to each level and department of government in an integrated hierarchical system, has not been drawn up.506

Facing the government’s challenges in “gradually decentralizing functions yet controlling and unifying activities,” constituting the region as an intermediary category served to mediate between the vertical and horizontal levels of state management. Following Weitz’s formulation, which became known as the Rehovot Approach (after the Rehovot institute), what Doudai referred to as “vertical” was the trickling down of governmental decisions from the national to regional to local levels, and by horizontal he meant the linking of all three sectors by chains of concrete projects.507 In the process, while chiefdoms would be

“undisturbed,” they would have to cooperate at a regional level. Thus, as a larger frame of reference the region would allow maintenance of ethnic differentiations only to the extent that it would serve the economic differentiation of the region in relation to other regions in the country.

On the one hand, the Urban Framework flow map can be read as a situated version of a spatial diagram comparable to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City or Christaller’s “Central

Place Theory,” as it follows their main principles such as the hierarchical gradation of settlements, and an emphasis on settlement clusters with multiple urban centers that would

506 Ibid, 42.

507 Weitz, 25. See also Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim”, 103.

173 eventually eliminate the distinction between city and countryside. On the other hand, this map cannot be read as a simple application of a general theory to a concrete territory since its emphasis is on the rearrangement of existing “things.” Here the figure of the bricoleur, who is concerned with the reorganization of “things,” converges with the figure of the engineer to guide and manage change within a large scale scheme as a mode of governmentality.508 One of the ways in which Michel Foucault distinguishes security, or governmentality,509 from discipline is by the sphere of its operation: “unlike the law that works in the imaginary and discipline that works in a sphere complementary to reality,

[security] tries to work within reality, by getting components of reality to work in relation to each other, thanks to and through a series of analyses and specific arrangements.”510 With its prime “things” being population, territory, and production (agriculture and industry), and with its principle of feedback as a participatory mechanism, the Sierra Leone National

Urbanization Plan was much more than a top down governmental policy in the spirit of

James Scott’s “high modernism.” The move from the present “given” to future possibilities is a concern that characterizes governmentality, and is fundamentally different from top- down high-modernist planning. Governmentality’s concern, Foucault explain, is “how to integrate possible future developments within a present plan (…) the town is seen as developing: a number of things, events and elements, will arrive or occur.”511 In contrast to

508 This distinction is purely theoretical. Levi Strauss admits that the boundaries are not so clear at times. And as the discussion earlier shows in the case of Israel, the figure of the engineer drew its potency from acting like the bricoleur.

509 For a note on Foucault’s use of the terms see: Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007 [2004]), 108-9.

510 Ibid, 47. (My emphasis). According to James Scott, this is also the epistemic working horizon of metis, which operates through re-combination of existing, available, components. See Scott, 324.

511 Foucault, 18-9.

174 discipline that

works in an empty, artificial space that is to be completely constructed. Security will rely on a number of material givens (…) [Second] this given will not be reconstructed to arrive at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. It is simply a matter of maximizing the positive elements, for which one provides the best possible circulation, and of minimizing what is risky and inconvenient….512

With the “broad intuitive decisions” – visualized in his maps that seem more like water color sketches – Doudai conformed to the logic of governmentality much more than to the disciplinary apparatuses that focus on details: “by definition, discipline regulates everything.

Discipline allows nothing to escape. Not only does it not allow things to run their course, its principle is that things, the smallest things, must not be abandoned to themselves.”

Contrasting discipline with governmentality, Foucault claims that governmentality “‘lets things happen.’ (…) the basic function of discipline is to prevent everything, even and above all the detail. The function of security is to rely on details that are not valued as good or evil in themselves, that are taken to be necessary, inevitable processes, as natural processes in the broad sense…”513 Accordingly, as in Doudai’s approach, the planner’s challenge is to identify and encourage desirable trends, while minimizing interference and keeping an appearance of a natural flow, inevitable processes.

What gives the Sierra Leone National Urbanization Plan a semblance of natural flow is the construction of the “region” as a necessary intermediary unit between national and urban

512 Ibid, 19.

513 Ibid, ibid.

175 scales. Less artificial than colonial drawn national boundaries, provinces or districts, the plan defined the region mainly by natural resources and population distribution. Unlike plans that focused on prevention, this plan “let things happen” by the maximization of the productive capacities of regions. Constructing them as natural economic units not only created larger and more coherent areas of governance, but also encouraged the cooperation of local chiefs beyond their chiefdoms’ borders. As a territorial unit, the region included villages whose continuing agricultural production assured that the traditional power structure associated with it continued. Similarly to their function under colonial indirect rule, the chiefs could continue to serve as the central government’s local arms but without the threat of losing their traditional hold, their scope of participation and cooperation would extend to the regional level since economically it could become much more viable at the level of the chiefdoms, and consequently at the level of the regions and the state.

The shift of emphasis from the national to the regional scale entailed a shift in the point of view of the population by the planner or policy maker. Doudai’s emphasis on the study and maintenance of the culture of the Sierra Leone people(s), seen as tied to their production capacities and general economic behavior, is reminiscent of the sub-field “human geography” that developed in tandem with regional planning in the US and France.514 As argued by photography historian Paula Amad, the introduction of the human element into the discipline of geography entailed the supplementing of the macro view offered by aerial photography with a more detailed representation at the micro level. As an example of their new co- dependence, she cites famous pilot and writer Antoine Saint-Exupéry (who also piloted Le

514 Jessica Berman, “Modernism’s Possible Geographies,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, eds. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 282.

176 Corbusier over Brazil during the architect’s formative 1928 trip),515 who argued that “the view afforded through flight has ‘transformed [us] into physicists [and] biologists’ who are now ‘able to judge man in cosmic terms, scrutinize him through our portholes as through instruments of the laboratory.’”516 This analogy of an aerial view to a microscope is particularly relevant to Doudai’s plan, where the series of maps and visual analysis of Sierra

Leone’s territory resembles, particularly at its abstracted “water-color”-like sketches, a series of Petri dishes. With its emphasis on gradual introduction of changes (“actions”) as a feedback mechanism back to the plan, and its preference for organic shapes and “natural” processes, the plan - and by extension the lab, which is the country itself - becomes a Petri dish; a template for controlled and continuous rearrangement of elements that allows the planner and policy maker “to see what happens.”

In terms of implementing the plan, nothing much happened, but this had little to do with the plan or administration. Following the submission of the plan in June 1966, together with instructions to the Sierra Leone government on how to apply for a grant from the UN

Special Fund, Doudai remarked in frustration that he doubted the government would do anything about it.517 In a meeting held in November 1966, David Tene, the Israeli Minister of Housing, expressed how very pleased he was with the booklet, despite the fact that its costs doubled Sierra Leone’s expenditure, and therefore came out of the Israeli government’s pocket. He gave orders to distribute and publicize the plan as widely as

515 Paula Amad, “From God’s-eye to Camera-eye: Aeriel Photography’s Post-humanist and Neo-humanist Visions of the World,” History of Photography (2012): 77.

516 Ibid, 85.

517 IPD Board Meeting No. 22, June 23, 1966, ISA, MFA 2899/19; IPD Board Meeting No. 23, November 24, 1966, ISA, MFA 2899/19.

177 possible nationally and internationally. This was a bitter victory for Doudai, who had already submitted a letter of resignation five months earlier, the same month he submitted the plan to the Sierra Leone government. Following the State Comptroller report the previous year, it had been decided that IPD should be terminated due to “its mediocre function” and its failure to raise funds from third parties.518 Similarly to Solel Boneh’s change of mode of operation in 1964 from an Histadrut arm of aid to a purely commercial undertaking, the IPD changed its course to provide Israeli planning services to whomever could pay for it, including projects in Europe and the US, concurrently with the beginning of deterioration of Israel’s relationship with African governments following the 1967 war.519

Co-owned from 1967 by the Israeli government and the Association of Engineers and

Architects in Israel, its function was dramatically reduced to a center of information and coordination of Israeli private professionals’ work abroad.520

This was also a dramatic year in Sierra Leone, where Siaka Stevens’ opposition party All

People’s Congress winning of the election by only a minor margin led to a military coup.

Although Stevens would regain the Prime Minister title the following year, it was not until

April 1971, when he declared Sierra Leone a republic and himself its president, that the government (now authoritative) was stable enough to resume planning operations. As if time has not elapsed and the regime has not changed, the new administration returned to the new

518 For the bitter correspondence between IPD managers and the government see: ISA, MFA 2899/19.

519 Ibid, ibid. This decision was taken at the government level. From 1967, IPD expanded extensively its relationship with American public and private companies. Victor Gruen Associated offered it a partnership, for works outside of Canada and the US, beginning with a project in Bangkok. These negotiations started in October 1967 via USAID and the Israeli embassy in Washington. Israeli embassy in Washington to Jerusalem, Cable 54, October 1967, ISA, MFA 2899/19; Morechai Lador to S. Dror, May 28, 1967, ISA, MFA 2899/19.

520 IPD was reorganized again in June 1970.

178 IPD in August 1971, now with the intention of focusing on a “metropolitan structure plan for Greater Freetown.” While it is unclear whether Mrs. Leonora D. Deigh, the Acting

Permanent Secretary of the Sierra Leone Ministry of Housing and Country Planning, thought of it as a continuation of Doudai’s 1965 plan,521 the principles of that plan continued to live up as evidenced by professional publications of Sierra Leone planners.522 Ironically, it seems that Sierra Leone’s weak governance and political crisis relieved Doudai’s plan from the challenge of implementation. Its provocative – though politically reactionary - proposition remained no more than an inadvertently produced theory, but a radical one at that.523

521 There is no evidence that the new plan was ever drafted. Architect Tommy Leitersdorf who was involved in the 1960s in the planning of Abidjan’s Riviera, and was invited to participate in this project, has no recollection of it. Y. Horowitz to M. Lador, August 22, 1971, ISA, MFA 4380/10.

522 Citing Lakhish as a reference in a 1977 publication, in Mabogunje and Faniran.

523 Retired planners in Sierra Leone still hold IPD in high esteem. Mr. Joseph Mouna, former Town Planning Director at Freetown City Council from 1971-2011, interview by Ayala Levin, Freetown, Sierra Leone, February 20, 2013.

179

Part II: Nigeria

180 3. Planning a Postcolonial Regional University Campus: The University of Ife

What greeted my young mind virtually had me pass out. My eyes were scintillated by the sight of an impressive stretch of well laid lawn garnished with floricultural species carefully arranged and showcasing the beauty that nature has always afforded. My lot was much comparable to the fate of a well mesmerized biblical Queen of Sheba amidst the garnished array of the palaces of King Solomon, the Great. Was I in Nigeria? No I must be elsewhere. I wasn't born with the silver spoon; and for my social phylum, apart from my foundational blissful village life in Igarra, Edo State, had me regularly exposed to the dung hills that in the 1970s littered the streets of my turfs in Yaba, Surulere and indeed other parts of the jungle of a city called Lagos (kudos to Senator Ahmed Tinubu and Governor Raji Fashola for their redemptive initiatives). Benin where I schooled was no better. Despite the impressive modernization initiatives of the then Governor Osaigbovo Ogbemudia, the city despite its international acclaim was largely rural. Irritating ferric red dust choked up attempts at giving the city a facelift. In journeying to Ife, I had also had a laughable view of Ibadan, the city that stripped the late Aare Alasa, Uncle Bola Ige of his chieftaincy, thanks to his caustic tongue. Ibadan at the time had the acclaim - the largest city in West Africa and arguably, South of the Sahara. Being a city set on hills, from some elevation, one needn't look further to understand what chaos poor urban planning could imply. The city flaunted an ugly sea of rusty weather worn roof tops. How could this historic city be dealt this poor showing? What I was seeing reminds me of the nauseating first impression Onitsha. The ancestral home of the late sage, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe , viewed across the Niger from Asaba – was a far cry from the traditional dispersed housing pattern of the Igbos. The introduction to Onitsha was akin to the well familiar Daddy Shokey ville, our ghetto, Ajegunle. It must [be] different Nigerians that planned this Ife. After about a ten minute drive on that beautiful road - the famed Road One, we were to be greeted another alluring scene, Ife's well laid out and kempt Sports Centre on the left hand side. At the terminal of Road one were gigantic architectural master pieces all linked by lush green lawns, décors, walk ways, elevations and subways. I was later to realize that the intimidating architectural array warehoused the famous Oduduwa Hall, the Hezekiah Oluwasanmi library, the Senate Building cum Administrative building and the Humanities faculty.

181 I kept asking my teenage mind: did Nigerians think this place up? Are Nigerians indeed capable of planning, organizing and creating such wonder? Was I indeed in the same country where confusion is a festering norm?524

This lengthy quote, the impressions of a Nigerian student arriving in 1979 for the first time to the Ife University campus (fig. 33), captures the campus’ stark contrast from its surrounding environment with its orderly planning, well-kept lawns, and attractive buildings.

This enclave atmosphere, which has been cultivated since the late 1970s by the university, does not reflect the wishes the university founders had when they first imagined a West

Nigerian regional university. While the university was to exhibit a unique image that would differentiate it from the striking modernity of the neighboring University College Ibadan, an elite institution established in 1948 under British colonial auspices, Ife University campus was intended to represent a post-independence democratic institution that would serve the entire region.

A primary tool in decolonization and development, the university in Africa was only second in importance to the government itself.525 Concurrently with Nigeria’s independence in

October 1960, the government of West Nigeria announced the establishment of its own regional university in addition to the two regional universities that the Ashby committee, formed in 1960 for the specific aim of planning university building in the country,

524 Niyi Egbe, “Memoirs of Times at 50 Year Old Great Ife,” Nigeria Village Square (February 24, 2012), http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/ojukwu/memoirs-of-times-at-50-year-old-great-ife.html (acceded July 17, 2014). (My emphasis).

525 Cornelius de Kiewiet, The Emergent African University: An Interpretation (Washington, DC: Overseas Liaison Committee, American Council on Education, 1971), 3.

182 recommended in its report.526 Emerging out of a regional competition – painted by ethnical rivalry - over the allocation of higher education resources, the University of Ife (renamed

Obafemi Awolowo University) undertaking, carried on for the next twenty years, was to be

West Nigeria’s most ambitious project. Estimated at the capital expenditure of 20 million pounds in the first ten years,527 the university was to be the Western government’s showpiece and continued to be its top priority in the following decades, withstanding radical changes in the local and federal governments.

The continuous planning and construction of the university campus following its original conception and master plan attested to West Nigeria’s politicians’ and educators’ determination and commitment to building the university despite fickle geopolitical alignments, political mongering and corruption. While the decision to establish the university was undertaken under the leadership of Chief Obafemi Awolowo,528 leader of the ruling party Action Group, in 1962 a political crisis in the region brought his incarceration and the dissolution of the party. The rehabilitated Western government resumed the work as soon as the federal military coup of 1966 imposed stability on the region. Despite the Civil

War that broke the following year and continued until the end of the decade, the university construction was carried through without interruption into the 1970s.529 Similarly, it did not

526 Olufemi Omosini and ʾBiodun Adediran, eds., Great Ife: A History of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, 1962-1987 (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 1989), 6-10.

527 Hannan Yavor to the Division of International Aid, November 18, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/12. 528 Chief Obafemi Awolowo was committed to public education even prior to independence, starting free primary education in the region already in the 1950s. Omosini and Adediran, 4.

529 Stephen Adebanji Akintoye, Ten Years of the University of Ife, 1962-1972 (Ile Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press, 1973).

183 halt even after the severing in 1973 of formal diplomatic relations with Israel, whose company Solel Boneh was in charge of most of the undertaking.

While the university planners were highly determined to establish a regional university, they had no specific vision in regards to its program and physical planning. With no prescribed model for a postcolonial African university, the program and master plan unfolded in tandem, as Arieh Sharon, an Israeli prominent Bauhaus graduate architect and planner, started the search for the site and began preliminary planning while the university planners – the first all-Nigerian committee to plan a university530 – deliberated on the university’s character.

In an essay on the campus design, professor Bayo Amole of the Department of Architecture at the Obafemi Awolowo University defined it as a cité universitaire comparable to the

University of Ibadan campus, which was established under British late colonial rule: “Next to the University of Ibadan Campus in Ibadan, the Ile-Ife Campus remains the first to give physical expression to the idea of the university as a city and to attain to significance as a model of the city.”531 Equating the two campuses’ modern urban schemes, Amole failed to acknowledge that the Ife University founders were at pains to distinguish the university, in both architecture and program, from the neighboring University College Ibadan.532 While both university campuses maintained the tension typically existing between university

530 Omosini and Adediran, 11-2.

531 Bayo Amole, “The Cité Universitaire in Ile-Ife: an Architectural Critique,” Architects and Architecture in Nigeria: A Book of Reading in Honour of Professor Ekundayo Adeyinka Adeyemi, ed. Uche Obisike Nkwogu and Ekundayo Adeyinka Adeyemi (Place unknown: Association of Architectural Educators in Nigeria, 2001), 58. 532 Omosini and Adediran, 11-2.

184 campuses’ idealized layout and their neighboring towns,533 their design conceptions differed radically, both in terms of internal organization and in terms of relationship with the adjacent town, and presented distinctly competing approaches to the problem of higher education in a decolonizing society.

This chapter follows the early stages of the planning of the university campus, starting with the choice of site, the search for an alternative model to the Oxbridge collegiate model adopted at University College Ibadan, and the turn to American Land Grant University model as the most applicable for development. The special emphasis on the elevation of the status of agriculture to a field of professionalization, and the accompanying desire to showcase rural high standards of living resulted in a city-village hybrid that drew its inspiration from both kibbutz planning and American rural and suburban universities. While the university adhered to the Israeli planning team until well into the 1980s, and the campus developed in consistency with the original master plan, the conception of the university campus in relation to its surrounding environment was affected by unequal development in the country, to which the university served as a reluctant accomplice, resulting in an ever- expanding enclave. This chapter concludes with the implications of the campus’ design logic and aspirations on its surrounding environs.

The Establishment of a Regional University

The decision to establish a regional university in the Western Region followed a series of higher education reforms initiated by the British colonial government in the 1950s,

533 Starting with planned campuses such as Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia “academic village,” See: Paul Venable Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (New York: Architectural History Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.)

185 culminating with the Ashby Committee on the eve of independence. Recommending the establishment of two regional universities in the East and North as well as a federal university in Lagos, it assumed that the existing University College Ibadan, which was established in 1948 as the first university in the country in the capital of the Western Region, would cater the needs of that region. However, the Western government argued that UCI’s capacity was too limited to cater to the growing educational needs of the region. In 1960, there were close to 3,000 students from Western Nigeria, supported by government scholarships, in the U.K. alone.534 Furthermore, due to its status as a federal university its enrollment rates were equally distributed among students of the three regions,535 and therefore even if it grew it could not assure the sufficient enrollment of students of the

Western Region. Thus the privilege the region enjoyed by having the university located in its capital (alongside other federal educational institutions such as a branch of the Nigerian

College for Arts, Science and Technology in Ibadan, and the Yaba College in federal Lagos) during the late colonial period became a hindrance with the approaching independence.

Protesting against these recommendations, Sanya Dojo Onabamiro, the Western Region’s

Minister of Education representing the region on the committee, submitted a minority report and withdrew from the committee.536 From that moment on, the Western Regional government pursued unilaterally its decision to establish a university in the region that

534 Admitting at best third of the qualified students by the mid 1950s. By the 1960s, this pressure of enrollment became more acute because of the rapid expansion of educational facilities at the secondary level in the Western region. Omosini and Adediran, 4-6.

535 Ibid, 7.

536 Ibid, 9.

186 would cater first, if not exclusively, its students who were predominantly of Yoruba origin.537

By April 1961, when the federal government formally accepted the establishment of the western university, the university planning was already underway.538 Among the actions taken by the Western government was the formation of the University Planning Committee in October 1960,539 followed by the publishing of a White Paper on the university in

November 1960 that announced the search for a suitable site for the university, and the embarking of a delegation on a study-tour of campuses overseas.540

Setting the Wheels in Motion

By the time the decision to establish a regional university in the West took place, Nigersol,

Solel Boneh’s joint company with the government of West Nigeria, had already been in operation for almost two years, waiting for a commission of such magnitude. Although

Britain rejected the Israeli application to open a consular office in Lagos until March 1960, trade relations and technical assistance programs were already underway before the

537 Ibid, 4.

538 Ibid, 10.

539 When the university planning committee was established in October 21, 1960, it comprised of Chief Awolowo, D.S. Onabamiro, S.G. Ikoku, and H.A. Oluwasanmi - all members of the Action Group. By January 1961, the committee expanded to include other interest groups. The committee met four times and took far reaching decisions on the siting, physical development, academic programs and finance. In addition, Premier Chief Akintola set up an unofficial committee of intellectuals, regardless of party affiliation. See ibid 11-2.

540 White Paper on the Establishment of a University in Western Nigeria, NAN PR/D17. According to Omosini and Adediran the White Paper was published in July 1960. See ibid, 10. However, other evidence suggests that it was published in November 1960.

187 consulate opened.541 Israel’s Foreign Ministry placed a great emphasis on establishing relations with the country, and from 1957, when the Eastern and Western Regions became self-governing (the Northern Region postponed it to 1959), initial trade relations were formalized.542 These trade relations were mediated mainly through the Israeli export company Dizengoff West Africa, which was established the same year and opened branches in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.543 In 1957, Chief C.D. Akran, Minister of Development for Nigeria’s Western Region, visited Israel to negotiate trade and technical assistance.544

Chief Akin Deko, Minister of Agriculture and Natural Resources for Western Nigeria, visited the following year.545 Following up on these visits, Solel Boneh personnel and foreign ministry delegates stationed in Accra frequented West Nigeria to discuss the establishment of a joint water and construction company modeled after the Israeli-Ghanaian joint company Ghana National Construction Corporation.546 These negotiations resulted in an agreement on the establishment of Nigersol Construction Company, signed on January 14,

1959, between the Western Region Production Development Board and Solel Boneh, who

541 In lieu of an official representative, and due to the increased activity of negotiations and to oversee the establishment of the company, a foreign ministry representative was stationed in Lagos under-cover as a Dizengoff West Africa employee. See Ehud Avriel to Asia-Africa Division, Foreign Ministry, August 27, 1958, ISA MFA 1951/5. This close relationship would later become a source of embarrassment, as Dizengoff was condemned for operating as “a second embassy”, interfering with diplomacy.

542 The volume of Israel’s trade with British West Africa from 1955 to 1957 reached $3.7 million, and by early 1958 nearly $670,000 of that sum was in the form of commerce with the Western region of Nigeria. Levey, Israel in Africa, 91.

543 Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 4/62, May 2, 1962, LA IV-204-4-536. Solel Boneh held 40 percent of the company shares.

544 Levey, Israel in Africa, 91.

545 Ibid, ibid.

546 Initially, the West Nigerian government was interested in one company for construction and water, to reduce Israeli visibility. Memorandum and Articles of Association, Article RR, September 29, 1959, Ministry of Works, Ibadan.

188 had forty percent holder of the shares.547 By September 1959 eleven Solel Boneh experts were stationed in Ibadan, while two more were on their way, employing 270 local workers.548 By December 1960, just two months after Nigeria celebrated its independence, there were 62 Solel Boneh personnel stationed in branches in Ibadan and Lagos.549

Governmental involvement in the construction market through the Western Region

Production Development Board (later Western Nigeria Development Corporation) was based on what the political scientist Crawford Young has named the “pragmatic socialism” of the late 1950s, in which a nationalist “nurture-capitalism” was combined with state- capitalist and welfare tendencies.550 The 1955-60 Economic Plan of Western Nigeria outlined the following priorities for the Development Corporation:

(a) the undertaking of those projects for which individual initiative and private capital are not forthcoming, i.e. to be complementary to, and not competitive with, private enterprise; (b) the undertaking of those types of enterprise for which the minimum economic unit and, so, the capital requirements are large; and (c) the attraction, so far as possible, of outside capital to these enterprises subject to adequate safeguards.551

In the absence of a strong indigenous private sector, this parastatal sector assumed the role of an entrepreneur, while the government attracted foreign investment with various

547 Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 1/63, June 1, 1963, LA IV-204-4-536.

548 Ehud Avriel to Simkha Golan, November 27, 1958, ISA, MFA 3114/16.

549 Solel Boneh Overseas: End of the Year 1960 Review, LA IV-204-4-536. Compare the number of personnel to: Cyprus: 14; Turkey: 75; Ghana: 45; East Nigeria: 20; Sierra Leone: 17; Burma: 10; Ethiopia: 32; Iran: 45.

550 Crawford Young, Ideology and Development in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 227.

551 Cited in A. Akinsanya, “The Former Western Nigeria Development Corporation: A Framework for Performance Evaluation,” Public Administration and Development 1 (1981): 30.

189 incentives such as tax relief and protective tariffs.552 It is perhaps ironic that it was the

Western Region, alongside federal Lagos, that attracted most of the country’s foreign investment,553 given that the Action Group leader, Obafemi Awolowo, advanced nationalization as part of his opposition to foreign domination of the economy.554 Despite such cries for nationalization, a continuous influx of foreign investment did not necessarily mean new economic subjugation. It seems that any relationship with non-British investors was welcomed as a means of loosening British companies’ grip over the economy, and therefore as a step toward economic independence.

Against British attempts to thwart the Israeli initiative that would have decreased dependence on British contractors,555 the Western Region Government was keen to establish the company before the impending federal elections of 1960. Awolowo desired to boost the region’s economy so that it would bolster his party’s competitiveness against a North-

Eastern coalition.556 This regional competition, however, did not deter Solel Boneh from establishing in November 1959 a parallel joint company with the Eastern Region

Government, the Eastern Nigeria Construction and Furniture Company.557 The booming

552 Eghosa E. Osaghae, The Crippled Giant: Nigeria after Independence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 48-9. In 1965 there were 115 joint ventures of which expatriate interests held controlling shares in 73 firms.

553 In 1964, 62 percent of foreign and state-owned industry was situated in these areas. See Crawford, 229.

554 Osaghae, 49.

555 A. Tzur to Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, December 29, 1958, ISA, MFA 1951/6.

556 Ibid.

557 The Eastern Nigeria Construction and Furniture Company was established in November 59, with 51 percent of the company shares held by the government of East Nigeria, and the remaining 49 by Solel Boneh. Its projects included East Nigeria’s parliament, two hotels, and glass and beer factories. Israeli Embassy in

190 state construction industry that opened to private contracting in 1950 offered a particularly lucrative avenue. From 1950 to 1963, construction costs rose 285 percent while overall prices increased only 36 percent.558 As the Israel foreign ministry official Tzur reported on the eve of 1959, “Just today the newspaper published the figures that English contractor companies’ estimated jobs in Nigeria in 1957 is 157 million pound.”559 At the time of its inception, Nigersol was expecting work for the following five years in the sum of twenty million British Pounds.560 The establishment of a government owned company was therefore an attempt to return to the Western Region Government, now fully Nigerianized, some of the profits, if not the control, of the construction industry in the region.561

Indicative of this state-capitalism entrepreneurship is Nigersol’s Memorandum and Articles of Association of September 1959 that nowhere states that the company was state-owned.

The company’s mission statement was grounded on a purely market-based economy, and the scope of its activity was by no means limited to the Western Region, or even to Nigeria.562

Off-the-record, however, Awolowo’s government assured the Israeli delegates “without blushing” as one Israeli delegate reported, that the company would be given priority over

Nigeria Weekly Report August 3, 1964, ISA, MFA 3569/23. The company was dissolved following the Biafra civil war.

558 Crawford, 226-7.

559 A. Tzur to Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, December 29, 1958, ISA, MFA 1951/6.

560 Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 13/61, November 20, 1961, LA IV-204-4-635.

561 Following the military coup in 1966, Solel Boneh sold its shares to the Nigerian government, and the company bankrupt in 1971. Solel Boneh continued to work on the campus construction as a private company. Solel Boneh Overseas: Review 1973, LA IV-104-38-104.

562 Memorandum and Articles of Association, article RR, September 29, 1959, Ministry of Works, Ibadan. The document states the company’s commitment to expand to various markets, and serve as a marketing agent for various products. There is even very little evidence that the prime activity of the company was construction.

191 other contractors in state projects, and could sometimes even bypass formal tenders.563 In the negotiations over the establishment of a similar company in the Eastern Region, the Israeli representative made it clear that securing a few head-start projects was a precondition for any such undertaking.564

Another aspect in the formation of Nigersol as part of this parastatal sector is the Israeli state low interest loans to the federal government that accompanied it. While the loans were only occasionally directed at the implementation of specific projects, as in the case of the loan for the Sierra Leone parliament, it was generally understood that the majority of the loans would be used for the projects the joint companies were undertaking. Furthermore, even if the

African governments did not condition the establishment of joint companies by the granting of loans, their establishment served as an incentive for such granting to ensure the companies’ success in obtaining and implementing projects. This may help explain the counterintuitive fact that although the Western Region was the first Nigerian government to establish a joint company with Solel Boneh, no instructions regarding the allocation of funds to the region were specified in the loan agreement between Israel and the future federal government, signed in Lagos in July 1960.565 In a draft dating a month earlier, the three million BP loan was to be divided equally between the Northern Region (whose pro Arab-

563 Ehud Avriel to Simkha Golan, November 27, 1958, ISA, MFA 3114/16. This promise was not always kept. The Eastern Company had to pledge the Federation Government not to hand their big projects to “foreign countries,” thus establishing their company as local. By 1964, they shortened their staff by half. See: Israel Embassy in Nigeria, Weekly Review July 28, 1964, ISA MFA 1932/9. As was in the case of the Sierra Leone National Construction Company, this expectation on the part of the Solel Boneh was a point of contention with the Sierra Leonean government. It may be the case that Solel Boneh was expecting the same treatment in Sierra Leone, after this promise had been made to it in West Nigeria.

564 Hannan Yavor to the Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, January 7, 1959, ISA, MFA 3114/12.

565 Aide Memoire, July 13, 1960, ISA, MFA 3142/11.

192 League government Israel has been persistently courting), the Eastern Region, and the federal government. Eventually, the signed agreement specified the allocation of one million

BP to the Eastern joint company for the purpose of completion of the construction of two hotels,566 and the two remaining million was left to the discretion of the federal government, provided that it would use half of it for the purchase of Israeli goods and the other half for development projects. It was assumed that the joint companies would carry out at least part of these projects. As a later correspondence reveals, the Israeli government requested that the Federal Minister of Finance Chief Festus Sam Okoti-Eboh ensure 500,000 BP be allocated to the government of West Nigeria, and be used “exclusively for paying outstanding Bills to the Nigersol Construction Company and the Nigerian Water Resources

Developments Limited.”567

Cold War politics shaped the co-dependence between the establishing of foreign relations, the granting of loans, and the construction industry.568 Following its experience in Ghana, where Solel Boneh had faced fierce competition with three additional construction companies – Russian, Yugoslav and East German – Solel Boneh grew to realize that Israeli financial backing was not enough. As its managers reported, the Soviet Bloc’s competition in Ghana was particularly devastating since Russia was handing out large sums as long-term loans, sometimes even as grants. In response, Solel Boneh requested from Israel a quick

566 One in Enugu and the other in Port Harcourt.

567 Chief Festus Sam Okotie-Eboh to undisclosed (Levi Eshkol?), July 20, 1962, ISA, MFA 3142/11.

568 Between 1960-1962 Nigeria received loans from the UK, the US, the International Bank for Development (the World Bank), and Israel. Israel’s loan was 3 million BP (8.4 million USD), repayable in seven years at ½ percent above UK Bank Rate, which was at the time of the agreement 5%. The commonwealth’s loan was 12 million BP, repayable in 20 years at ¾ per cent above the rate, and the International Bank’s loan was 10 million, repayable in 16 years at ¼ per cent above rate). See Federal Government Dabates (sic), Overseas Loans, April 2 1962, ISA, MFA 3142/11.

193 governmental action to secure funds from other resources abroad, and in the meantime started independent negotiations with West German, French and American financiers.569

Solel Boneh’s independent negotiations extended from private financiers to meddling in

Cold War politics when it attempted to solicit US support directly from the American

Consulate in Haifa. Reporting to Washington on a meeting with Messrs. Levav and Golan of

Solel Boneh Overseas, the American Consular explained that “according to Mr. Levav, the

Israeli contracting firm had sought to set up a joint company of the same kind [as in East

Nigeria, West Nigeria, and Sierra Leone] in Sekou Toure’s Guinea, but by the time they were ready to move the Soviets had made Guinea a more attractive offer.”570 And in case the

Consular did not take the hint, “Messrs Golan and Levav commented that, while their company might not always make substantial profit on some of its jobs, it was felt that they were serving to promote the larger interests not only of their own country but also, they thought, of the free, Western world in general.” It remains unclear whether the gentlemen had the backing of the Israeli foreign ministry when they made such staunch assertions.571

The Western Regional university project, with a capital expenditure estimated at twenty million pounds for the first ten years,572 was by far the largest project Nigersol could have hoped for. With Nigersol readily available, the University Planning Committee did not issue

569 Solel Boneh Overseas: End of the Year 1960 Review, LA IV-204-4-536.

570 Philip A. Mangano, to the Department of State, Washington, Solel Boneh (Overseas Contracting and Harbor Works Branch), April 2, 1960, BL, Confidential US State Department Central Files, Ghana 1960- January 1963.

571 Ibid, ibid.

572 Hannan Yavor to the Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, ISA, MFA 2031/12.

194 a public tender.573 While initially only the preliminary planning was commissioned to Solel

Boneh, it was clear that Nigersol would be the contractor for the bush clearing, road paving, and eventually the buildings. Before this commission, Nigersol’s disparate contracts included civil engineering projects such as road construction, industrial sheds and warehouses.574 It was assumed that once major architectural projects arrived, they would boost the company’s experience and prestige, increase the number of workers, and utilize the machinery on which the company spent over a million BP.575 The first such job Nigersol undertook was the Premier Hotel in Ibadan, to which the Haifa architect Shmuel Rosoff, known in Haifa for designing luxury hotels and villas, was sub-contracted by Solel

Boneh.576 Planning and construction were perceived as linked, and there was no institutional separation between the trades: Solel Boneh employed its own architects that were in charge of planning tasks for the African joint companies. When commissions arrived for more complicated and prestigious projects, Solel Boneh often hired prominent Israeli architects specifically for the job.577 As a result, there was no clear formal division between the designers and the contractors, as both were Solel Boneh employees. When the two were

573 This was not without objections, on the part of the Minister of Labor. Nigersol began clearing the bush based on a non-committal meeting in Jerusalem, held during the Minister of Labor and the Minister of Education’s visit to Israel that concluded their tour in the US, Mexico and Brazil. It seems that the minister of education, Dr. S.D. Onabamiro, wished to get the preparation of the site in motion, while the Minister of Labor was not ready to give up the entire operation to both Nigersol and the Solel Boneh planning team. S.Y. Momoh to S.D. Onabamiro, January 20, 1961, AAAC, ASE.

574 Yeruham to Avriel, September 9, 1959, ISA, MFA 1951/5; Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 13/61, November 20, 1961, LA IV-204-4-536.

575 Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 13/61, November 20, 1961, LA, IV-204-4-635.

576 Rosoff was also commissioned for a hotel in the East Region, where he arrived according to the Daily Express in November 22, 1960.

577 Occasionally there were Solel Boneh “house architects” that were assigned for such jobs, such as Stephen Dunsky, who designed the extension for the Presidential Hotel in East Nigeria and Mordechai Mone, who designed a hotel in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and the Teheran Hilton. Solel Boneh Bulletin No. 44 (1/70), May 1970, LA IV-104-38-104.

195 once divorced, as in the case of the planning of the University of Nigeria of the Eastern

Region, the planning of the university was aborted due to disputes with the local contractors.578 As the diplomat reporting on the fiasco argued, Israel had no interest in getting involved in design projects without also handling their construction.579 The dependence of the first on the latter related to the need to be able to show concrete results, as well as the fact that much of the Israeli loan returned through the purchase of Israeli products by the construction company.

Following the habit of subcontracting external architects for complex and prestigious jobs,

Arieh Sharon was commissioned for the master-plan design of the Ife University campus.

Given his long established professional relations with the Histadrut and Solel Boneh, and the fact that his was the winning proposal for the design of the Technion (Israel Institute of

Technology) new campus Forum, this commission is not surprising. However, since the architectural firm Karmi-Meltzer-Karmi, who designed the Sierra Leone’s parliament, had an equally important commission at the Hebrew University campus at Givat Ram, as did

578 Hannan Yavor to the Division of International Aid, Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, November 28, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/12. The eastern government had already promised construction to local contractors. Another prominent Israeli architect, Alfred Mansfeld, who was concurrently in charge of the design of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, was commissioned for the job. Al Mansfeld’s model accompanied the University of Nigeria publications, but eventually British architect James Cubit received the project. Perhaps in order to compensate him, he was included initially in the team of architects to work on the Ife campus. See: The University of Nigeria: Plan of Work, Official Document No. 1 of 1960, NAN, UNIV 2/6; Al Mansfeld to Nnamdi Azikiwe, December 1, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/12; Anna Teut, Al Mansfeld, an Architect in Israel (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1999), 93-4; M. Spitz to A. Sharon and B. Idelson, September 7, 1961, AAAC, ASE; “University of Nigeria,” Architectural Review 125, no. 745 (February 1959): 132-6.

579 Hannan Yavor to the Division of International Aid, Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, November 28, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/12. On the other hand, planning was perceived as a way to boost the project’s net worth. See: Yaakov Shor, “Hakablanut Hayisraelit Bekhul” (paper given in the Israeli Center for Management on June 27, 1968), LA, IV-204-4-1603.

196 Alfred Mansfeld, who was commissioned to design the East Nigerian University,580 it seems that Solel Boneh strategically did not concentrate projects in the hands of external offices, so that they would remain in control over the receipt of commissions in Africa. The university campus was such a large undertaking that Solel Boneh architects collaborated with Sharon’s office. Following complaints made by the director of the Sierra Leone Public Works

Department regarding the blurred division of labor between construction and design in the operation of the National Construction Company,581 such division was formalized in a separate company in which Solel Boneh’s designers came to be known under the acronym

A.M.Y. (architects, engineers, consultants).

Search for Site

Since Ibadan, the region’s capital was automatically annulled as an option for the site, being the seat of Ibadan University College, the choice of site became subject to an intense rivalry among various interest groups of competing Yoruba towns.582 The economy of towns was

580 Karmi-Meltzer-Karmi designed the administration and auditorium hall at the Hebrew University.

581 Mr. Armstrong complained about “the irregularities” in books, and the “whole method of operation.” He specifically referred to the confusion as to “who produces the plans and where:” The above quotation is disturbing in that it implies National Construction Company and Solel Boneh are joint designers (of part of the scheme?) and National Construction Company are contractors. Who then approves the design? And what distinction is there between Consultants and Contractors in so far as “giving instructions” and “carrying out instructions”? It is not uncommon for Contractors to design works in connection with their contracts but an independent authority approves the design, thus preserving the distinction between the functions of Consultants and Contractors… I cannot help but record the irregularity which shrouds the whole work.” See K.L. Armstrong to the Ministry of Works, February 1, 1961 SLNA, RG/4/1B/186. This complaint was made only four days before AMY appeared in the letterhead correspondence with Sharon. For the same reasons, the Yugoslav construction and planning company Energoproject established UNICO, a separate planning and architecture firm in Zambia in 1965, 167. See Dubravka Sekulic, Three Points of Support: Zoran Bojovic (Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013). AMY partnered with Augustine Egbor, a local architect, to form EGBORAMY in the early 1970s following the government’s pressures of Nigerization.

582 The site was a subject of rivalry as early as in October 1960, See Omosini and Adediran, 10.

197 traditionally based mainly on trade, as well as craft and agriculture.583 Therefore, while the university was seen as a motor for the development of the region in general, its immediate environment benefited from it most promptly, boosting the town’s economy by providing jobs and services and increasing commerce. This was the case with the opening of the

Ibadan University College, which together with the high salaried employees of the college’s

Teaching Hospital and concentration of government ministries, substantially increased purchasing power in the city and stimulated rapid growth in commerce and employment opportunities.584 To preempt a political crisis and relieve the tension, the White Paper issued by the Planning Committee announced that the choice of site would “be guided by the advice of experts who will conduct a survey of all possible sites in various parts of the

Region and submit their recommendation in due course,” according to the following criteria:585

(i) it must have the physical setting appropriate to a University environment. (ii) it must be a place possessing a soil that is conductive to agricultural research; (iii) it must be a point that is of easy access to all parts of the Region; (iv) it must have either already in existence or have facilities for the rapid development of essential services such as water, electricity and tele-communications.586

Serving the role of an impartial expert, Sharon had in fact already arrived in Nigeria shortly before the White Paper meeting took place to conduct a preliminary survey of eight towns,

583 Industrial development did not play a significant role except in Lagos.

584 Akin L. Mabogunje, Urbanization in Nigeria (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1969), 200.

585 White Paper, Article III, 3.

586 Ibid, ibid.

198 based on a list handed to him by the Minister of Education Dr. S. Onobamiro.587 He submitted his report on the first day the White Paper meeting took place, and the above- mentioned criteria presented the committee’s revised version of his conclusions.588

Sharon enlisted five factors he deemed decisive in the selection of the campus: First, the town and district selected should be centrally located within the Western Region and in relation to other regions, and should be easily accessible by roads, railway and a future airport; secondly, the site should be adjacent to a medium-sized town of 100,000 (to be expanded in the future to 150,000) that should be “well-developing and if possible, quite attractive”; thirdly, the size of the site should be about five by five or four by six miles

(12,800 – 15,360 acres) and be located 2-3 miles from the boundary of the town; fourth, in addition to infrastructural amenities of water supply, electricity and telecommunications – already existing or nearing completion in most of the towns in the survey – Sharon added soil conditions “and other fertility factors” as equally decisive in the choice of a site for a university where one of the main research fields would be agriculture;589 the fifth and final factor pertained to the “microphysical conditions” by which Sharon referred specifically to the type of the desired landscape he envisioned as the ideal settings for the university campus. Attached to the reports was a comparative table containing data on location, communications (quality of roads, railway station and airport), geographic factors (altitude

587 Arieh Sharon to Dr. D. S. Onabamiro, November 22, 1960, AAAC, ASE. On his first visit, in addition to the eight towns he was instructed to visit -- Abeokuta, Ado-Ekiti, Akure, Benin City, Ife, Ijebu-Ode, Ondo and Owo -- Sharon visited the town of Oyo as well. When the delegation returned from the overseas tour, Sharon continued the survey that eventually included sixteen towns, among them: Badagry, Ilaro, Ilesha, Ogbomosho, Oshogbo, Shagamu, and Sapele. See Arieh Sharon to Chief S.L. Akintola, February 12, 1961, AAAC, ASE.

588 Sharon submitted his preliminary report on the first day the committee met.

589 This was decided already in October 1960. See Extracts from the 1st Meeting of the Western Region University Planning Committee, October 21, 1960, AAAC, ASE.

199 and climate), existing services and amenities (water supply and electricity, hospitals, schools, shops), population figures and occupation, and general characteristics relating to the local and physical environment.

The White Paper incorporated most of Sharon’s recommendations, but inverted their order when presenting them to the larger public. Sharon’s fifth and most subjective point regarding “the physical setting appropriate to a University environment” moved up to the top of the list of pre-requisites, while the conditions of the soil suitable for agricultural experimentation moved to the prominent second position. As the third condition the White

Paper positioned the centrality of the town in relation to the region, leaving out Sharon’s concern over the centrality of the chosen town in relation to the entire country. These modifications bring to the fore what the West Region government wanted to emphasize, that the university would serve first and foremost the Western Region, rather than the entire country; that the university would be dedicated to agricultural experimentation as one of its flagship research fields; and by moving the least objectively measurable parameter - “the physical settings appropriate to a University environment” – to the forefront, it left the final say to the architect, or at least made the decision making process dim enough so that his professional authority would help to push aside any possible grievances.590

590 As Sharon explained in a private conversation, the decision was political as much as professional, and fell in the hands of a local chief. Harold Rubin and Miriam Keini, interview by Ayala Levin, Jaffa, Israel, May 27, 2013. According to Omosini and Adediran a parcel of land of about 13,850 hectares had been acquired by October 1960: “a large slice of the coveted site, stretching from the town of Ile-Ife to the adjoining settlement of Edunabon was largely ‘crown land’ which the Ooni traditionally had the right of allocating.” Since this would mean that the land was purchased prior to Sharon’s first and second reports as well as before the White Paper committee met, this must be a mistake. See Omosini and Adediran, 13.

200 After returning for another visit and completing an extended survey of sixteen towns,

Sharon chose the town of Ile-Ife.591 More centrally located within the region than the region’s capital Ibadan, Ife was connected to and could still benefit from proximity to

Ibadan’s “first class” 51-mile road. By choosing a site closer to the administrative center of the region, Sharon also preempted the separation of the Midwestern Region that formed its own government in 1963 and reduced the Western Region’s territory by approximately one third to the east (after this separation, Ife was in fact more centrally located within the

Western Region). Ife fulfilled satisfactorily other conditions as well, being a medium sized town of 110,000 and a producer of “chief agricultural produce and expert cocoa [the staple product of the region] and on smaller scale palm kernels and timber.”592 In terms of infrastructure and services, it had electricity and a local water supply and a new water scheme was underway. In addition, it had “many schools, a modern hospital, banks and lively shopping streets.”593 Its geographical settings were relatively optimal, given its forest climate, as Sharon explained in the final report: “Ife lies within the high-forest belt of the

Region, 800 feet above sea-level. The annual rainfall is about 51 inches, the temperature varies between 60ºF - 80ºF and the mean relative humidity is 70%, its climatic conditions could be therefore regarded as favourable.” The relatively pleasant climate went hand in hand with the type of landscape that Sharon had envisioned in his preliminary report: “an attractive slightly undulated wooded countryside, rich in agricultural plantations, which

591 Following the tour, Sharon repeated his previous conclusions with only slight figure modulations of the expected students that rose from 3000 to 3000-5000, the expected growth of the town that rose from 150,000 to 150,000-200,000, and the reduction of the distance between the university and the town from 2-3 miles to 1-2 miles (thus giving up on the idea of urban development around it). Going beyond his previous conclusions, however, this report went on to suggest concrete sites around the town of Ife, including the area on the northwest, which was eventually selected, as the most recommended for the campus site.

592 Arieh Sharon to Chief S.L. Akintola, February 12, 1961, AAAC, ASE.

593 Ibid.

201 form also the economic basis for Ife’s economy and future development.”594 Referring specifically to the wooded site eventually chosen at the north-west of the town that was bounded by a series of hills and a river, Sharon qualified his choice by mentioning that despite this economic potentiality, the area was relatively un-populated, and therefore did not include a massive displacement of farmers.595

To these favorable factors, Sharon added its cultural and historical significance, being considered the cradle of Yoruba civilization and the seat of the Ooni (Yoruba king).

Interestingly, this significance was added after the fact both in terms of criteria, and after the site was chosen,596 suggesting that this new criteria served to rationalize and buttress what was eventually a political decision. Categorized as “third class” under colonial administration, Ife had received fewer services than many “second class” towns (only Lagos was “first class”).597 That there were other strong candidates is evident by the fact the towns of Oyo and Ilesha were singled out as potential candidates by the Planning Committee.598

However, since Ooni Adesoji Aderemi (king of Ife, 1930-1980) had a high standing in the

Action Group hierarchy, and the town served as a stronghold of the ruling party, it was therefore considered more favorable than others. Having such a powerful traditional figure on its side, the university could both benefit from the excessive lands only a figure like him

594 Arieh Sharon to Dr. D. S. Onabamiro, November 22, 1960, AAAC, ASE.

595 Arieh Sharon to Chief S.L. Akintola, February 12, 1961, AAAC, ASE.

596 In hand-written notes adding to the printed report, date unknown.

597 Mabogunje, Urbanization, 115.

598 Omosini and Adediran, 12-3.

202 would have the power to endow,599 as well as the assurance that the town would collaborate fully with the university endeavor.

Rejecting the British Oxbridge Model

Since the university was to be established as an alternative to the federal University College

Ibadan, it had become the prime negative reference point both in terms of curriculum and architecture. As the first University College in Nigeria, University College Ibadan served as a testing ground for university building in Nigeria. Many of the founders of the University of Ife drew their conclusions directly from their intimate experience of its formation.600

Established in 1948 by the British colonial rule as part of educational reform envisioned for the colonies, University College Ibadan joined new University Colleges in the West Indies,

Malaya, Uganda and the Gold Coast (Ghana).601 The two universities in West Africa were to join the existing Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was founded in 1827 and until 1948 was the only university in the entire region to serve the growing demand for education. In addition to Fourah Bay College, Yoruba of Nigeria had been sending their children to Britain since the 1870s, and beginning in the 1930s Nigeria’s other ethnic groups

599 On Southern Nigeria land tenure systems see: Hezekiah A. Oluwasanmi, Agriculture and Nigerian Economic Development (Ibadan; London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 23-31, 37-47.

600 Notable examples include the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Ife Professor Oladele Ajose, the first African professor at the university who acted as the head of the department of preventive and social medicine; Dr. S.O. Biobaku who acted as Registrar in UCI became the Pro-Vice Chancellor (deputy Vice- Chancellor) at the University of Ife. Prof. Ajose was succeeded by Vice Chancellor Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, who was a lecturer at UCI when he was appointed to the University Planning Committee of the western Nigerian university. See J.F. Ade Ajayi and Tekena N. Tamuno, eds., The University of Ibadan, 1948-73: A History of the First Twenty-Five Years (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1973), 40. Omosini and Adediran, 14.

601 Tim Livsey, “’Suitable Lodgings for Students’: Modern Spaces, Colonial Development and Decolonization in Nigeria,” Urban History 41, no. 4 (November 2014): 664-5; Ajayi and Tamuno, 20.

203 had been doing the same thing. Due to shortage of places available after WWI, from the

1920s Nigerians turned to North American universities and colleges as well.602

University College Ibadan succeeded the Yaba Higher College, whose staff, students and equipment it inherited when the college closed in December 1947. Officially opened in the outskirts of Lagos municipality in 1934 but already under operation since 1932, Yaba

Higher College was established mainly to cater to the manpower needs of the colonial governmental departments by training personnel for intermediary civil service posts.603 It was highly criticized for a very limited enrollment directly related to anticipated vacancies, for its vocational emphasis, and for its failure to adhere to any qualifications recognizable outside Nigeria. By setting up what was interpreted as “false standards” this failure was perceived as an attempt to isolate “Nigerian youths from the outside world.”604 To correct this, UCI was set up as an institute of higher learning and included courses in the arts and sciences as well as professional schools to attend Nigeria’s specific needs such as medicine, dentistry, agriculture, forestry, veterinary science, teacher training, and engineering.605 To ensure its high standards, UCI granted degrees under the authority of the University of

London until it achieved academic independence in 1962.606

602 Ajayi and Tamuno, 14-6.

603 Ibid, 24-5. As a testimony of the chiefs’ involvement in promoting and sponsoring education is the fact that they did not sell the lands but rented it for nominal rent for 999 years.

604 Ibid, 13-14. The authors attribute the high rate of failures at the college to the limited available positions in the government departments. See also Livsey, 671.

605 Ajayi and Tamuno, 18-9.

606 Ibid, 29.

204 Yet the problem of standards conflicted with the increasing demands of enrollment and anticipated growth of the university. Ibadan was chosen precisely for its advantage over

Lagos, which is mostly comprised of islands, in its ability to accommodate and sustain the needs of the university’s expected expansion. Ibadan’s population was estimated at 400,000 at that time; it was the fourth largest city in Africa and the largest in tropical Africa, including neighboring Lagos. The local chiefs contributed more than 2,550 acres of land five miles away from the city for the university site.607 Despite these favorable conditions, however, advisors from the International Bank for Development criticized the university’s slow rate of growth, evidenced by the fact that after six years of existence they had no more than 400 students enrolled. While for the American advisors, who envisioned a university capacity of 20,000 students, this number represented nothing short of a failure, for the university’s English founders this number reflected optimally the growth rate they had cautiously envisioned, expecting just “more than 600 students” by the end of the 1948-1957 period.608

By the time of independence, as the historians of Ife University Olufemi Osomoni and

‘Biodun Adediran argue, it became clear that the UCI was inadequate to facilitate the needs of "a country moving towards political sovereignty and with an articulate political elite desirous of decolonizing the public service economy."609 In addition to the safeguarding of standards that inhibited the growth of the university, the planning of the campus along the

607 Another source cites 2982 acres. See Bola Ayeni, Knowing the University of Ibadan Campus (Ibadan, Nigeria: Research Support Services, 2003), 34. Compare to: 700 acres at the University of Nigeria in Enugu (closer to the scale of the University of Baghdad campus, a contemporary project designed by Walter Gropius), and 16,000 acres for Ife University.

608 Ajayi and Tamuno, 28.

609 Osomoni and Adediran, 4.

205 lines of an Oxbridge residential collegiate model presented a major obstacle for expansion.

The necessity for a residential university model in the African context was presented by the

Asquith Committee in 1945: “the unsuitability of off-campus accommodations are necessary to supervise the health of the students closely; the widely different backgrounds of the undergraduates and the need to promote unity; the opportunity offered for broadening their outlook through the sharing of experiences and through extra-curricular activities.”610 The first point must have had a particular appeal to Kenneth Mellanby, who prior to becoming

UCI first principle acted as a Reader in Medical Entomology at the London School of

Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.611 The second point pertains to the idea of the university as a “melting pot” and as “the crucible of a nation.” The third point pertains to the extra- curricular activities governed by the university that would shape the student’s entire social life and life style.612

Following Mellanby’s instructions, the residential university was modeled after the

Oxbridge collegiate model. The initial site plan, designed in 1949 by Maxwell Fry and Jane

Drew, comprised two halls of residence, accommodating 150 students each. The halls had their own courtyard and a dining hall, and each student enjoyed a private study-bedroom and

610 Ajayi and Tamuno, 24.

611 Ibid, 22.

612 Ibid, 28. These points are demonstrated in a film produced by the British Petroleum Company, which shows the arrival of three Nigerian students from Nigeria’s three administrative regions: the Northern, the Western and the Eastern Regions. The modernized campus serves in this film to facilitate the carefree life style, free of ethnic or regional distinction, of the students. This life style was carefully designed by the university facilities, showing a club within the university, which minimizes the need to get out to town. “Three Roads to Tomorrow” (1958), Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/475, accessed October 13, 2014.

206 a verandah.613 For a melting pot, UCI maintained quite high standards, suitable for the formation of a British-educated Nigerian elite.614

As a secluded space of privilege, the UCI continued Oxbridge’s ivory tower elitism, which developed historically from a “town-gown” antagonism and the necessity to segregate the students for their own protection, especially after the Reformation.615 In this respect, the collegiate model was appropriate for Fry and Drew’s tropical architecture approach in conception, if not in terms of climate (as the enclosed courtyard model blocked ventilation), since it was used as a means of physical separation and social seclusion. Although Fry and

Drew’s modernist tropical architecture was formulated in the late colonial period to cater to the needs of both European and African subjects, its discursive origins were rooted in the colonial medical discourse on tropical disease and hygiene.616 Formed mainly as a part of preventive measures taken to assist colonial administrators and soldiers to survive in what they perceived as hostile environments, this discourse encouraged physical separation for fear of physical and moral degeneration of the colonizers.617 The collegiate model, as a university “total environment” dedicated to the molding of young Nigerians as the “heirs of empire,’”618 continued this insulating approach by segregating the students from their own native African environment. Thus if it was the city and its institutions that were seen as a

613 Ajayi and Tamuno, 25.

614 Livsey, 672.

615 Turner, 10.

616 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Anthony D. King, “Toward a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Historical Fragments of Power-Knowledge, Built Environment and Climate in the British Colonial Territories,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32 (2011): 283-300.

617 This subject will be discussed extensively in the following chapter.

618 Ajayi and Tamuno, 38.

207 threat that the students needed to be shielded from in the collegiate model in England, in

Ibadan climate could serve as one of the reasons for insulating the students from the social fabric of the African city.

In November 1952, the new halls of residence, laboratory, classroom blocks and staff houses formally opened at the new site and presented a spectacular image of architectural modernism unrivaled in the area.619 However, criticisms over its expense and restrictive capacity were soon to follow. In 1954, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe argued in the House of

Representatives “what this country sorely needs today is a first-class institution of learning and not a first-class exhibition of streamlined buildings,” and went on to propose instead the use of prefabricated houses for junior and senior staff and the admission of non-residential students.620 Around the same time advisors of the International Bank for Development criticized the UCI accommodations as “luxurious” and suggested pairing students in rooms to double capacity, taking India as a model rather than Oxbridge’s colleges.621 Even the

Inter-University Council of England, which was established in March 1946 after the recommendations of the Asquith Committee to supervise and maintain the colonial universities’ “special relationship” with universities in England,622 criticized the excessive emphasis on halls, and the collegiate model was gradually abandoned until the early 1970s, when the university was no longer exclusively residential.623

619 Ibid, 25; Livsey 665.

620 Ajayi and Tamuno, 27.

621 Ibid, 28.

622 Ibid, 20.

623 Ibid, 24-6.

208

As mentioned above, Sharon addressed the “town-gown” relationship specifically, arguing that the medium size of the town (100,000-150,000 compared to 400,000 in Ibadan) would ensure a mutually beneficial relationship between the town and the university and prevent

“the danger of social sterility and intellectual superiority.”624 With a projected figure of

3,000 students in the first decade compared to “more than 600” in Ibadan,625 the ratio of students and faculty to the town would ensure their interrelationships and preclude any

“ivory tower” elitism. While the projected population of the students and the desirable size of the campus grew following the university committee’s study trip to universities in the US and Latin America, the distance between the campus and the town was reduced from 2-3 miles to 1-2 miles, further emphasizing the campus potential connectivity with the town compared to the five mile distance of UCI from Ibadan. Sharon recommended that the university campus plan should be incorporated into the town plan of Ife, if such existed, so that their growth would be coordinated.626 Finally, it was implied that the university facilities, services and infrastructure, would benefit the living standards of the town.

Demonstrating Rural Living

Starting out with 244 students and about 80 teaching staff in October 1962, by the end of

1978 the university comprised 9,097 students and 1,346 Academic and senior staff.627 Given

624 Arieh Sharon to Dr. D. S. Onabamiro, November 22, 1960, AAAC, ASE.

625 Egboramy, Arieh Sharon and Eldar Sharon, The 1980-85 Master Plan Vol.1; University Brief: A Survey Report, 10, OAU PDA. (From here on: Master Plan 1980-85).

626 Arieh Sharon to Dr. D. S. Onabamiro, November 22, 1960, AAAC, ASE.

627 Master Plan 1980-85, 10. Currently there are more than 20,000 undergraduate students and 6000 graduate students.

209 this growth rate, the enrollment goal of 20,000 students set by the advisors of the

International Bank for Development was not an over-estimation, and may have been based on their experience in India. From 1951, when the US opened a Technical Cooperation

Mission (TCM), to 1972 the International Bank and other organizations were involved in establishing agricultural universities in India based on the American Land Grant

University.628 In 1961, when the United States Agency for International Development

(USAID) took over, it extended this university development program to Nigeria, where it became involved in transferring the American Land Grant University model to the three new regional universities.629

The importation of the Land Grant model to Nigeria was first initiated by Nnamdi Azikiwe, who served as the Premier and consequently the General Governor of the Eastern Region, before he became the President of the country. While Ife was the first Nigerian university to be established on the recommendations of an all-Nigerian committee, the University of

Nigeria in Nsukka, East Nigeria, was the first to introduce a model that radically diverged from UCI to accommodate the post-independence era.630 Unlike Obafemi Awolowo, the first

628 Dr. M. S. Randhawa, “Agricultural Universities in India – Progress and Problems,” The Agricultural Division of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, Washington, November 12, 1968. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNABJ266.pdf (accessed December 28, 2014). See also: Arthur A. Goldsmith, “The Management of Institutional Innovation: Lessons from Transferring the Land Grant Model to India,” Public Administration and Development 8 (1988): 317-330.

629 Agency for International Development, “Three Nigerian Universities and their Role in Agricultural Development,” AID Project Impact Evaluation Report No. 66, Washington, March 1988. In addition to USAID, American involvement included the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the African-American Institute. See Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, The March Forward: An Address to the convocation of the University, July 3, 1971 (Place of publication unknown), 8; Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, Address by the Vice-Chancellor Professor H.A. Oluwasanmi at the University of Ife Graduation Ceremony, 1969 (Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife; Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1969), 6.

630 However, similarly to UCI, the University of London and Michigan State University conferred its degrees. Most of the faculty was foreign. According to Israeli Foreign Ministry correspondence, the university

210 Premier of the Western Region, who was educated in Nigeria and England and therefore was not familiar first hand with the American university system, Nnamdi Azikiwe had received his degrees from Lincoln College and the University of Pennsylvania, and had already in the late 1930s and 1940s organized sponsorship programs from American academes for the education of Nigerian students.631 Following the Eastern Region initiative to establish a regional university, advisors from Exeter University in England and Michigan State

University in the US arrived in East Nigeria as early as 1957, and their recommendations set a precedent that the West Nigerians could follow.632 In their report, they stated that it was

Azikiwe’s desire that the University of East Nigeria be fashioned after the American Land

Grant University model.633 The team suggested the establishment of a Provisional Council and a visit to universities in England and the United States.634

The Western Region White Paper followed these recommendations, but in addition to visiting the University of Oxford in England, and the universities Yale, Harvard, and M.I.T., which the committee had already visited in a prior visit to the US, it added to its study tour

requested Israeli faculty since they did not want all staff to be of western powers, but also wanted to limit Indian personnel. See The University of Nigeria: Plan of Work, Official Document No. 1 of 1960, NAN, UNIV 2/6; Gideon Yarden to the Division of International Cooperation, the Foreign Ministry, July 30, 1962, ISA, MFA 1912/1.

631 Ajayi and Tamuno, 16.

632 British involvement was mediated through the Inter-University Council of England, established in March 1946 following the recommendations of the Asquith Commission. The American involvement was mediated through the International Co-operation Administration of the United States, which was incorporated into USAID in 1961. See Ajayi and Tamuno, 20. The team of advisors included: J.W. Cook, Vice Chancellor of the University of Exeter, John A. Hannah President, Michigan State University, and Glen L. Taggart, Dean, International Programmes, Michigan State University. University of Nigeria: Eastern Region Official Document No. 4 of 1958, NAN RG/C16.

633 University of Nigeria, Eastern Region Official Document No. 4 of 1958, NAN RG/C16.

634 Ibid, 4-5.

211 universities in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro (initially the plan also included Caracas).635 It is unclear what the committee’s impetus was to visit Latin American universities, and it is possible the decision was taken following the advice of the Harvard Architecture Dean Jose

Luis Sert, whom they had met on that preliminary tour.636 This initiative certainly did not come from Sharon, whose first reaction was to look into contemporary university planning in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.637 The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the

Technion in Haifa – both of which Sharon had a hand in designing – were added to the list of the universities visited, albeit not as part of the official itinerary.638 Two members of the

Nigerian delegation arrived in Israel at the end of the tour primarily to discuss the construction and financing arrangements, and Sharon used this opportunity to show them the newly built campuses.639

In terms of curriculum, the planning committee showed a clear preference for the American university model over the European one. Comparing the two, the Akintola Committee agreed that the latter “produces a ‘scholar’ with ‘specialized knowledge’ (…) and caters for

635 White Paper on the Establishment of a University in Western Nigeria, article V, NAN PR/D17. The delegation included Dr. Onabamiro, Dr. Biobaku, Dr. Oluwasanmi, Dr. V.A. Oyenuga, Mr. kesington Mommoth, Mr. S.G. Ikoku and G.N.I. Enobakhare. In addition to Sharon, Mr. Babatunde Sobowale, an architect of the Regional Ministry of Works and Transport, joined the team. Western Nigeria University Project: Itinerary for Overseas Team, November-December, 1960, AAAC, ASE. See also Akintoye, 5.

636 Schedule: Nigerian Study Commission, November 3, 1960, AAAC, ASE.

637 See Arieh Sharon correspondence with Zvi Cohen, July-September, 1960, AAAC, ASE; Wera Meyer- Waldeck to Arieh Sharon, July 4, 1960, AAAC, ASE.

638 At a certain point it was also suggested to cancel the trip to Israel but the Israeli embassy pressured against that. Hannan Yavor to the Division of International Aid, the Foreign Ministry, November 18, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/12.

639 On a possible discrepancy between Sharon and the delegation’s impressions, see Ayala Levin, "Exporting Architectural National Expertise: Arieh Sharon’s Ile-Ife University Campus in West Nigeria (1962-1976)," in Nationalism and Architecture, eds. Raymond Quek and Darren Deane (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 58-9.

212 only a small section of the population; and the American model which had as its goal

“breadth and balance in scholarship … makes general education an integral part of

University curriculum… provides for a much higher percentage of the population …. [and] have managed to combine quality with quantity.”640 Envisioning a “radical re-orientation of the programme (considered pro-British) to make education directly relevant to the needs of the region and to rapidly Nigerianize the Public Service,”641 the committee had a non-elitist institution in mind, to which the North American Land Grant University, or its Latin

American Reformed Universities counterpart, could serve as a model. Both of these democratized models emphasized public access to education, applied research, and an extension to community as formulated by the tripartite mission of teaching, research, and extension.642 The goal of the new university was “to produce graduates who will be able to adjust themselves to life in the communities they may be called upon to serve and not reproduce an elite which is divorced from the rest of the community.”643 It was decided that in order “[T]o quicken the rate of preparing students for degrees, the existing system should be supplemented with evening classes, sandwich and correspondence courses; as well as in- service training programs.”644 Furthermore, against the emphasis in British education on the training of civil servants, the committee aspired for a ratio of 65 percent of students’

640 Omosini and Adediran, 13.

641 Ibid, 5.

642 For Latin American Reformed Universities see Rodrigo Arocena and Judith Sutz, “Latin American Universities: From an Original Revolution to an Uncertain Transition,” Higher Education 50 (2005): 575. 643 Omosini and Adediran, 14. See also Hezekia Oluwasanmi, “The Preservation of Intellectual Freedom and Cultural Integrity,” (paper presented at the symposium “The Role of the University in a Post-Colonial World” at Duke University Center for International Studies, Durham, NC, 1975).

644 Ibid, 14.

213 enrollment in sciences versus 35 percent in the humanities.645 At the first meeting of the

Western Region university planning committee it was decided that the faculties of agriculture, arts (humanities, including education in the beginning), science (including pharmacy), engineering, and social science would be set up in the first five years, followed by the faculties of medicine, veterinary science, dental surgery, and law. In addition, an extension of the faculty of engineering was to include architecture, town planning, quantity surveying, and estate management.646

Recognizing the opportunity for extensive involvement in the concurrent setting up of the three regional universities, USAID launched what was then its largest US assistance program in Africa.647 This assistance took the shape of partnering a major American Land

Grant University with each regional university: Kansas State University was partnered with

Ahmadu Bello University; Michigan State University with the University of Nigeria at

Nsukka; and the University of Wisconsin with the University of Ife.648 While they differed

645 Ibid, 13.

646 Extracts from the 1st meeting of the Western Region University Planning Committee, October 21, 1960, AAAC, ASE. It was decided to start in the first five years with faculties of agriculture, arts, science, engineering and social science. To these would be added the faculties of medicine, veterinary science, dental surgery and law in the consequent five-year period. The Akintola committee also added professional courses such as pharmacy, architecture, town planning, quantity surveying and estate management. According to Omosini and Adediran, “the diversity of courses reflected the intention of government to produce the much- needed personnel in the Science-related professions. The bias for the Sciences was further buttressed by the committee’s recommendation that the ratio of intake should be 65:35 at the expense of the humanities.” Omosini and Adediran, 13.

647 Three Nigeria Universities and their Role in Agricultural Development, AID Project Impact Evaluation Report No. 66, 4.

648 Ibid, 4-6. Cooperation between Michigan State University and the University of Nigeria was abruptly terminated after only 6 to 7 years because of the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970). Before that, Michigan State University had assisted in the founding and launching of the entire university. The Kansas State University cooperation project with Ahmadu Bello University lasted from 1962 to 1978 and involved the establishment of the faculties of agriculture and veterinary medicine as well as several off-campus agricultural training schools.

214 in their scope of involvement with the establishment of the universities, the main impetus behind them was the establishment of agriculture research institutions. The Land Grant

American university model was especially attractive to Nigerian regional governments since it was oriented toward the needs and concerns of the local community, often by establishing off campus extension units. From the USAID perspective, its emphasis on agricultural and technical training made it the most viable model for higher education in a period when

“human resources” were considered even more determinant for economic and social development than natural ones.649

Yet although the emphasis was on developing “human resources,” American aid focused on agriculture and therefore depended on access to land. Through the professionalization of farming, university-level applied research, and extension service to the surrounding population, the university system presented the most viable channel for American intervention in Nigeria’s largest production and export sector before the 1970s oil boom.

While the Western and Eastern Regional governments did manage to acquire land for rural resettlement projects,650 the customary land tenure system made it difficult to acquire the large tracts of land necessary for agricultural experimentation. Since the land was traditionally the property of the community and was subdivided between families and

Similarly, the University of Wisconsin was involved from 1962 to 1975 in the establishment of Ife University faculty of agriculture.

649 This subject will be discussed extensively in the following chapter.

650 As for example for farm settlements in east and west Nigeria operated by Israeli personnel. For a study of one such farm in East Nigeria see Eugene Nwana, “Ohaji Farm Settlement: A Flash in the Pan,” in Foreign Experts and Unsustainable Development: Transferring Israeli Technology to Zambia, Nigeria and Nepal, eds. Moshe Schwartz and A. Paul Hare (Aldershot, England; Brookfield VT, 2000), 109-128.

215 individuals who owned it by cultivation, it could not be bought or sold.651 The system was therefore particularly challenging for acquisition of land since it necessitated a special granting from the local chief. The local chiefs’ cooperation with the regional government gave the American aid experts direct access to large tracts of university farmland.652 Of the

13,500 acre site that Oladele Ajose, the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Ife, managed to acquire from the Action Group supporter Ooni of Ife,653 3,000 acres were allocated for the experimental use of the Faculty of Agriculture, compared to 500 in Ibadan.

Their use consisted of a farm center, swine research unit, poultry research unit and green house, a nursery, cropping systems, and research units for beef, sheep, and goats’ dairy and turkeys.654

Together with the assumed benefits of the modernization of agriculture, the professionalization of agriculture within the context of university education was pertinent in a society in which modernization, high standards of living, and social status were associated exclusively with the city.655 In his 1971 address to the university, Vice Chancellor and agriculturalist Hezekiel Oluwasanmi explained that the problem of the urban migration of educated young people was that they left rural areas in the hands of non-Nigerians who did not understand Nigerian rural culture. This was, Oluwasanmi stressed, “our chance of

651 Oluwasanmi, Agriculture, 23-31.

652 As in the case of the local chiefs’ cooperation with British administration in the establishment of UCI. See Livsey, 676-7.

653 The Ooni of Ife, Sir Titus Martins Adesoji Tadeniawo Aderemi I (1889-1980), also served as the governor of the Western Region in 1960-1967. Following the limited capacity of UCI, the Vice Chancellor insisted on purchasing a large expense of land. Omosini and Adediran, 15.

654 “Ife – Permanent Site of the University,” Nigerian Daily Sketch, February 8, 1967, 7.

655 Larkin, 21.

216 effecting a rapid but orderly social change.”656 Akintola Agboola of the Faculty of

Agriculture at the university complained in 1967 that school “graduates from any level regard farmers as those at the bottom of the economic ladder.”657 Due to the British colonial education, educated sons of farmers did not return to their families’ farms after graduation because they associated farming with backwardness and illiteracy.658 To remedy this problem, he argued, in addition to adult education of practicing farmers, it was necessary to create incentives for these educated young men, who were essential for agricultural reform as they “will be easier to reach than the old illiterate farmers.”659

The status of the farmer and rural living conditions needed to be elevated to present a desirable alternative to the lure of the city and clerical jobs. On top of providing land for experimentation, the regional university campus served as the ideal setting to “demonstrate” modern rural living.660 Just as the farm acted as a demonstration farm for nearby farmers,661 so did the residential quarters of the university staff, dispersed in the bucolic landscape between the Agriculture Faculty and the University Farm, demonstrate high quality living in

656 Hezekiah, The March Forward, 11.

657 Akinola Agboola, “Thought on Nigerian Agriculture,” Nigerian Daily Sketch, March 18, 1967, 5.

658 According to Agboola, “There is a great psychological effect. Pupils always think that only important subjects are taught in schools and since farming is not taught in school, therefore, it is not important.” Ibid, ibid.

659 Historian Jeremiah I. Dibua cites the preference for educated farmers in Israeli farm settlements in West Nigeria as one of the causes for their failure. Dibua, 182-3. It should be noted that Israeli experts preferred educated settlers not only for reasons of technical literacy, as explained by Agboola, but also for “ideological literacy.”

660 Architecture rendered visible the benefits of modernized agriculture. See for example how rural experiment stations and model villages in the Philippines became a site of the “green revolution” spectacle. In Nick Cullather, “Miracles of Modernization: The Green Revolution and the Apotheosis of Technology,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 2 (April 2004): 227-254.

661 Master Plan 1980-85, 80-1.

217 the rural area. For those who did not frequent the campus, a photograph of the largest housing type of the 130 Senior Staff housing units (figs. 38-40) appeared in the newspaper.662 In its outlook, it was no less comfortable than the houses on Bodija Estate, the first planned housing estate in Ibadan, built in the early 1960s and modeled after colonial residential districts specifically reserved for Europeans.663 The Bodija Estate, in turn, served as a model for the senior staff housing of the neighboring University College Ibadan, and probably also for the University of Ife, whose faculty still resided in Ibadan until the relocation to the Ife site in 1967 after the first buildings were completed.664 Like the hierarchy of housing types which the Bodija estate offered in order to attract both high and middle-income households665 -- and belonged to the implementation of a modern class system corresponding to a modern division of labor -- the housing on campus was to serve staff in addition to senior and junior faculty. This was meant to prevent the “villagization” of the campus, that is, the squatting of workers and displaced villagers on campus grounds.666

On top of providing housing for faculty, staff, and students, the university needed to supplement – and even supplant – the services that existed in the city in order to sustain the campus’ high standards of living and working. Sharon’s evaluation of the existing services’ infrastructure in his surveys proved too optimistic, as it did not take into account the internal political crisis that would halt the development of the region and the campus construction

662 “A Young Institution with a Bright Future,” Nigerian Daily Sketch, February 8, 1967, 9.

663 Mabogunje, Urbanization in Nigeria, 232-3.

664 Ibid, 233.

665 Ibid, ibid. The Bodija estate was supposed to attract different incomes but failed to attract low-income classes.

666 Master Plan 1980-85, 45.

218 from 1962 to 1966 until the new military government stabilized the region. When Vice

Chancellor Hezekiel Oluwasanmi (who succeeded Ajose) first arrived at the site to inspect it before the university’s planned relocation from its temporary facilities in Ibadan, he found no telecommunication infrastructure in the area.667 In addition, the university needed to construct a dam to supplement water supply, and to install diesel emergency generators for uninterrupted electricity service. It also installed a sewage treatment and disposal plant.668

Furthermore, it catered to the needs of the faculty and staff by establishing schools for their children. It goes without saying that these schools presented a much higher standard of education than the public schools in Ife.669 From this perspective, the Ife University campus replicated the idea of the “Reservation,” as the residential quarters designed for the

European population came to be called during colonial times. The adjacent small houses for the “houseboys” that accompanied faculty housing further enhance this impression. By the beginning of the 1980s, the architects in charge of the updated master plan had already abandoned the language of mutual cooperation with the town of Ife, arguing that, “located in a rural area, the University must develop self-sufficiency in terms of services, housing, recreation, schools and shopping and in terms of infrastructural capabilities such as electricity, water, sewage, disposal and treatment, communications and transportation.”670

667 Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, The Challenge of the Technological Gap: Being a text from an Address of the Vice Chancellor to the Convocation of the University of Ife, October 10, 1970 (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife, 1970), 1.

668 Master Plan 1980-85, 48-9.

669 It is unclear whether these schools were open to the public of Ife. Since this is not mentioned in the list of the university’s contribution to the town, it can be assumed that the schools were limited strictly to children of university employees. See ibid, 46.

670 Ibid, 21.

219 The problem of image the University of Ife was facing did not only regard the status of farming as a profession and the betterment of living standards in a rural environment, but also the association of social mobility, cultural capital, and urbanity strictly with the city.

The challenge was not only to attract sons of farmers back to the farm, but also to attract

Nigerian professors, then a rare commodity and subject to competition from other new universities, to a rural setting.671 In the Western Region, the competition was particularly with UCI (renamed in 1962 the University of Ibadan) and the University of Lagos, established in 1962. Despite the fact that Ife was only 51 miles (82 kilometers) away, even the existing faculty in Ibadan were reluctant to move there when the Ife campus began its operation.672 In his reasons for choosing the site, Sharon mentioned the cultural and historical value of the Museum of Ife, established in 1954 and housing Ife’s antiquities.

Although Ife was a center of traditional craftwork, it did not have the vibrant contemporary artistic culture that existed in Oshogbo and to a much larger extent in Ibadan.673 While

Sharon acknowledged Ibadan as the university’s nearest metropolitan center, he envisioned

Ife as a cultural center in its own right which would be revived by the activities of the university. The university founders shared this vision, as one of the tasks of the University

Town and Gown Committee was to coordinate the operation of the Ori Olokun Cultural

Center, which housed the university theatre company in town. However, by the end of the

1970s most of the cultural activity organized by the university relocated to campus grounds, as it offered better facilities in the newly built Institute of African Studies (designed by Fry,

671 Omosini and Adediran, 15.

672 Imevbore mentions specifically white staff. A.M.A. Imevbore, Science and Spirituality: The Autobiography of an African Scientist (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Christ Apostolic Church, 2005), 14.

673 Ulli Beier, “A Moment of Hope: Cultural Developments in Nigeria before the First Military Coup,” in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2001), 47-8.

220 Drew and Atkinson) and Oduduwa Hall (designed by Harold Rubin for Sharon).674 As a result, while students and faculty “went to town” in Ibadan, perhaps despite the administrators’ wishes, at Ife, the town came to campus.675

The importance given to culture and agriculture as two equal components is reflected in the early designs of the campus, which are based on a basic separation between the academic core and the Faculty of Agriculture.676 Sharon, who had no experience in designing a university campus that included a large agriculture faculty, approached the Faculty of

Agriculture of the Hebrew University to consult on agricultural campus planning. Although also developed on the basis of the American Land Grant University model, this campus is located in Rehovot and therefore does not comprise part of the Hebrew University’s main campuses in Jerusalem.677 As a very early plan from June 1961 shows, there is no designation of faculty buildings for agriculture – only vacant land on the other side of the eastern road from the academic core. From October 1961, there is a designation of

Agriculture Faculty buildings with adjacent workshops, north of the Humanities Faculty, separated by a road from the academic core. A plan of June 1962 fixed the Agriculture

Faculty northeast to the academic core, further separating them to create an architectural and programmatic distinction (fig. 37).

674 Master Plan, 45.

675 L.B.N. Ogbogbo, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Ibadan, interview by Ayala Levin, Ibadam, Nigeria, January 14, 2013.

676 This principle was kept throughout all stages of planning, even when the siting was different.

677 For the history of the faculty of agriculture see Shaul Katz and Joseph Ben-David, “Scientific Research and Agricultural Innovation in Israel,” Minerva 13, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 152-181; Ilan S. Troen, “Higher Education in Israel: An Historical Perspective,” Higher Education 23, no. 1 (Jan. 1992): 45-63.

221 The evolution of the plan demonstrates that in the absence of an appropriate university model that Sharon already knew from Israel, he resorted to the basics of kibbutz planning, which he was well familiar with first as a founder of a kibbutz and later as a planner for the

Kibbutz Artzi Movement. The Jewish collective settlement began as an agricultural community with residences and farms at either end of a rectangle courtyard that served as a common yard.678 With the growth of the kibbutz in the 1940s, its basic scheme comprised a division of social (residential and educational) and agricultural (later also industry) zones, with a green belt to separate the two, and a central cultural and social core (fig. 34).679

Imagined as a city-village hybrid, it rejected both a city’s alienation and pollution and the abjectness of rural life many of kibbutz founders had experienced in East Europe. As a form of a “new village” it also rejected early kibbutz idyllic image of rural life or the Soviet kolkhoz.680 Since ideological commitment was pertinent to the survival of the kibbutz collectivist principles, education and the cultivation of intellectual and cultural life was perceived of prime importance. Therefore, distinct from any other forms of rural settlements, the kibbutz center often comprised cultural buildings with institutions such as museums and performance halls that surrounded the central lawn.681 Addressing this kernel of kibbutz public life, Sharon writes,

678 Bracha Chyutin and Michael Chyutin, Adrikhalut ha-Chevra ha-Utopit: Kibbutz ve-Moshav (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2010), 100; Galia Bar Or, “The Initial Phases: A Test Case,” in Kibbutz: Architecture Without Precedents; Israeli pavilion, 12th International Architecture Exhibition, The Venice Biennial, eds. Galia Bar Or and Yuval Yaski (Tel Aviv: Top Print, 2010), 20.

679 Chyutin and Chyutin, 114-5.

680 Bar Or, 21.

681 Ibid, 26-7, 32.

222 The main planning problem in kibbutzim, as in old and new towns, was – and still is – how to create an architecturally attractive, social and cultural centre. How can the building elements of the dining-hall, the club-houses, the lawn and gardens, be combined into one architectural entity? How can a balanced space relationship between the strong cubes of buildings, the tall trees, and the open spaces and lawns be created? There is a tendency nowadays in many prosperous kibbutzim to concentrate all the central activities in one large structure, containing dining-hall, plus all other rooms or halls used for administrative, cultural and entertainment activities. I believe, however, in the clear and simple solution of a central lawn-piazza, surrounded by trees and pergolas, leading to the various public buildings, consisting of dining hall, administration, club and reading rooms. From this central area, all the other building zones would radiate centripetally: the residential and children’s quarters, the farm buildings and the small, organic children’s society.682

Substitute children with students, the dining-hall with a library, and the club-houses with

Oduduwa Hall, and you have a description of Sharon’s vision for the Ife campus. Based on pedestrian-vehicular separation and designed for a growing community that would preserve its original close-knit character, Sharon saw in the kibbutz an appropriate model for a university campus that promoted modern rural living and the marriage of culture and education with agriculture.

Campus: From Village-Town to Village-Region

The importation of the kibbutz model, however, did not entail the transfer of the collective ideals that guided kibbutz founders. Although there was some pride in using a Histadrut contractor, as reflected in a 1973 publication on the university,683 and perhaps in Sharon’s

682 Arieh Sharon, Kibbutz +Bauhaus: An Architect's Way in a New Land (Stuttgart: Kramer Verlag, 1976), 63.

683 Akintoye, 12.

223 kibbutz background, mentioned in Bayo Amole’s retrospective account,684 there is no indication in either Sharon’s or the university’s publications and correspondence that any of them had socialist ambitions for the campus. The applicability of the kibbutz model to the campus simply derived from the fact that these two city-village hybrids shared common origins in enlightenment and anarchist planning traditions.685 Developed in North America, the university campus was often situated in the countryside to allow for spacious expansion and the salubrious effect of nature away from the unhealthy and corrupt effect of cities on young students’ bodies and minds.686 This tradition, which began in colonial colleges, was perfected into a planning paradigm with Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia

“academic village,” and later Frederick Law Olmsted’s plans for agrarian or suburban Land

Grant Universities such as the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and the University of

California in Berkeley respectively.687 Sharon was well aware of the interchangeability of kibbutz and campus planning models when he planned the boarding school in Kibbutz Beit

Alpha following the American campus tradition, with a central three-sided quadrangle from which the university expanded horizontally around symmetrical courtyards (fig. 35).

Sharon’s plan for Ife was much looser in character and retained the three-sided open courtyard logic only in the central piazza of the academic core (fig. 36). Even then, its loose grid was much more controlled than Olmsted’s campus plans and even rigid at times, as commented by the Wisconsin landscaping team that arrived in Ife in 1966 as USAID

684 Amole, 59-60. Amole draws from the pathos expressed in Bruno Zevi’s introduction to Sharon’s monograph Kibbutz and Bauhaus. For a discussion on Zevi’s forward see Levin, “Exporting Architectural National Expertise,” 54-5.

685 See Turner; Chyutin and Chyutin, 1-49; Bar Or mentions anarchist Peter Kropotkin as a direct influence on some of the leaders of the kibbutz movement.

686 Turner, 4.

687 Turner, 141-2, 145.

224 consultants.688 The team also criticized the vast open space and the monumental character of the buildings in the plaza, suggesting instead a traditional four-sided quadrangle with a domed structure to serve as its focal point.689 The plan achieved its most picturesque character in the loose grouping of the single or double detached faculty houses discussed above. This loose grouping of houses with no fences was reminiscent of kibbutz shared property principles. The houses retained their privacy through the lush vegetation between them, and some also had screened patios, since as Sharon had learned, even in the kibbutz people needed a sense of privacy.690 Yet the cars parked in front of the houses and the distance between them situated these houses in an individualist consumerist society rather in the kibbutz collective.691 Thus in addition to the European Reservation colonial model mentioned earlier, the faculty housing conflated the planning traditions of the kibbutz with the American campus.

A self-sufficient island of suburban living conditions (excluding private ownership, as the houses were offered for subsidized rent by the university), the campus brought to mind contemporary foreign resource-extractive enclaves in Africa.692 Similarly to these transnational suburban gated-communities, the campus served as a governmental civil servants’ enclave. However, unlike the foreign extractive contemporary version of

688 Bernard J. Niemann Jr. and William J. Tishler, University of Ife Physical Development Plan, Ife, Nigeria (Madison, Wis.: Dept. of Landscape Architecture, School of Natural Resources, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin, 1969), 78.

689 Following the tradition of a domed building as focal point in American campuses. See for example, University of Virginia, Columbia University, Union College. However, since the library construction had already began, the team returned to the original piazza design in the revisions for their proposed plan. 690 Sharon, Kibbutz+Bauhaus, 63.

691 Cars are shared in a kibbutz, and the access paths to residential areas are mainly pedestrian. 692 See: Appel, 439-465; Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: The New Press, 2007).

225 “company towns” who paid lip service to the surrounding communities in the form of defunct infrastructure and white elephants,693 the university’s ambitions to serve the external community in cooperation with the town eventually resulted in supplanting the latter for its failure to develop in tandem with the university.694

In addition to centering the cultural activities of the town on campus, the 1970s saw the establishment of a commercial farm on campus grounds, initially as an arm of the Faculty of

Agriculture and later in partnership with the private sector. By 1980, however, this commercial farm was run solely by private parties who distributed its produce to the university and additional customers in a selling booth located west of the student residential areas.695 In 1979, 50 tons of maize, vegetables, plantain and eggs were sold.696 This, in turn, threatened to strip the Yoruba town of its traditional market role and its main source of income. With its favorable road connections to nearby towns, the university commercial farm could bypass Ife altogether.697 The self-sufficiency of the campus therefore developed into an inverted relationship in which the university’s original ambition of extending to the surrounding community instead took place almost exclusively on campus grounds. The acquisition of further 6,256.2 hectares of land by the end of the 1970s continued this trend:

693 Appel, 396-465.

694 This is implied in the Master Plan 1980-85. See especially the discussion on the town-gown cooperation, pages 45-6.

695 Ibid, 20.

696 Ibid, 21.

697 Ibid, 22.

226 This acquisition is very important to the University and the region. (…) for attracting high- quality students, academic and professionals, the University has to create outlets for the application of acquired skills and the means of livelihood for supporting these people in the area. The new lands offer an opportunity for doing this with development in agriculture, science and industry, forestry and paper mills, and archeology. In addition to serving the University, these new developments will supply local manpower and may well serve as a model for other developments in the region. The university, as a repository of great planning, management, training and research capabilities, will become the centre of regional planned development.698

Facing the lack of sufficient jobs for its graduates, the university’s role was now extended to the creation of such jobs. In his 1971 address, Vice Chancellor Oluwasanmi deplored the flight of university graduates, who “loathed the rural areas,” to the city.699 When it came to the agriculturalists, his criticism was not only directed towards the students. The problem was the lack of employment opportunities when they left the university: “out of the 85

Agriculture graduates that this University turned out between 1966 and 1970, 25 could find nothing else but schoolroom jobs in this country (…) our Governments must re-examine their priorities for agricultural development in a bold and imaginative manner.”700 The Vice

Chancellor’s appeal was to the government: “it is only through such cooperation that the

State and the Nation can receive the maximum benefit from their investment in this

University.”701 With the purchase of land, the university was therefore not only bypassing the town, but also the state. Since the latter two failed to develop in tandem with the university and to provide adequate jobs for its students, the university would take over and

698 Ibid, 21. (My emphasis).

699 Oluwasanmi, The March Forward, 10.

700 Ibid, 12.

701 ibid, ibid.

227 continue to expand as a privileged site where development and planning could be managed and controlled almost autonomously from the state. It would eventually become the region’s epicenter as the prime producer, marketer, and distributer of agriculture, as well as the main human resources developer and employer. As an ever-extending unit, the city-village hybrid changed its scale to a city-region hybrid, and eventually, following this logic, could become an autonomous city-state.

This undermining of the town of Ife, or the entire Yoruba urban system, resonates with the antagonistic position the kibbutzim held in the planning of regions such as Lakhish.

Similarly to English universities’ town-gown antagonism, the kibbutzim enclosed and alienated themselves socially and economically from the towns that were supposed to act as regional centers. This antagonism ended up in an elitism and exclusion that the process of kibbutzim’s privatization starting in the 1980s only enhanced.702

To conclude, in appearance and function, the campus presented a complete alternative to life in the town of Ife as well as to other Yoruba towns and villages. In the report on its involvement in the three regional campuses, USAID regarded the university of Ife primarily in regard to its architectural contrast from its surroundings: “the architecture is world-class and spectacular and contrasts starkly with the nearby, typically Yoruba city of Ile-Ife, with its densely clustered earthen buildings topped by rain-rusted tin roofs.”703 The campus presented a striking contrast not only in relation to the town of Ife, but to practically anything else known to the average Nigerian student. The lengthy quote that opened this

702 See: Smadar Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 72-3, 104-5. See also Tzur, 316-337.

703 Agency for International Development, “Three Nigerian Universities,” 4.

228 chapter, by a former student who is now a Lagosian agriculturalist and media consultant, demonstrates the dramatic effect of this impression.

The rhetorical questions he raises,“[d]id Nigerians think this place up? Are Nigerians indeed capable of planning, organizing and creating such wonder? Was I indeed in the same country where confusion is a festering norm?”704 do not betray a misunderstanding of the complex transnational situation that gave birth to the university in its present appearance. To the young Nigerian student, it did not matter that the university founders had an American model in mind, or that the campus was planned and designed predominantly by an Israeli team.705 The curious reference to the Queen of Sheba mesmerized by King Solomon’s gardens at the beginning of the quote could have been an ironic statement about the power structure of African-Israeli relationship, and a reflection of the legendary status Israel held in

African popular imagination as the land of the bible. Together with its newly acquired image as a military power following its involvement in the Suez Crisis, and by virtue of its sheer presence and visible aid, this legendary status was probably the reason that a West Nigerian daily proclaimed that the University of Ife was second in size only to the Al Azhar

University in Israel, misplacing Cairo’s venerable university.706 It is more probable, however, that the former student was not even aware of the fact the campus was an Israeli undertaking. With no plaques on the walls (against the wishes of the Israeli embassy), and not much mentioned in the newspapers, especially after the severance of diplomatic relations

704 Egbe, “Memoirs.” (My emphasis).

705 Among them were Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and Robin Atkinson (African Studies), James Cubitt (Faculty of Science), and the local Design Group (main cafeteria, today housing the architecture faculty). For a partial list of architects and contractors see Akintoye, 25-6.

706 “Modern Place of Learning in an Ancient City,” Nigerian Daily Sketch, February 8, 1967, 7.

229 in 1973, his only way of knowing that would have been if he had encountered Israeli personnel on campus. And indeed it did not matter much who built the campus, since the great achievement belonged to the university founders and administration. These were the

“different Nigerians that planned this Ife.” Despite American, British and Israeli aid, and

European universities that contributed to the setting up of the various faculties and departments, the fact is that this was the first university that was established by a whole

Nigerian committee and developed according to its vision. Determined to ensure this vision, and to secure the integrity of the original master plan, the university held on to the same team that continued to revise the master plan until the 1980s. As the former student’s account shows, this was no small victory in Nigeria then and now.

230 4. Designing a Postcolonial University in the Tropics: The University of Ife

What greeted my young mind virtually had me pass out. My eyes were scintillated by the sight of an impressive stretch of well laid lawn garnished with floricultural species carefully arranged and showcasing the beauty that nature has always afforded (…) I kept asking my teenage mind: did Nigerians think this place up? Are Nigerians indeed capable of planning, organizing and creating such wonder?707

In this former student’s account, cited at length at the beginning of the previous chapter, the beauty of the Ife University campus partly derives from the inherent natural beauty of the site before it was subjected to human manipulation. As we saw in the last chapter, the physical properties of the site were an important component of the university site selection, both for aesthetic and agricultural reasons. The tropical landscape was not disavowed, as in the collegiate model of the University College Ibadan campus, but served as a visual backdrop and regional economic point of reference in the campus design. At the same time, the agency of the human in “planning, organizing, and creating” this environment was equally important since the university served as a primary site where the molding of the

Nigerian as a productive national subject took place. This molding was partly mediated via

American and Israeli aid in rejection of the previous British colonial education model. This chapter expands on the Israeli planners and American consultants’ mediation to examine how the national subjects’ productive capacity was imagined and shaped as a “human resource,” “human capital,” or “human material” vis-à-vis their relationship to the tropical environment. Focusing on the buildings that Arieh Sharon and his team designed at the representative Campus Core from the beginning of the 1960s to the mid-1970s, this chapter

707 Egbe, “Memoirs.” (My emphasis).

231 posits the question how these buildings not only represented, but also mediated, the desired relationship between man and environment as it was articulated primarily by the Israeli designers in relation to the Nigerian university personnel expectations and American USAID supervision.

As an epitome of the tropical architecture approach promoted by Maxwell Fry and Jane

Drew, University College Ibadan embodied the underlying postulates that shaped British colonizers’ experience in the tropics. Conceived originally to protect the colonizers from the

“degenerating” effects of the environment, both physically and morally, this approach emphasized prevention and moderate insulation. On the other hand, the labor Zionist experience to which Arieh Sharon subscribed as a Jewish settler-pioneer emphasized symbiotic, mutual-transformative relations, epitomized in the idiom “to build and to be built.”

If the colonies presented the British with the danger of degeneration, for the Jewish pioneers a “return” to the land of the patriarchs presented the promise of national regeneration.708

This experience cannot be understood fully without taking into consideration the anxieties over acclimatization of the Jewish pioneer’s body to Palestine, and the repression of the minority experience of Diaspora Jews as an effeminate and degenerating race. This chapter tries to answer the question of how this socio-corporeal experience affects modes of knowing and translation from the Jewish experience as formulated by Zionism to postcolonial Nigerian nation building.

708 Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanord University Press, 2000), 7-49; Nadia Abu El Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 67-78; According to Sandar Gilman, the jews in nineteenth century Europe were not only considered a degenerated race, but also black. See Sandar Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 171-8.

232 In what is so far the most comprehensive account of the campus’ design, art historian Inbal

Ben-Asher Gitler defines the architects’ position as translators from the Israeli and international context to Nigeria as “embodying knowledge as commodity.”709 Although her study suggests that the architects were more sensitive than their colonial predecessors or contemporary expatriate counterparts to Nigeria’s nation building challenges, it fails to articulate how exactly Israeli “situated modernism” was embodied as a form of knowledge that mediated the translation of international modernism as it was practiced globally by the

1950s and 1960s. In other words, beyond reference to an explicit incorporation of local references, this analysis does not explain how and why the Israeli translation was different from other expatriates’ practices.710 Since Sharon’s team shared with Fry and Drew and the contemporary expatriates the same architectural modernism tool kit, the reference to

“knowledge” closes the scope of this translation to anything beyond disciplinary boundaries.

As this chapter argues, however, the architects’ disciplinary and professional knowledge was informed by their settler-colonial socio-corporeal experience. To emphasize this experience in the formation and adaptation of disciplinary knowledge, I therefore propose to shift the emphasis from “knowledge” as codified by discipline to “expertise,” which includes a broader range of experiences beyond disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Equally commodifiable, and even more susceptible to mystification since it cannot be assessed by professional standards, this category presents a more flexible heuristic to discern the complex interplay of layers of embodied experience and their accumulative - even if conflicting - effect on the formation of expertise.

709 Ben-Asher Gitler, 134.

710 Ben-Asher Gitler refers specifically to the architecture of American embassies and British architecture during decolonization. Ibid, 140, n. 105.

233

Against common characterizations of the figure of the aid expert as a disembodied technocrat whose massive production and socialization since the 1950s has been described vividly as creating “a new tribe,”711 I propose to think of aid expertise in terms of what cultural theorist Bruce Robbins has termed “embodied cosmopolitanism.”712 In lieu of an abstract position that can be enacted at will at any given cultural encounter, Robbins suggests that cosmopolitanism is a mode of belonging, “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance.”713 Adapting this definition to the international expert, while her tool kit could be perceived as “universal knowledge” as codified by international professional norms, its application in a given context is affected by the expert’s

“multiple attachment” and projection from one experience to another, however inadvertently.

In emphasizing the socio-corporeal experience that the expert’s “situated knowledge” derives from, this study opens the realm of expertise to the experience of “embodied difference” as conceptualized in gender and queer critique, and asks how it affects disciplinary knowledge production.714 Examining the specific context of translation of the

Zionist settler-colonial experience to the university building in Nigeria as part of African racial pride, this study brings to the fore the material and ideological effects of acts of disciplinary translation through identification and (mis)recognition of difference.

711 Watts, 55.

712 Robbins, 1-19.

713 Robbins, 3.

714 De Lauretis, 54-68.

234 Environment, Architecture, and the “Human Factor”

Caught within the magic circle of growth, lulled by its constancy, controlled by disease and warfare, the people of the tropics have slumbered on for centuries, little touched by what took place in the world outside them, maintaining themselves in a varying balance against the forces of nature at once so propitious yet so insidious.715 Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1956

The human material rather than the constitutions, is in reality the greatest determining factor.716 Hezekiel Oluwasanmi, 1970

When Arieh Sharon arrived to design the University of Ife, the tropical architecture discourse promoted by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew was so prevalent, even among laymen, that Sharon was expected to address tropical climate as a problem that demanded serious design consideration.717 Employed by the British architects and building industry as a gate- keeping mechanism to ensure continuing dependence on colonial-based knowledge, this discourse was nonetheless open to reinterpretation and reformulation in the postcolonial period.718 Since the University College Ibadan campus was both the quintessential

715 Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (New York: Reinhold, 1956), 27.

716 Hezekiel Oluwasanmi, “The Technological Gap,” 3.

717 In a letter to the first Vice Chancellor Prof. Oladele Ajose, Sharon reported that he visited the Building Research Station in London, probably following his request, and assured the VC that this visit confirmed his climatic calculations. See Arieh Sharon to Dr. Ajose, December 20, 1961, AAAC, ASE.

718 Hanna le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture 8 (Autumn 2003): 337-354; Hanna le Roux, “Building on the Boundary – Modern Architecture in the Tropics,” Social Identities 10, no. 4 (2004): 439-453; Hanna le Roux, “Modern Architecture in Post-colonial Ghana and Nigeria,” Architectural History 47 (2004): 361-392; Vandana Baweja, “A Pre-history of Green Architecture: Otto Koenigsberger and Tropical Architecture, from Princely Mysore to Post-colonial London,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 107-135. See also Lukasz Stanek, “Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957-1967): Architecture and Mondialization,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

235 embodiment of Fry and Drew’s approach and the primary negative reference point for the founders of the University of Ife, Sharon’s task was to devise an architectural language that would be both modernist and climatically responsive, as Fry and Drew’s tropical architecture was, yet visually completely distinct from it. Since this approach implied that

“form followed climate,”719 this reformulation of the modernist principles to accommodate tropical climate embedded design in a quasi-scientific methodology that placed climate as its empirical base.720 Sharon’s challenge, therefore, was to use the same climatic base to conceive an entirely different architectural form. The arrival of different architectural

“solutions” to the same empirical parameters demonstrates how the translation of empirical studies of climate into architectural form is ideologically invested, specifically regarding the desired relationship between man and environment, and in this case, the Nigerian students and their campus. If architecture was the solution to the problem of climate, what needs to be interrogated in this analysis is how, in each of the solutions given to it, climate was constructed as a problem in the first place.

The epigraph from Fry and Drew’s seminal 1956 publication Tropical Architecture in the

Humid Zone encapsulated the architects’ traumatic response to the tropical climate (fig. 45).

(forthcoming). This prevalence can be demonstrated by the fact that the first question the Hungarian architect Charles Polónyi was asked at a press conference in the city of Calabar in South East Nigeria, was how he can design a master plan for the city if the Hungarians did not have a “tropical experience.” Ákos Moravánsky, “Peripheral Modernism: Charles Polónyi and the Lessons of the Village,” The Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012): 351.

719 This is the title of a talk Indian architect Charles Correa gave in 1980. Charles Correa, Form follows Climate (London : Pidgeon Digital, 2009 [1980]); recording. Arieh Sharon scribbled this saying on the pages of a talk he gave in Nairobi in 1971 on systems hospitals, being probably inspired by one of the other presentations. See Yacobi, “The Architecture of Foreign Policy,” 43.

720 Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network: Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Politics of Decolonization,” in Third World Modernism, ed. Duanfang Lu (London; New York: Routledge, 2011), 211-235. I discuss the department of tropical architecture at the AA more extensively in the next chapter.

236 In his analysis of the discourse of British colonialism in Central Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, social scientist Jonathan Crush argues, “the language was traumatic not romantic – the area was practically in “chaos,” virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable, racked by internal violence and insecurity.”721 Similarly, more than half a century later, Fry and Drew used the language of perpetual crisis to describe West Africa’s climate as its impediment to entering into world history. According to Crush, in this discourse

“development – the rebuilding of the landscape and the reclothing of its benighted inhabitants – is redemptive power.”722 Equating “re-clothing” and “rebuilding,” the colonial subjects and their environment needed to be completely transformed in tandem, so that development would enable Africa’s reintegration into world history. As an ordering mechanism, it offered a way to manage natural resources and redirect growth outside of its destructive “magical circle,” to reiterate Fry and Drew’s terminology.

Although they were latecomers to the colonial project, the couple’s approach to the tropics and to the redemptive qualities of architecture drew its logic directly from this discourse. As scholars have recently pointed out, Fry and Drew’s tropical architecture had its origin in colonial architecture that developed as a body of knowledge in tandem with the colonial medical discourse on tropical disease and hygiene, formed mainly as preventive measures to assist colonial administration and soldiers to survive in what they perceived as hostile environments. If in the eighteenth century it was widely believed that Europeans could adapt successfully to tropical climate, by the nineteenth century such views were displaced by the

721 Jonathan Crush, “Introduction: Imagining Development,” in The Power of Development, ed. Jonathan Crush (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 10.

722 Ibid, ibid.

237 idea of racial difference grounded on biological essentialism. By the end of the nineteenth century scientific knowledge was seen as the white man’s competitive edge over the indigenous knowledge of the environment, since it helped the colonizers to remain “white,” that is, to continue to be foreigners who are undisturbed by, and who could even overcome, the effects of the environment. This entailed a shift to environmental management by intervention, “improvement” and reform.723 Correspondingly, writes historian Mark

Harrison, “from being a condition determined largely by climate, “tropicality” – which connoted lethargy, disease, and corruption – came to be associated with underdevelopment and “imperfect” civilization.”724 Lying at the heart of this physical and psychological separation was the fear of racial degeneration. Acclimatizing too well (“becoming native”) would not only lead to moral and physical degeneration, but would also defeat the very idea of racial superiority that justified colonization.725 The threat posed by acclimatization of hybridity and degeneration became now environmental and biological; it disclosed the colonialists’ growing anxiety over the effects of their prolonged stay in the colonies on their

European selves.726

The main difference, however, was that by the mid 1950s, at the height of decolonization and after the holocaust and the 1951 UNESCO Declaration on Race, the racial component that undergirded the British approach to the tropics had to be subdued. Tropical architecture had to be completely reformulated to address the subjects of decolonization, so that the

723 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600-1850 (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21, 205.

724 Ibid, 205.

725 Ibid, especially 17-21, 205.

726 Ibid, 19.

238 relationship between the Europeans and the tropical environment was displaced to the indigenous in relation to their native environment. In the 1950s, the discourse on tropical architecture needed not only to be cleansed of its racist underpinning, but also reformulated so it could cater beyond its traditional clients – the European colonizers – to the decolonized ones. Addressing specifically the modernized Nigerian elite, who alienated themselves from their native environment by wearing western suits (recall Crush’s apt phrase “reclothing”),

Fry and Drew’s task was to create an environment that would facilitate this alienation process. This environment, in turn, would be conducive to the creation of a productive society. As an antidote to the inherent lethargy of the “tropical people,” tropical architecture would redeem tropical people from the tropics.

This concern over productivity was also shared by the team of the Wisconsin University

Department of Landscape Architecture that arrived in 1966 on behalf of USAID to consult on the design of the University of Ife campus. Providing “resource-based management plans,” its emphasis was “placed upon the procedures for integrating human needs and resources goals into the design-formulation process.”727 As architectural historian Vandana

Baweja has argued, the tropical architecture discourse received a specific emphasis on energy resources in the US with writing such as the Hungarian immigrant American-based brothers Victor and Aladar Olgyay.728 The Wisconsin team, which based its study on both

Fry and Drew’s Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, and Victor Olgyay’s 1963 Design with Climate, shifted the discourse away from viewing the tropics as a hazard that needs

727 Niemann and Tishler, “Cool Planning for a Hot Campus in Ife, Nigeria,” Landscape Architecture 61, no. 3 (April 1971), 216.

728 Baweja, 112, 118-9.

239 protecting from to its articulation into an array of resources, such as sun radiation and soil, that can be maximized through proper coordination and management. Instead of viewing tropical climate as an enemy in which “all is overdone. Burning sun alternating with torrential rains brings to life an unending cycle of massive vegetation, dwarfing man by the vigour of its growth,”729 to cite again Fry and Drew, the Wisconsin team rationalized climate to make it calculable and manageable as a resource.

One of the other resources, the most important of all, was the students themselves. In the

American development discourse of the 1960s, human resources were perceived as more determinant than natural resources; hence the emphasis on knowledge transfer, skill acquisition and university building epitomized in the slogan “help them to help themselves.”

Yet the Wisconsin team’s emphasis on the coordination of human and natural resources implies that a simple transfer of knowledge would not suffice without creating a productive environment for the cultivation of human resources. The latter were to be cultivated just like the lands some of these students were cultivating under the tutorship of American and

American-trained agriculturalists. Seen from the Wisconsin team perspective, university education was not only a means to transform the economy of the region, but also to train and perfect the performance of the students through careful consideration of their living and working habitat.

American emphasis on the universality of “human resources” – potentially metamorphosing into “human capital” – was particularly significant in postwar development discourse since

729 Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones (New York: Reinhold, 1964), 23.

240 it helped to neutralize any racist implications that used to undergird and justify colonial domination.730 This universalizing of the human as a viable resource for development was complemented by the contradictory tendency toward relativizing, both in terms of rescaling the environment from macro to microclimates, and in terms of the human body’s experience of comfort. Thus the Wisconsin team could conclude, following interviews with locals in the area, that the “comfort zone” for residents of this part of the tropics was seventeen degrees higher than was accepted in temperate climates, slightly adjusting Olgyay’s definition of the comfort zone for the humid-tropical region.731 In the postwar era overt racist implications were displaced by notions such as the “human factor,” population, or community; “racial types” gave way to “population characteristics” and the tropics to microenvironments.732

In his 1970 university convocation address titled “The Technological Gap,” Hezekieh

Oluwasanmi, an agriculturalist and the second Vice Chancellor of the University of Ife stated, “the human material rather than the constitutions, is in reality the greatest determining factor.”733 A Harvard graduate, Oluwasanmi was well aware of the American shift of discourse from natural elements to human resources, and the racial implications that were at stake in this discursive shift. While the issue of race was at the heart of the

730 Michael Adas, “Modernization Theory and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological Standards of Social Achievements and Human Worth,” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, eds. David C. Engerman et al. (Amherst; Boston: University of Massachusetts Press), 2003, 25-45.

731 Niemann and Tishler, 27.

732 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 10, 209, 224, 226. In another study on Australia, Anderson points to a discursive shift from “racial types” to “population characteristics” that occurred following the Cold Spring Harbor conference on quantitative biology in 1950, which emphasized population dynamics rather than racial typologies. See Warwick Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 209, 241, 243.

733 Oluwasanmi, Technological Gap, 3.

241 decolonization process, it gained a particular significance in the context of university building. Already at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of the growing pan-African race-consciousness the educated elite were concerned over “the elevation of the black race.”734 When a training college and industrial institute was proposed for Lagos in 1896, it was hailed as “the greatest need of the race” through which, “we shall be brought back to ourselves and be taught our true place in the economy of humanity.” Anti-colonial leaders such as Nnamdi Azikiwe continued to hold this view in the 1950s-1960s, when he based his hope for a “Renascent Africa” on mental emancipation through university education. His motto for the University of Nigeria, which he helped to found, was “To Restore the Dignity of Man” which the historian J. F. Ade Ajayi rephrases “To Restore the Dignity of the

Negro.”735

While education promised a vehicle for social mobilization supposedly irrespective of skin color, it also confronted the students more fiercely with the invisible wall of the color line.

As Fanon explained, the more educated the black man was, the less confident he would become, since attempts to overcome feelings of inferiority led to further disappointments and frustration.736 With independence, it was believed that the postcolonial African universities would succeed where British universities had failed, that is, to provide the proper settings for the desired “mental emancipation.” One of the ways to achieve this

“decolonization of the mind” was to instill racial pride through curriculum reform. By 1960,

734 Ajayi and Tamuno, 6. Among the best-known exponents of this movement in Africa were Dr. James Africanus Horton (1835-1883), a Sierra Leonean of Nigerian decent, and Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden, a Liberian (1832-1912) who taught at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone. (See chapter 1).

735 Ibid, 6-7.

736 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]), 9.

242 there was a conscious concern not only to introduce applied research and other practical subjects to enlarge the pool of skilled manpower, but also the re-conceiving of the humanities by turning attention to local history and culture.737 University of Ife’s Institute of

African Studies became an important research center and for Yoruba culture and Africana studies, with prominent professors such as Wole Soyinka, who specialized in Yoruba theater.

“Top-Quality Human Material”

Oluwasanmi’s use of the term “human material,” rather than the more prevailing “human resources” or “human capital,” which were at the time in widespread use in development discourse, may refer to another source of influence besides the American one. In the Labor

Zionist discourse in Palestine, “human material” was imbued with social-ideological implications that did not exist in the purely managerial American use of the term. In the

Zionist case, the construction of the human as a resource was differentiated in relation to the role immigrants partook in the nation-building project. In 1950, as part of a discussion on

American Point Four, American economist Robert Nathan cites Israel as an example of successful industrial development, explaining that:

The industrial development in Palestine and Israel was made possible primarily by one factor which I feel we cannot possible overemphasize in this whole matter of development of backward areas, and that is know-how, skill, and talent. My own travels around the world in recent years have convinced me that the primary factor for the development of any country is

737 Ulli Beier, Art in Nigeria 1960 (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1960), 18. Ulli Beier (1922-2011), a German-Jewish art educator and scholar who resided in the 1950s-1960s in Ede, Oshogbo, and later in Ife, and was very active in promoting the local art scene, criticized both the British educator, and like-minded architects (referring to Maxwell Fry) for assuming “that the task of education and architecture critique in West Africa is to convert Africans to European values.” Ibid, ibid. (Emphasis in origin).

243 the creative talents and the capacity of the people. They are more essential than natural resources. Israel secured an advantage which very few countries have had – indeed, we might call it a windfall – in receiving a transplantation of skills and know-how quickly, substantially, and readymade, from the outside. Whereas most countries have to train their people and develop their skills through the hard way of internal education, Palestine was able, because of the external developments, to get outstanding talent, ability, and skills easily and quickly through the influx of leading professional people, scientists, and businessmen.738

While the capital these immigrants possessed was mostly gained via formal education, the

“talent, ability and skills” that Nathan referred to could be used to euphemize racist stereotypes.739 As stated bluntly by a Consul at the Israeli embassy in Washington at a

Conference on Free World Cooperation with Africa in 1964,

From the technical and economic viewpoint there are two Israels: the European sector brought the knowledge and highly developed technology of the Occident and a centuries old scientific tradition. The so-called Oriental sector has no technological knowledge and skill and a very scant scientific tradition. It is the latter sector that has raised in Israel problems almost identical to those of the other new countries (…) A fundamental difference between developed and developing countries is that the trend in the first is toward the replacement of manpower, while in the developing country manpower, if used well and proficiently, is a major natural resource.740

738 Robert R. Nathan, “Israel and Point Four,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 270 (July 1950): 141-2.

739 Race was supplemented, but not completely supplanted, by notions such as “human factor,” population, or community that served as its euphemism.

740 Mordecai Lador, “Technical Cooperation: American, Africa, Israeli Approaches; An Israeli View,” in Conference on Free World Cooperation with Africa, Duquesne University, October 18, 1964, (New York: American Histadrut Cultural Exchange Institute, 1964), 5-6.

244 In this talk, the Consul unabashedly described Israeli society almost in terms of South

African’s “separate development.” While these two “sectors” were intertwined in one state economy, his application of the term “sector” to describe economy in terms of ethnicity evokes also the earlier separation of the Jewish economy from the Arab population in the pre-state period.741 The bluntness of his description helps to give the difference between

“human capital” and “human resources” in the Zionist parlance in greater nuance: the “first

Israel,” based on European Jews’ immigration, was considered in terms of “human capital,” whereas the “second Israel,” based on Middle Eastern and North-African Jews’ immigration, was considered in terms of “natural resources.” As raw material, easily malleable and properly trained if in the right hands, it could be molded to fit the needs of the developing country.742

While the Counsel referred to the 1950s immigration of Middle Eastern and North African

Jews, the need for en-mass immigration rather than a selected few was also important to sustain the economy of the Jewish sector in the pre-state period, when this labor division was applied between Central European and Eastern European Jews, and even further down the ladder, the Yemenite Jews.743 As 1920s debates within Solel Boneh and the Technion show, working hands were a rare commodity in a sector saturated with professionals.744 The

741 Horowitz and Lissak; Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882- 1914 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

742 See Kozlovsky, chapter 1.

743 See, for example, in: Sarah Hinski, “Rokmot ha-Takhra mi-Betzalel,” Teoria vu-Vikoret 11 (1997): 177-205.

744 Carl Alpert, Technion: The Story of Israel’s Institute of Technology (New York: American Technion Society, 1982), 95-9; Solel Boneh: Kovets Le’et Yesud Hakhevra (Jerusalem: Hapo’alim Print, 1923), 65-8, 100.

245 merging of working hands with scientific expertise was especially needed in the agricultural sector to prove the “economic absorptive capacity” of the Jewish sector, which in turn would allow more immigrants to come.745 The combination of both, fueled by ideological purposefulness, was crucial for the Zionist transformation of land, proving that “human material is more determinant than the constitutions.”

In the term’s third differentiation, “human material” was based less on knowledge or skills than on socialization and ideological leaning. It was based on social capital accumulated through participation in Zionist youth movements in East Europe, kibbutzim, the Haganah and the Histadrut. During the early days of Israeli aid to African countries, this social capital was the prime criteria, before technical skills and professional knowledge, for the selection of Israeli experts.746 The concern over the “right” social character of the Hebrew worker or manager overseas had already appeared in the pre-state period. In a discussion held in the mid 1940s at the Hisradrut about the selection process of Solel Boneh workers to Abadan,

Persia, the seat of Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it was agreed that the workers selected should be of “top-quality human material.” If they were not, it was suggested that they could become so during their intense collective living and working experience in Abadan.747

Simply put, Abadan could compensate for the intense pioneering experience the petit-

745 Troen, Imagining Zion, 168-178.

746 Preference for kibbutz or moshav members, male, IDF veterans, of European descent, but also inclusion of Mizrahi Jews since their knowledge of French was recognized as highly beneficial in the former French colonies. See: Bar-Yosef, 167-173; Yacobi, Kan Lo Afrika, 39. At the same time, while there was emphasis on the unmediated social approach of the Israeli expert, there was a sense of self-consciousness regarding their “cultural level.” As one former official explained, they preferred German Jews, “who know how to eat with a fork and a knife.” See Mirel Raviv, interview in Golda Meir, http://goldameir.org.il/archive/home/he/10.html, accessed November 8, 2012.

747 For Histadrut discussions on the Abadan workers see: LA IV-320-6, LA IV-320-7.

246 bourgeois worker “missed” (of his own volition) in Palestine. The shaping of the Hebrew

Pioneer, so it was implied, could also occur beyond the borders of the national territory. Just as immigrants were malleable in terms of skill acquisition, so – under the right conditions – they could be socialized into the Labor Zionist ideology.748

As the discussants made clear, the term “human material” referred to the ideological commitment of the Jewish workers to the social and national causes of the Histardut.

Professional ability came only second. Arieh Sharon, who portrayed himself first as a

Zionist pioneer and only later an architect, described his architectural work as part and parcel of his nation-building life’s work. According to his autobiographical narrative, even his educational experience at the Bauhaus, where he skipped the preliminary course due to his practical building experience at the kibbutz of which he was a founding member, was informed by the needs of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.749 As a kibbutz founder, a

Bauhaus graduate, and a Histadrut and kibbutzim architect, Sharon could not have better fulfilled the “top-quality human material” profile. As we saw in chapter 2, these social- ideological qualifications did not diminish the professional expertise of the Israeli experts but rather enhanced them, as they were shaped by real-life conditions of underdevelopment.

More than “human resources,” the term “human material” expresses the corporeal as well as vocational and social transformation of the New Jew, who is imbricated with the transformation of the environment. It implies an active stance toward the territory, which is concurrently re-shaped in this process. Unlike the stance of a cool detached expert who

748 As in the Lakhish project: see Smadar Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 155-182.

749 See Levin, “Exporting Architectural National Expertise,” 53-5.

247 objectifies the environment, this process is a mutually transformative one in which the New

Jew is reshaped, body and spirit, by the transformation of the environment. In this view, the role of architecture, together with agriculture, is not only to mold the territory in the image of the New Jew, but also to facilitate his emergence. This circular logic is encapsulated in the Zionist idiom “to build and be built.”

Oluwasanmi’s use of the term “human material” indicates that in the process of the university campus design and construction, fragments of this Zionist ideology were transported together with the architectural and building practices.750 Since Sharon practically embodied this Zionist stance, the question arises how the Zionist conception of “human material” has affected the very design of the Ife University campus, specifically in relation to the mutually transformative relations between the national subject and the environment.

How did Sharon and his team respond to the premises of the British “tropical architecture” discourse and its North American postwar derivative and translate their socio-corporeal experience in Palestine to the tropics? Since, as historian Ilan Troen has argued, the

American agricultural experts who advised the Jewish settlement in Palestine in the 1930s-

1940s were not exporting “merely socially neutral technologies but the social and economic experience of America’s development of its own frontiers,”751 so should Sharon’s architecture in Ife be read as informed by his frontier experience in Palestine. While both

750 Oluwasanmi supervised up close the construction and design under his vice chancellery 1966-1975, which coincided with the most intense building period of the campus. According to a witness account, he used to inspect every evening the construction progress, comparing every detail to the plans, and he pressured the faculty to do the same. See Imevbore, 31-2. Similarly, architects who worked with him had great appreciation of his keen interest and architectural understanding. Harold Rubin and Miriam Keini, interview by Ayala Levin, Jaffa, Israel, June 27, 2012; Amos Spitz, interview by Ayala Levin, Lagos, Nigeria, January 17-8, 2013. Even primary to his vice chancellery, Dr. Oluwasanmi was involved from the beginning in the design deliberations of the campus as a member of the university planning committee. See chapter 3.

751 Troen, Imagining Zion, 196.

248 frontier settler experiences shared the idea of regeneration,752 in the Zionist narrative regeneration had racial implications that presented an inverted mirror to the British colonial fear of degeneration. As we shall see later, this experience cannot be understood fully without taking into consideration its corporeal aspects of acclimatization of the Jewish pioneer’s body in Palestine.

Good whites - blackened expertise

A repeating trope in Israeli aid discourse of the 1960s was the Zionist leader Theodor

Herzl’s statement, enunciated by one of the protagonists in his 1902 utopian novel

Altneuland (Old-New Land), that once the Jewish problem is resolved, it will be time to attend to the black problem:753

…There is still one problem of racial misfortune unsolved. The depths of that problem, in all their horror, only a Jew can fathom. I mean the negro problem. Don't laugh, Mr. Kingscourt. Think of the hair-raising horrors of the slave trade. Human beings, because their skins are black, are stolen, carried off, and sold. Their descendants grow up in alien surroundings despised and hated because their skin is differently pigmented. I am not ashamed to say,

752 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800- 1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998 [1985]), 39-41.

753 Netanel Lorech, the head of the Africa division in the Foreign Ministry, ordered Israeli embassies around the world to reiterate this quote in conversations and publications. See Yacobi, Kan Lo Afrika, 33. Consequently, this quote opened a traveling exhibition that toured British and French West Africa. Dan Avni to Israeli Representatives in Africa, August 28, 1964, LA IV-277-189; “Israeli Exhibition due in Freetown Soon,” Daily Mail, February 17, 1962, 12. Altneuland was distributed to Nigerian universities as part of Israeli donation of books, under the history section, thus effacing its utopian and fictive character. See M. Artsieli to David Ben Dov, January 19, 1965, ISA, MFA 1932/6.

249 though I be thought ridiculous, now that I have lived to see the restoration of the Jews, I should like to pave the way for the restoration of the Negroes.754

In this provocative statement, which served as the foundational text for Israeli diplomacy in the 1960s, the founder of Zionism tied its fate together with that of Africa. The speaker, a fictive bacteriologist named Professor Steinbeck, set up a research institute in Palestine modeled after the Pasteur Institute in Paris.755 Hoping to find a cure for malaria following its successful eradication in Palestine “thanks to the drainage of the swamps, canalization, and the eucalyptus forests,” he explains that in Africa the conditions are different:756

The same measures cannot be taken there because the prerequisite-mass immigration is not present. The white colonist goes under in Africa. That country can be opened up to civilization only after malaria has been subdued. Only then will enormous areas become available for the surplus populations of Europe. And only then will the proletarian masses find a healthy outlet.757

To his enthused interlocutor who responds, "You want to cart off the whites to the black continent, you wonder-worker!” Prof. Steinbeck explains that his aim is equally directed towards the return of the black people, who would be “restored” like the Jews in Palestine

754 Theodor Herzl, Old New Land, trans. Lotta Levensohn (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wierner Publishers, 2000 [1941]), 170.

755 Ibid, 169. This character was most probably based on Alexander Marmorek (1865-1923), an Austrian- Jewish physician and assistant at the Pasteur institute. See “Alexander Marmorek,” Herzl Museum, http://www.herzl.org/english/Article.aspx?Item=532 (accessed December 30, 2014). Botanist Otto Warburg, who advised Herzl in writing the book, may be another possible influence. Warburg gained his expertise through his service in the German colonization of Cameroon and Togoland, and across the Ottoman Empire. See Troen, “Higher Education,” 47-8; Otto Warburg: A Biographical Note, The Otto Warburg Minerva Center for Agricultural Biotechnology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem http://departments.agri.huji.ac.il/biotech/otto3.htm, accessed December 30, 2014.

756 Herzl, 169.

757 Ibid, 170.

250 when back on their land.758 Following the colonial tradition of coupling tropical medicine with architecture, the professor’s brother is an architect who mirrors and completes the his character and mission by building a hospital in the outskirts of Jerusalem.759 This fictional coupling became reality in the immediate ensuing years when the Zionist delegations to El

Arish (in the Sinai Peninsula, now Egypt) and Uganda (now Kenya) embarked on missions to examine the suitability of the areas for Jewish settlement. Together with a geologist, an agronomist, and a physician, the Viennese architect Oskar Marmorek completed the team of experts that joined the El Arish delegation of 1903.760 In the 1905 delegation to Uganda, the sole Jewish representative was a building engineer.761

In his seminal “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry,” Historian of Religion

Daniel Boyarin argues that by turning to Zionism, Herzl did not abandon his previous dream of assimilation and conversion into German Kultur, but only sophisticated the methods of

Jewish mimicry: “Herzlian Zionism imagined itself as colonialism because such a representation was pivotal to the entire project of becoming ‘white men.’ (…) Indeed, it is through mimicry of colonization that the Zionist seeks to escape the stigma of Jewish

758 Ibid, ibid.

759 Based on the Viennese architect Oskar Marmorek (1863-1909), Alexander Marmorek’s brother, who joined the El Arish Zionist expedition led by Otto Warburg.

760 Adolf Loos mentions Marmorek favorably in his essay “The Furniture of 1898.” See Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Adriane Press, 1998), 125. See also Markus Kristan, Oskar Marmurek: Architekt und Zionist (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996).

761 The provisional compromise to create a Jewish settlement in Uganda (now Kenya) was a subject of a heated debate at the Zionist Congress see Gur Alroey, “Journey to New Palestine: The Zionist Expedition to East Africa and the Aftermath of the Uganda Debate,” Jewish Culture and History 10, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 23-58. For a sophisticated critique of the expedition’s reports see Eitan Bar-Yoef, “Lama Lo Uganda: Hamishlakhat Hazionist Lemizrakh Afrika, 1905,” Teoria Uvikoret 28 (Spring 2006): 75-100.

251 difference.”762 By evoking colonial scientific imaginary and the Jews’ capacity to participate in it, Herzl targeted the imperial interests of the European, Russian, and Ottoman rulers he courted in his quest for territorial concessions for a Jewish settlement.763 Following

Boyarin, literary scholar Eitan Bar-Yosef interprets Herzl’s commitment in his novel to the

African cause as a whitening project of Africa. “The white’s man burden,” he argues, became in this novel the “whitened Jew’s burden.”764

In an analysis of Israeli aid to African countries in the field of planning, geographer and architect Haim Yacobi argues that Israel exported to Africa its internal colonization projects of social engineering of populations and transformation of natural environment.765 By presenting its achievements in these fields to the impressed African governments, and providing these practices as aid, he argues, Israel joined the aid donors club and completed its whitening. In a linear continuum with Boyarin’s interpretation of Herzl’s desire to become “a (colonial) nation like all nations” as a practice of colonial mimicry, Yacobi interprets Israel’s desire to join the aid donors club as a way to align itself with the developed world north of the Cold War “Color Curtain” divide, to use African-American intellectual Richard Wright’s apt phrase. In this interpretation, the Zionist history of mimicry repeated and sophisticated itself with the establishment of the state through the practice of aid, shifting alliances from colonial to neocolonial ones. Specifically, it is

762 Daniel Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, eds. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2000), 252-3.

763 Massad, 315.

764 Bar-Yosef, 33-4.

765 Haim Yacobi, “The Moral Geopolitics,” 441-461.

252 through the high modernist confluence of engineering, sciences, medicine, economy planning, and architecture that Israel could align itself with the developed world, while still presenting itself to African countries as a developing country.

On the one hand, Israel’s status as a developing country, supported too by external aid, does not disrupt the thesis of continuity from colonial to postcolonial development discourses, since as we saw in chapter 2, this in-between position served to present the promise of development as a tangible process in a fast-forward motion. This continuity also fits postcolonial critique of African national elites, who inherited colonial mechanisms of control and subjected themselves to neocolonial forces in order to sustain their domination.766 On the other hand, the in-between position can be broadened to include cultural, social and historical experiences that complicate narratives of uninterrupted continuity from colonial to neocolonial forces. Dan Vittorio Segre, a political scientist who served at the Israeli foreign ministry in the 1960s, explained Israel’s in-between position not only in terms of economic development, but also as a political culture. Together with

Formosa, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, Israel was part of a group of “small countries” that were

… still asking for and receiving foreign aid for their own development while offering aid to more underdeveloped countries and claiming to posses special qualifications – not necessarily ideological – for so doing. One common feature is that they operate under constant political stress; another, that they are located at the periphery of large ideological “empires.”767

According to Segre, in their engagement with aid activities these “border states” could use

766 Mbemebe, 24-52.

767 D.V. Segre, “The Philosophy and Practice of Israel’s International Cooperation,” in Israel in the Third World, eds. Michael Curtis and Susan Aurelia Gitelson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1976), 8.

253 their marginal position as an asset, especially if it was “permanent and rooted in history.”768

“As for Israel,” Segre continued, “the middleman role of Jews throughout history (…) needs no demonstration. It seems only natural that a people that has succeeded for generations in coping with its marginal situation, should consider itself better equipped than others to contribute to the exchange, diffusion and integration of cultures, in the widest sense of the word.”769 The author, however, forgot to mention that this marginal position, with the cosmopolitan qualities it entailed, was directly tied to the Jews’ historical position as minority. Rooted in history but a-historical, this explanation does not account for the problem of moving from a minority position to sovereignty in maintaining this elusive middleman position.

Turning economic and diplomatic marginality into an advantage was precisely the strategy the Israeli foreign ministry employed, yet the specific historical experience, or the content of its in-between position, remained ambiguous. Functioning like a floating signifier, it was provisionally anchored according to the whims of politicians. In 1959, Ben Gurion announced that the peoples of Asia and Africa “desire rapprochement not because we are rich in possessions that enable us to influence them, but because they view the spiritual values enshrined in Israeli halutziut [pioneering] as worth learning.”770 To the mix of pioneerism and messianism, which he employed in his mamlakhtiut doctrine to revive the

768 Ibid, ibid.

769 Ibid, 9.

770 David Ben Gurion, Divrei Haknesset 22 (March 1959). Cited in Levey, Israel in Africa, 33.

254 pioneering spirit of the pre-state voluntary society,771 he added an international dimension, famously presenting Israel as a “light onto the nations.” In this framing, after the establishment of the state, the pioneering task was not complete. Alongside its continuous role within the state in the blossoming of the Negev Desert and absorption of masses of immigrants,772 pioneering had an important role in Israel’s self-fashioning in the international realm. Just as Abadan was perceived as an extra-territorial site for the self- fashioning of the Hebrew pioneer in the pre-state period, so the developing countries were perceived as a site for the continuation and perpetuation of Zionist pioneering as practiced by emissaries of the state.773 In Ben Gurion’s conceptualization, this extra-territorial pioneering activity carried out by the nation of the “chosen people” brought the “white man’s burden” to new levels of messianic fervor. Golda Meir, on the other hand, refrained from spiritual allusions but went further back in history: “The truth is that we did what we did in Africa not because it was just a policy of enlightened self-interest—a matter of quid pro quo —but because it was a continuation of our own most valued traditions and an expression of our own deepest historic instincts.”774 As in Segre’s description, the content of these traditions and historic instincts remains conveniently ambiguous. The Israeli political leadership’s challenge was, therefore, to maintain the historical experience of Jews’ minority despite their recently gained political sovereignty, and their responsibility to the consequential process of minoritization of the Palestinian population.

771 See David Ohana, Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli Messianism and its Critics (London; New York: Routledge, 2010); Aronson Shlomo, David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance, trans. Naftali Greenwood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

772 See Bar-Yosef’s discussion on the Nahal (acronym for Fighting Pioneer Youth) organization. Bar-Yosef, 123-184.

773 Ibid, 129, 157.

774 Meir, 319.

255

The problem of maintaining a unique Jewish identity in the international realm while becoming “a nation like all nations” occupied leaders of the Zionist movement from its inception. As an alternative to the Zionist movement’s cooperation with colonial regimes,

Zionist thinker Martin Buber warned against abusing the Jew’s middleman position for western alliance and domination. After the 1918 Balfour Declaration that promised the Jews a “national home” in Palestine, Buber stated vigorously that Zionism "must not undertake this task [of mediating East and West] as the servants of a mighty and doomed Europe, but rather as the allies of a weak Europe full of future promise, not as middlemen for a decadent culture, but as collaborators of a creative young one..."775 Using weakness for self- empowerment offered a promise of radical change, which in the postcolonial world could have been translated into an alliance with the Non-Aligned Movement.

Having grown out of the Afro-Asian conference of 1955 in Bandung, this form of solidarity presented a “political community” beyond the nation-state, based on an intercontinental and interracial exchange.776 Israel’s exclusion from the conference due to Arab countries’ pressure has been considered in international relations literature as the point of origin of its diplomatic efforts in Africa.777 Even without this pressure, it is doubtful Israel would have been considered for the next meeting following its imperial alignment in the Suez Crisis the

775 Martin Buber, “Towards the Decision (March 1919),” in A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Cited in Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “Erich Mendelsohn: From Berlin to Jerusalem,” (Master’s thesis, MIT, Dept. of Architecture, 1993), 93-4.

776 Christopher J. Lee, ed., “Introduction: Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 4.

777 Peters, 1.

256 following year. Israel’s new military strength, however, and what was seen in many African countries as a bold move against Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, helped to consolidate a powerful image of the new country in the eyes of decolonizing African states.

The duality of its newly acquired military capacity in light of the fresh memory of the

Holocaust became a powerful blend of weakness and strength. Israel emphasized its sensitivity to the race issue by denouncing Apartheid South Africa, despite its large Jewish community, at the UN.778 This was translated into individual performances such as Golda

Meir’s inversed reenactment of Rosa Parks’ bus protest on the border of Zambia and South

Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1964. During Zambia’s independence celebrations, the bus

Meir shared with the rest of the dignitaries was on its way to Victoria Falls when policemen at the Rhodesian border stopped it, not allowing the black delegates to cross the border.

According to Israeli newspapers that reported on the incident, Meir stood up to the policemen and led a protest against this discrimination. Eventually, the bus turned back.779

The evocation of race in diplomatic relations was not unprecedented at that time, especially after UNESCO’s “Statement on Race” of 1951 and the self-conscious formation of the Afro-

Asian countries as an anti-imperial bloc. One of the most contentious issues in American and Soviet competition over Africa was the American civil rights issue, which presented a significant thorn to American’s propaganda efforts. Aided by Soviet media, stories about

American racial discrimination found their way quickly to African newspapers. In response,

778 Ibid, 53. This solidarity discourse had its real politik limits during the Biafra crisis (Nigerian Civil War). See Michal Givoni, “Lemi Ikhpat [Ma La’asot?]? Teguvot Beyisrael al Ason Biafra,” Teoria Uvikoret 23 (Fall 2003): 57-81.

779 Bar-Yosef, 199. Similarly, David Hacohen broke the color curtain in a country club in Burma, and Yael Dayan, General Moshe Dayan’s daughter, announced in a newspaper interview during a tour in Africa that she would not mind marrying an African man. See N. Pundak, “Haiti Shafan Nisyonot Ladjungel,” Davar, July 26, 1963, 3.

257 American cultural diplomacy developed the concept of “community” and incorporated tours of prominent African Americans such as Louis Armstrong to exhibit their achievements across the continent.780 In their attempt to forge diplomatic and trade relations, other countries such as Brazil emphasized as well their historical African connections, and presented themselves as “the lovers of the African race.”781 The discourse of race in politics was so predominant that the Nigerian Prime Minister Nnamdi Ezikiwe repelled the Arab

League’s pressure to sever ties with Israel on the grounds that Nigeria’s foreign policy did not discriminate on the basis of race.782 In parallel with the Israeli politicians’ lofty but ambiguous statements, there was much work invested in containing the racism and prejudices of the Israeli public against Africans within the country and in their African

“outposts.”783 On their part, however, Israeli diplomats were unpleasantly surprised to encounter anti-Semitic stereotypes in parliamentary discussions in Ghana, which they excused as a British colonial inheritance.784

From this perspective, and while taking into account that many of the members of the Afro-

Asian conference and the Non-Aligned Movement took part in the practices of aid as donors

780 Karen B. Bell, “Developing a ‘Sense of Community’: US Cultural Diplomacy and the Place of Africa during the Early Cold War Period, 1953-64,” in The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations, eds. Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 125-146.

781 Jerry Dávila, Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980 (Durham, NC; London; Duke University Press, 2010).

782 Obafemi Awolowo, Foreign Policy for Independent Nigeria, September 1958, ISA, MFA 3114/7. 783 See for example the diplomatic fiascos of staging a play about cannibalism in an Israeli school in Ghana. Hannan Yavor, Review, March 8, 1961, ISA MFA 2029/8. As Bar-Yosef has shown, this demand for “sensitivity” towards the African trainees in Israel created a lively debate in Israeli public discourse, especially in the theaters, and served to reflect on prejudices and racism within Jewish society in Israel, and towards the Palestinian population. See Bar-Yosf, 69-122.

784 Embassy of Israel in Accra to Africa-Asia Division, Foreign Ministry, November 12, 1959, ISA, MFA 3103/11; Extracts from Ghana Parliamentary Debates on the Ghana/Israel Trade and Payment Agreements on October 29, 1959, ISA, MFA 3103/11.

258 as well as receivers,785 it would be equally accurate to claim that Israel was “blackening” itself via its aid. Since anti-colonial Third World leaders embraced the paradigm of high modernism for their own ends,786 associating it strictly with westernization and whitening would misread the transnational and translational potency of aid expertise as it grew in tandem with its application across geographies, political regimes, and ideologies of race.

Similarly, any reading of Herzl’s protagonist’s statement as purely a practice of colonial whitening would neglect the significance of its qualification that it was Jews’ historical experience as a racial minority that gave them a privileged moral position through which they could mediate the colonial civilizing mission. Since this statement was made in the context of the production of colonial science, it suggests that Jews’ historical condition as an oppressed minority was brought to bear on their scientific expertise.

This qualification does not remain at the rhetorical level alone, since Steinbeck bases his vision on the Zionist ideology of racial rejuvenation, formulated as an antidote against Jews’ embodied difference. Based on an appropriation and reformulation of the colonial discourse on race and environmental determinism, this vision saw the root of the problem of African people in the “alien environment” to which they were forced with slavery. According to this

785 Among the most notable examples are Yugoslavia and China. On China’s aid see Jamie Manson, “Working Ahead of Time: Labor and Modernization during the Construction of the TAZARA Railway, 1968-86,” in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), ed. Christopher J. Lee, 235-65. African countries too engaged in aid as donors among themselves. See for example the “loan” of Nigerian doctors to Sierra Leone: “Two Nigerian Doctors on Loan from the Nigerian Government,” Daily Mail, January 5, 1961.

786 See chapter 1. Similarly, Japanese colonization practices became the model of development throughout Asia. See Aaron Stephen Moore, “’The Yalu River Era of Developing Asia;’ Japanese Expertise, Colonial Power, and the Construction of Sup’ung Dam,” The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 1 (February 2013): 116.

259 logic, similarly to the Jews, once they could return to their native environment they would again regenerate and thrive.787

While in the pre-state period the Labor Zionist discourse attempted to negate every aspect of

Jews’ Diaspora existence in the creation of the New Jew, in the world after Bandung the long history of Jews’ minority and racial oppression added a moral dimension to Israel’s attempts of self-fashioning as anti-colonial. In the competitive world of aid, in which even the French had “a rare pioneering spirit, ”as observed by one Israeli Histadrut member,788 the Foreign Ministry could capitalize on the Jews’ historical experience as an oppressed minority to buttress its assumed privileged moral position. Herzl’s protagonist’s quote, which was reiterated repeatedly by the foreign ministry, resonated even more strongly in the postwar climate of decolonization and the recent memory of the holocaust. The question is whether this historical minority experience translated into the realm of expertise, and if so, how it was reconciled with the anti-Diaspora self-fashioning of the pre-state pioneers.

Although the history of oppression per se did not have an explicit bearing on the discourse

787 African liberation intellectuals shared the language of Diaspora, return and national rejuvenation with Zionism. Similarly to Edward Blyden, African Liberation intellectuals such as Marcus Garvey and W.E.B Du Bois drew parallels to Zionism. For an informative but uncritical account (produced for the Jewish Agency) see Benyamin Neuberger, “Black Nationalism, Jews, and Zionism,” Avar Veatid: A Journal for Jewish Education, Culture, and Discourse (April 1996): 18-22. http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=12840, accessed December 30, 2014.

788 The Israeli experts found out that their emissary-pioneering position was not necessarily unique. As one Histdrut member explained, “We should not be vein and think that the Israeli emissary-pioneer is one of his kind. We should know that there are in Africa pioneering emissaries from other countries. I met French men in West Africa, who have exceptional friendly relationships with the Africans, who are very appreciated, and have a rare pioneering spirit (…) The Israeli emissary should stand the character test in competition with the emissaries of other countries, who are imbued as well with superb pioneering spirit.” Malkhin and Goldberg, 48-9 (My translation-AL).

260 of the pioneers/experts,789 some qualities relating to Jews’ Diaspora cosmopolitan qualities surfaced in relation to their ability to communicate with other nationalities’ experts or with the locals. Their command of European, Slavic and even Arabic languages was considered an advantage, as well as their ability to learn quickly the native languages.790 However, this minority-derived cosmopolitanism was generally seen as contradictory to the straightforwardness and cockiness of the Israeli experts.791

The Jewish-Italian architectural historian Bruno Zevi, who was familiar with the Zionist discourse, also made this distinction when describing the partnership of Sharon and

Benjamin Idelson from 1954 to 1964 as the meeting of “the pioneer’s optimistic climate” of the first with “the humanism of the Diaspora, the mysticism of the ghetto dreamers,” of the latter.792 Indeed, although Sharon had to flee Germany due to the Nazis’ rise to power and was as a result separated from his non-Jewish partner and newly born daughter, this experience is played down in his narrative in favor of the “pioneer optimism” of state building. The incorporation of his Sabra son into his narrative as the successive architectural generation that will supplant the place of Idelson further reaffirms the narrative of

789 Except for rare instances in which the cosmopolitanism of the wondering Jew was evoked to describe a “Diasporic emissary,” as in the following: “He had an exceptional human experience, I would say, that only a man [as in mensch – AL] that he is also a Jew, or a Jew that is also a man, can gain in such a short period.” Bar-Yosef, 170. (My translation-AL).

790 Zvi Szkolnik, the architect on site at Ife University at the late 1970s, spoke Polish, German, Italian, and English, and this may have contributed to his selection for the job. Italian was specifically useful since the largest contractors working on campus, besides Solel Boneh, were Italian. Zvi Szkolnik, interview by Ayala Levin, Haifa, Israel, August 3, 2011. Another example is of a Solel Boneh worker who spoke in Arabic with an Iraqi representative of Gropius’ The Architects’ Collaborative, who supervised the planning at an early stage. The Israeli representative in Lagos complained that Israeli managers in Africa do not always know English or even Hebrew, and resort to Polish and Yiddish when they converse with their African workers! Hannan Yavor, December 7, 1960, ISA MFA 2027/17.

791 Bar-Yosef, 169-170.

792 Bruno Zevi, forward to Arieh Sharon, Kibbutz +Bauhaus, 6.

261 regeneration and denial of Diaspora. However, at an early stage of the University of Ife project, the architects’ team composition at the office was supplemented by Harold Rubin, a

South African Jew whose involvement in the radical art scene in apartheid Johannesburg had led to his immigration to Israel. Joining the office in 1963, Rubin was put in charge of the design of most of the campus core, bringing with him not only a knowledge of African art, but also a particular sensitivity to race issues as seen through the ambiguous position of a

South African Jew.793

The incorporation of a “racial minority” consciousness as part of Israeli experts’ discourse presented not just a problem of anachronism, since it was negated in the pre-state period, but also an imminent danger to the Zionist project, since it would undermine the entire ethos of national rejuvenation. The intellectual historian Joseph Massad once described the Israeli

Sabra as imprisoned by a spatio-temporal conditioning:

…the Israeli Sabra with – almost always “his” new body can exist only within the Israeli space-time, outside of which “he” reverts to being the “feminine schleimiel” that he was before. As such the establishment of the Jewish settler colony makes it possible for postdiasporic Jewish male bodies to be decolonized only within it (…) Israel, as a postcolonial colony, can exist only in this temporal-spatial-corporeal limitation.794

793 Jews in South Africa were both white in a settler society, but also particularly attentive to the elusiveness and possible instability of racial categories. South African Jews aligned themselves with the regime to protect their status as white. However, some were active members of the most radical resistance. Attesting to that sensibility is the fact that among my interviewees, Rubin was the only one who mentioned an experience of anti-Semitism in his work in Nigeria, as he experienced it in his working relations with a librarian at Ife University from Malta. Harold Rubin and Miriam Keini, interview.

794 Massad, 340.

262 The question that arises, then, is what the effect was on the Israeli expert of stepping outside of this “temporal-spatial-corporeal limitation” to postcolonial spaces elsewhere. If the fiction of the Sabra, based on the “decolonization” of the Jewish body, could only occur within these limits, was there a danger of lapsing to the pre-Zionist Diasporic embodied difference, in a sort of a return of the oppressed? Or did Africa present an extension of these temporal- spatial limits, as suggested by Bar Yosef?795 To follow Boyarin’s line of argument, the

African territories served as a ground for affirming Jews’ whiteness even more easily than in

Palestine, since the African difference was ostensibly starker than the Palestinian Arabs’.796

If in the realm of expertise this whiteness is interpreted as implementing “human capital” knowledge and skills, then it follows, as suggested by this interpretation, that it was simply the continuation of a high modernist project and an extension of its abilities; testing it out in new territories in order to further sophisticate its techniques and opening new markets for capitalist expansion.

However, as a quote by Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first Foreign Minister and second Prime

Minister, suggests, “pioneering” in Africa was not so much about the opening of new markets as about maintaining a productive tension within Israeli society. The shift to sovereignty entailed another danger of degeneration, even within the spatial-temporal coordinates of the Zionist “postcolonial colony”:

The duty of volunteering [in Hebrew: hekhaltzut, deriving from the same root as pioneering, the term means extricating oneself] does not apply only to Africa. The development of the

795 Bar-Yosef, 128.

796 On the desire for sameness, which oscillated between attraction and repulsion, see Eyal, 33-61.

263 Negev is also a heavy task. So do the IDF and security are a great burden….. Against the fear that our strength will not suffice, there is the fear that the lack of demand, lack of need in strain and relief of tension – will degenerate us (…) moral degeneration is lurking us, and therefore there is a blessing in every difficult task, which entails tension. The load is needed for us like air for breathing, to be a worthy nation. … I believe that our security does not depend only on our weapons, but the climate of spiritual coping.797

Maintaining a productive tension between the non-developed and the developed world, nativity and colonialism, and minority and sovereignty was thus deemed essential against another relapse to “degeneration.” With independence, it seems that the country’s leaders fought against the security and normalization of feeling sovereign and “at home” in one’s alleged territory. Being “a nation like all nations” no longer seemed a viable option if it ever existed at all. As a continuum of the Negev desert, Africa presented a ground for a productive challenge to keep the Israeli experts “on their toes” in a dialectic where minority consciousness was kept as a faint flame to maintain the spark of the New Jew’s confidence and hone his expertise.

Tropical Zionism

Early in the process of designing the campus, Sharon was expected -- first by the university founders, and later by the Wisconsin team -- to address the tropical climate as a problem.

Given his experience in Palestine and Israel in adapting modern architecture to the conditions of the region, Sharon was not a stranger to climatic considerations.798 However, in Palestine and Israel these concerns were not consolidated discursively into a body of knowledge comparable to the British “Tropical Architecture” approach, which he may have

797 Malkhin and Goldberg, 78.

798 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 156-7.

264 first encountered at the 1954 UN housing convention in New Delhi.799 By the mid 1970s, when Sharon wrote his monograph “Kibbutz+Bauhaus,” he had appropriated the language of tropical architecture, only to attribute to Israel a privileged position in this discourse as a

“microclimatic pilot country.”800 Yet the preventive approach of the British discourse on tropical architecture or the resource management approach of the Wisconsin team was very different from what he had in mind when he first arrived in Nigeria. Embarking on his first survey tour, Sharon hoped “to receive a direct and immediate visual impression” of the towns and their surroundings,

… while intruding into the bush, by footpaths or narrow ways to get in immediate contact with Nature – the beautiful and outstanding trees, the rich bush-vegetation around them, the small streams and pools and the small hamlets, where the farmers are raising their food- crops (yam, banana, vegetables) and cash-crops (cocoa and Cola).801

Armed with only a camera and a sketchpad, Sharon’s ostensibly unmediated encounters with the region’s nature varied from the savannah areas in the north to its rain forests in the south.

At the end of the tour, he concluded that for the university site,

I would prefer a slightly undulated part of existing forest, containing tall and outstanding trees, rich bush-vegetation and some waterpools or streams. An undulated country site serves as a physical incentive for more varied and interesting siting of the buildings, enabling the architect to create a special relationship between the building groups so different in function

799 Sharon acted as a planning advisor to the Burmese government in the mid 1950s, when he was invited to participate at the U.N. Regional Planning and Housing Seminar held in New Delhi in 1954. In addition to Fry and Drew who participated there, Sharon met Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and Constantinos Doxiadis, who will later invite him to participate at the Delos symposia.

800 Arieh Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 188. See also Levin, 55-7.

801 Arieh Sharon to Dr. D. S. Onabamiro, November 22, 1960, AAAC, ASE. (My emphasis).

265 and character. The tall trees, pools or streams would serve as ideal landscape background to create out of the building groups, lawns and gardens an architectural entity.802

This description shows a preference for lush tropical vegetation with wooded hills and water streams, over the flat high-lands of the savannah. While there was an agricultural advantage to this area, clearly this was not Sharon’s prime concern.803 This idealized setting, in which even cash-crops are naturalized into a sort of biblical scene of primal abundance, is reminiscent of what David Arnold has named “tropicality”; a powerful construct in

European imaginary comparable to what Edward Said has named Orientalism (albeit unlike the latter it was based on natural sciences discourse rather than on the humanities).804 Yet, for Sharon, who originally arrived in Palestine from Eastern Europe to form an agricultural settlement in a difficult environment,805 this image of tropicality bore other implications

802 Ibid, ibid.

803 The second and final report was less idealizing. Attesting perhaps to Sharon’s more thorough study of the region, the final report presented a more complicated view of what was previously presented as an idealized simplistic divide between living and working, and nature. This time Sharon expressed his concern about the entailed displacement of farmers as a result of the building of a campus. One of his arguments for preferring the area northwest of the town was the scarcity of its current inhabitants due to the high density of the bush in this area. Thus architectural intervention was justified as long as traditional farmers could otherwise not use it. This choice of bush area caused more difficulties in terms of measuring and clearing the land, paradoxically exactly because it fitted more neatly with Sharon’s imagery of an untouched natural environment. However, as Tim Livsey show, in the case of the site chosen for the construction of the University College Ibadan some 14 years earlier, the metropolitan experts’ evaluation of the extent of farming in the area was as far from accurate. While they argued that the site was essentially empty, having “almost no farms,” local colonial officials claimed that it was in fact “heavily farmed” with forty-fifty villages of two or three mud huts, and as a result at least 345 farmers were displaced and compensated by the chief. For a foreign observer as Sharon, like the British metropolitan experts, two-three mud huts probably did not constitute a farm, and therefore he could easily misevaluate the extent of agricultural activity in the area. The university’s historians support this evaluation. However, their account might be biased and based on governmental publications that cite Sharon’s report. See Arieh Sharon to Chief S.L. Akintola, February 12, 1961, AAAC, ASE; Livsey, 676-7; Osomoni and Adediran, 13.

804 David Arnold, “’Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 1 (2000): 7. Tropicality is based on a slightly different set of discursive fields than Orientalism, as it is cultivated more in the natural sciences than in the humanities. See also David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 805 Sharon on his early years in Palestine: “For a year we worked under very hard condtions – making roads, clearing swamps and working as farmhand to gain some agricultural experience. In the following year, we took

266 whose nineteenth century European colonial imaginary only served as a substrate. While for the European colonizers, tropicality stood for complete otherness and untamed primitive nature, for Sharon it stood for an ideal of abundance and fertility, an inexhaustible source of natural riches and the fantasy of the Zionist revival of the biblical “land of milk and honey” which found its expression in the iconic landscapes designed by landscape architects

Yahalom Lipa and Dan Tzur in kibbutzim, public parks and university campuses in Israel.806

Sharon, who had worked with the two on numerous occasions, invited the first to consult on the landscape design of the Western Nigerian campus early in the process.807

In an essay published in 1940, Sharon argued that in rural areas public buildings (for

Kibbutzim, mostly) should be situated in a landscape “with maximum humility and harmony, because nature is more significant than human deeds,” obfuscating the fact that most of the natural landscape of the Jewish settlement in Palestine was made possible through intense human intervention. “The true talent of the architect,” he stated, “is expressed in his ability to maximize the building’s correspondence with the landscape, with minimum of

over a small kibbutz named Gan Shmuel in the swamp area of Wadi Hedera. Our small group consisted of eighteen boys and girls, eking out an existence under incredibly bad living conditions, with insufficient food, and with all of us afflicted by recurring bouts of malaria.” Arieh Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 14-5.

806 Bar-Yosef makes a similar observation regarding the reversal of mission of the Israeli expert/pioneer, from “blossoming the wasteland” to clearing the bush. Bar-Yosef , 132. On the work of Yahalom Lipa and Dan Tzur see: Nurit Lissovsky and Diana Dolev, Tavnit Nof: Haganim shel Lipa Yahalom Ve-Dan Tzur (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2012).

807 Yahalom Lipa to Arieh Sharon, April 16, 1961. AAAC, ASE. In this letter Lipa, who is on his way to West Africa (unclear where exactly and for what reasons), agrees to pass through Ife to inspect the site and consult on its development and planning, with the hope of getting the contract in the future. However, no such contract was commissioned.

267 exaggeration, in spite of the scale and solid blocs of a big public building.”808 The tropics presented Sharon the opportunity to “work with” the landscape as a given constant, rather than a manipulatable variable, to achieve his desired authentic relationship of “humility and harmony.”809 Thus Sharon’s description of himself “intruding into the bush, by footpaths or narrow ways” encapsulated his idea of his architecture’s “intrusion” that would be delicately carved from within the wooded hilly landscape rather than imposed on it in grand transformative gesture.810

Golda Meir expressed a similar sentiment regarding African natural abundance in a talk she gave at the Halie Selassie I University in Addis Ababa. Although Addis Ababa’s high altitude and dry climate is far from the rain forest Sharon found in West Nigeria, Meir was equally impressed by the lavish but carefully designed garden of the university campus, which only a few years earlier had served as the garden of the emperor’s palace. She told the students emphatically “how they [in Israel] worked hard to develop the country… how they squeezed water out of the desert soil…to give life to the barren and uninviting Negev desert and other dry parts of the country,” according to one student’s report.811 Comparing

Ethiopia’s and Israel’s conditions, while ignoring the droughts that the first had recurrently suffered from, she continued: “you have no problem of water here…in fact, I see a country that is full with beauty…unlimited beauty and unlimited possibilities – water, sunshine, soil

808 Arieh Sharon, “Habniya Hatsiburit Ba’arets,” in Esrim Shenot Bniya: Hityashvut, Shikun, Umosdot Tsibur Hapoalim (Tel Aviv: General Federation of Jewish Labour in Palestine; Engineers’, Architects’ and Surveyors’ Union, 1940), 116. (My translation-AL).

809 By the beginning of the 1960s, Sharon had already experience working in Beer Sheva, in a desert climate.

810 The wide long entry road that leads to the campus contradicts this early vision.

811 “Madam Goldameir (sic) Speaks to Students,” Busi-Body 1, no. 6 (December 26, 1963): 5. (My emphasis- AL).

268 and everything grows by itself, even without planting them.”812 Amos Spitz, AMY’s resident architect at Ife in the early 1970s, expressed the same astonishment regarding vegetation at

Ife, saying that even dead bamboo stems grew leaves in that climate.813

Directing her motivational speech to students who were about to embark on a university service program to the rural areas, Meir’s words implied a critique in the spirit of the Zionist discourse on “human material”: you have everything here, and yet fail to take advantage of it. Rooted in Jewish settlers’ claims against the Arab population in Palestine in the battle over the country’s economic absorptive capacity, the implication of her speech was that the problem was not Ethiopia’s lack of natural resources, but the attitude and capacity of its people. If for Fry and Drew the tropics’ climate was the cause for all ills of tropical existence, then in the Zionist logic the generations of Arab residents in Palestine were responsible for the dilapidation of the natural resources of the country. The displacement of the problem from the natural realm to human capacity had direct bearings on the feasibility of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Following the 1929 Palestinian riots, the British

Mandate posed limitations on Jewish immigration based on the limits of the country’s economic absorptive capacity. As a response the Zionist Organization commissioned various experts, Jews and non-Jews, to prove the potentialities of the land, which, it was argued, was once a land of milk and honey. Once it was back in the right hands, so it was argued, it

812 Ibid, ibid. The problem, so she insinuated, was not to be found in Ethiopia’s objective conditions but in its people’s attitude. Unwittingly, Meir reiterated here the colonial paradigm of difference that is implied in the concept of “human material.”

813 Amos Spitz, interviews by Ayala Levin, Ramat Hasharon, Israel, December 20, 2012; Lagos, Nigeria, January 17-8, 2013. Spitz brought it up twice on difference occasions, which indicates that it is a story he likes to tell; an instance of almost magical abundance.

269 would regain its biblical economic potential.814 Thus the role of experts, human capital, and technology was not the promethean reshaping of the environment, as James Scott describes the projects of high modernism, but the returning of it to its imagined original capacities.815

Following this logic, Ife’s nature was not seen as something that humans, foreigners or locals, needed protection from. On the contrary, Sharon attempted to keep his intervention within the landscape to a minimum, for example by keeping all the tall trees intact.816 When

Sharon added covered pathways between the buildings, it was more for aesthetic reasons, to visually connect the buildings, than to provide protection from sun and rain.817 Yet more than any other element, it was Sharon’s insistence on the openness of the buildings envelope that signified most distinctly how far his approach was from the British tropical architecture.

While Fry and Drew limited openings in order to minimize the infiltration of natural menaces, including insects, their “insidious enemies,”818 for Sharon the possible threats presented by the openings were downplayed and transformed into joyful creatures such as birds and butterflies:

814 The rational of this argument was that this transformation would not only benefit the Jews, but the Arabs and the region at large.

815 Archeology played an important part in this rationalization. See Troen 1992; El Haj, 2001.

816 In Ife, Sharon not only found the perfect scenery to work out his vision for rural public buildings, but he had the backing of the Vice Chancellor Oluwasanmi, who was criticized for spending too much on the university’s lawns than on staff housing. See Imevbore, 44. A repeating concern in Sharon’s correspondence with AMY representatives in Ife was the tall trees he insisted on keeping. At least on one occasion Sharon and the Vice Chancellor did not see eye to eye, when an order came from the latter’s office to cut off the trees that blocked the view of the library from the main access road. Sharon correspondence with the VC office and AMY, September 6, 1966; September 5, 1968, AAAC, ASE.

817 Sharon insisted on photos that will include male and female students, as well as the vegetation. See Arieh Sharon correspondence January 13-4, 1974; April 3, 1974, AAAC, ASE; Arieh Sharon to Harold Rubin, February 14, 1975, AAAC, ASE.

818 Fry and Drew 1964, 23.

270

There was considerable discussion about the dining-hall, the upper space of which is left open below the folded roof, cantilevered for sun and rain protection, without any windows. Some of the professors were afraid of the open spaces, arguing that birds and butterflies might disturb the students, but in the end they agreed to leave the hall open, with the possibility of installing windows in the future, if needed. To this day, the space has remained open and everybody enjoys it, even the few birds and butterflies… 819

Serving as a euphemism for what the university officials were probably more concerned about – the hygienic conditions of the dining hall and fear of malaria, the mosquito-borne deadly tropical disease – Sharon’s description tells us more about his biases than his clients’.

It was not that Sharon was unaware of the threat of malaria; he knew it firsthand from his pioneering days at the kibbutz. By 1931, infectious and parasitic diseases like malaria had become the third most common cause of mortality in Palestine.820 As Sandra Sufian explains, malaria eradication was an integral component of the Labor Zionist settlement narrative:

“you say drying, you mean swamp; by swamp you mean malaria: malaria means pioneers; and they mean settlement, plowing the first furrow, dancing an energetic hora, values, vision, land, Zionism. And so, by the power of words that are too lofty and professionalism that is too low, the [Hula] lake has been dried, killed, and turned into an allegory.”821 The relationship between human capital, human recourses, and the environment in the Zionist narrative reached its apogee in the Hula lake land reclamation project. But as Sufian’s acerbic description implies, there was an ideological tension between the pioneers, the

819 Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 128.

820 Sandra M. Sufian, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine 1920- 1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9.

821 Ibid, 4

271 “human material” that helped to materialize this restoration while facing its dangers, and the

“human capital” – the experts that planned how to do so scientifically. Before the pioneers were co-opted into the anti-malaria campaigns in the late 1920s, getting infected was seen as a heroic rite of passage and self-sacrifice.822 As Dr. Isaac M. Rubinow, the first director of the American Zionist Medical Unit in Palestine commented in 1921, experts’ insistence on the use of mosquito veils and gloves “shows un utter lack of familiarity with the habits and psychology of the Halutzim [pioneers].”823 Although eventually it was the high modernist project of population management and land reclamation that eradicated malaria in the country, in Sharon’s recollections it was with group spirit and singing that such ills were overcome.824

To materialize, the Zionist project needed both the Steinbecks and the Sharons. Or rather, professionals like Sharon, who established their expert’s knowledge on the basis of their settler-pioneering experience, eventually supplanted colonial experts as epitomized in

Steinbeck. If Steinbeck’s character was doubled by his brother the architect to give the colonial mission a semblance of coherence and comprehensiveness, Sharon’s professional character was qualified by his pioneering self. This interdependence of scientific expertise of

“human capital” and the ideological zeal of the “human material” gave Zionism its specific anti-colonial flair, which differentiated it from other colonial projects and could be exported to Africa. Even if Sharon’s experience was both anachronistic and idealistic, it constituted a

822 Ibid, 36-8.

823 Cited ibid, 37.

824 Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 15. Sharon’s group refused the Jewish authorities urging to leave the settlement following the death of some members. Ibid, ibid.

272 layer of his embodied expertise as it took shape in his encounter with Africa. But this anachronism was far from a product of a subjective experience or a delirious mind in the tropical heat. It was very much cultivated and sustained in the Israeli public discourse that even went as far as eulogizing the death from malaria of Israelis in Africa as a pioneering sacrifice.825

An Architecture of Regeneration

In Sharon and Meir’s encounter with African abundance, we witness the collision of

Orientalist and tropicalist constructions, mediated via the experience of the rejuvenated body of the Zionist Jew. If the tropical environment presented to the British colonial settler the threat of degeneration, for the Zionist settler the arid Middle Eastern environment presented a challenge of acclimatization and fertilization that entailed the promise of national regeneration. As various scholars have argued, the Zionist discourse was affected by race science discourse and accepted its proposition that the Jews are a degenerate and a degenerating race. However, regarding cause Zionist thinkers shifted the emphasis from biological essentialism to environmental reasons such as the living conditions in the Eastern

European shtetl or the modern, alienating city in which most Western European Jews lived.

As anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj has stressed, the rejuvenation of the Jewish body was construed explicitly as an antidote to biological degeneration. The same pathology was extended metaphorically to the land of Palestine, which in a typical Orientalist view was perceived as “dead” land, infertile and unproductive physically, economically and culturally.

Degeneration was thus displaced to the Arab inhabitants and their “degenerate

825 Bar-Yosef, 168.

273 agriculture.”826 In this formulation, only by reconnecting the people to their land would the two be regenerated and “cured.” If the “healing” of the Jewish body could only occur through its relocation to the native land, and a transformation, through the working of this land, into a productive nation, what was the role of architecture in mediating this relationship?

In architecture, the notion of degeneration as promoted by Viennese architect Adolf Loos at the turn of the twentieth century was engrained in the same discourse as Jewish degeneracy.

That the long list of degenerates in his highly influential 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime”

- “negroes, Arabs, rural peasants, women and children -”827 did not include the Jews was not because Loos was unaware of the discourse on Jewish degeneracy. It is more likely that he did not want to offend the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie, who were among his most loyal clients.828 An unacknowledged influence on Loos was the 1892 publication of Degeneration by Max Nordau, a Jewish physician and journalist who would become an important Zionist leader a few years later, second only to Theodor Herzl, Loos’ Viennese contemporary.829 A disciple of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who famously merged the discourses

826 Sufian, 124.

827 Anne Anlin Chang, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24.

828 Loos respected Jews’ attempts of assimilation, and even considered assimilated Jews such as Leopold Goldman, his tailor and client, as models of cosmopolitan modernity. See Elena Shapira, “Adolf Loos and the Fashioning of ‘the other’: Memory, Fashion, and Interiors,” Interiors 2, no. 2 (2011): 213-238.

829 George L. Mosse, “Max Nordau, Liberalism and the New Jew,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 4 (October 1992): 565-581. Loss’s “Ornament und Verbrechen” (1908) was a culmination of ideas Loos began to develop as early as 1898, when he wrote an article on the occasion of the Vienna Jubilee exhibition of the same year. See Jimena Canales and Andrew Herscher, “Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos”, Architectural History 48 (2005): 236. See also Todd Samuel Presner, “’Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’: Max Nordau and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration,” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 2 (April 2003): 269-92.

274 on crime and primitivism and whose influence on Loos is well documented, Nordau expanded Lombroso’s criminal anthropology to the cultural realm. Addressing material culture, specifically the interrelations between makeup, dress, and interior design as a basis for his critique of fin de siècle signs of degeneration, Nordau must have influenced Loos, whose writing addressed architectural culture in continuum with fashion and interior decoration.830

In the history of Zionism, however, Nordau is remembered as the man responsible for

Zionism’s “bodily turn,” as historian Boaz Neumann has named it.831 Coining the term

“Muscular Judaism” at the second World Zionist Congress, Nordau stressed that environmental causes were responsible for Jews’ degeneracy.832 Once they were changed,

Jews would be redeemed from the inauthentic existence of their assimilationist mimicry:

[A]ll the elements of Aristotelian physics – light, air, water and earth – were measured out to us very sparingly. In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly; the fear of constant persecution turned our powerful voices into frightened whispers (…) but now, all coercion has become a memory of the past, and at least we are allowed space enough for our bodies to live again. Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep- chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.833

830 See, for example, Canales and Herscher, 238, 240.

831 Boaz Neumann, Teshukat Hakhalutsim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009), 157.

832 Muskeljudentum, translated also as Jewry of muscle.

833 Max Nordau, “Jewry of Muscle (June 1903),” in The Jew in the Modern World, eds. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 547.

275 A year earlier Nordau had explained:834

The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations with his fellow-beings, timid with strangers, suspicious even toward the secret feeling of his friends. His best powers are exhausted in the suppression, or at least in the difficult concealment of his own real character. For he fears that this character might be recognized as Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing himself as he is in all his thoughts and sentiments [in every tremble of his voice, eyelid, or finger].835 He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher feeling men, as is everything that is unreal [fake].836

The sites of vulnerability in the Jew’s bodily mimicry as charted by Nordau embodied the fear of exposing his difference “in every tremble of his voice, eyelid, or finger.” Since these sites are both sensorial and expressive organs, the same organs that could “give away” the

Jew in his incomplete or excessive mimicry connect the sensorial absorption of the body with its expressive capacities at the symbolic level. Once the Jew’s environment changed and he would no longer need to conceal the fact of his Jewishness, these are precisely the sites that would mediate the re-writing of the Jew’s body (the “human material” of the immigrants)837 through its renewed relationship with light, air, water, and land. From this perspective, the modernist apartment perquisites of light and air construed in relation to new standards of living, gain a new significance in the Jewish colonial settlement in Palestine.

834 Max Nordau, “Address at the First Zionist Congress, August 29, 1897,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/nordau1.html, accessed January 8, 2015.

835 I added this sentence that is omitted from the English translation but exists in the Hebrew one. Cited in Neumann, 156. (My translation-AL).

836 See for comparison the Hebrew translation cited in Neumann: “he has never the joyful feeling of showing himself as he is, to be himself in every thought and sentiment. In his interiority he becomes cripple, in his exteriority – fake.” Ibid, ibid. (My translation-AL).

837 Ibid, 148.

276 Mirroring the supposedly clean slate of the territory from which it sprang, most exemplified in the myth of Tel Aviv growing from the white sand,838 the clean, smooth surface of modernist white served as a clean slate to project the Zionist ideological program onto the landscape while inscribing this imaginary onto the bodies of its inhabitants.839 This process was threefold and included whitewashing the surface, the filtering-in of the environment’s salubrious elements, and the allocation of space for social performance at the boundary of buildings. Following Mark Wigley’s analysis of the modernist white wall, in its Zionist rendering the white wall does not represent a passive neutrality: “the whitewash is not simply what is left behind after the removal of decoration. It is an active mechanism of erasure. Rather than a clean surface it is a cleaning agent, cleaning the image of the body in order to liberate the eye.840” As Nitzan-Shiftan writes, “in the context of the Yishuv [the

Jewish settlement in Palestine], the stark white house was, for Posener [architect and theorist

Julius Posener, who emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1935], the proper traceless home for the uprooted Jew, ‘an apartment free from past memories.’”841 In a double move of erasure and purification, the white wall served as a healing agent for the Jewish degenerate and sick

838 Maoz Azaryahu, Tel Aviv, Ha’ir Ha’amitit: Mitografya Historit (Beer Sehva: Makhon Ben-Gurion, Ben- Gurion University, 2005), 55-61. See also: Nitza Metzger-Szmuk, Batim min Hakhol: Adrikhalut Hasignon Habenle’umi Be-Tel Aviv 1931-1948 (Tel Aviv: Keren Yehoshu’a Rabinovitch Le’omanuyot; Keren Tel-Aviv Lefituakh; Misrad Habitakhon, 1994). The first part of the title literally translates, “houses from the sand.”

839 This reading is based on Neumann’s use of Freud’s term “ego-body” which is also relevant to this discussion via the mediation of Teresa de Lauretis’s reading of Frantz Fanon. According to Freud, “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but it itself the projection of a surface. [It] is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body.” This definition is important for the present discussion for two reasons: first, it privileges the surface of the body as the site of sensual perception, and second, as de Lauretis puts it, the ego-body is a permeable boundary that mediates between the bodily experience and the symbolic: it “does not merely delimit or contain the imaginary morphology of an individual self, but actually enables access to the symbolic.” See de Lauretis, 57.

840 Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 8.

841 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 158. Artist Danny Karavan even interpreted Tel Aviv as a victory over the Nazis. See Sharon Rotbard, Ir Levana, Ir Shekhora (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2005), 75-6.

277 body, and a cleaning agent of past memories in which the Jewish body was marked as degenerate and sick in the first place. Thus what Wigley calls the “liberation of the eye” also offers a seeming liberation from history and memory: in the Zionist context, the white wall represents the fantasy of liberating the Jewish body from its tortured history in order to be imagined anew in a clean-slate territory as a sovereign subject.842

The relationship to climate was particularly challenging since while the building served as protection from the elements, it was supposed to concurrently facilitate the successful acclimatization of the immigrant Jews’ bodies. The Labor Zionist challenge was to acclimatize the Jewish body in order to affirm its claim to a historic belonging in the territory and to naturalize the settler-Jews presence while maintaining a difference from the

Arab population. Thus while concerns over acclimatization and degeneration were shared in both British and Zionist colonial histories, they took on a different form of relationship with the environment that can be roughly characterized as an overtly defensive and alienating approach versus a nonchalant approach attempting to minimize the drama of the settlers’ acclimatization efforts. Drama - since the colonial experience entailed a performance on both ends, similarly to the colonized mimicry of the colonizer, so too the colonizer was

“dressed up” for the occasion. Contemplating the Jews’ architectural acclimatization,

Posener decisively rejected Edward Lutyens’ famous comparison of his architecture in India to an “Englishmen dressed for the weather.”843 Such a position would repeat the Jews’ failed attempt at assimilation in Europe, since it would reenact the divide created between the

842 As architectural critique Sharon Rotbard stresses, far from marking a clean break from history the white wall was used as a tool for violent erasure and exclusion in Tel Aviv’s construction first as an ethnically pure suburb of Jaffa and later as a Hebrew and Israeli city. See Rotbard, especially part II.

843 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 157.

278 public and private life of the Jew, resulting in a split subjecthood of being “a man outside, a

Jew within.”844 The embrace of the environment in modernist vocabulary not only filled the gap created by the rejection of Diaspora costumes, but also provided the alternative matter from which a distinct Zionist vernacular could be molded. Through reconnecting with the territory, the modernist white walls that once signified the assimilated Jew’s desire for anonymity, desensualization, and transparency now regained their corporeal expressiveness.

This approach is particularly evident in Sharon’s 1940 essay, in which he criticized the contemporary state of architecture in Palestine, claiming that it “is still too European.”845

Most of the existing public buildings, he argued, would go unnoticed if placed in Central

Europe. Sharon lists in that essay the different measures employed to address climate in

Palestine, including western and north-western orientation, shading hoods, balconies, and thick isolating walls. “I am certain,” he concludes, “that when our roots will deepen in the country, the climate will be a determinant factor in the building’s planning, and would determine its eretzisraeli unique character.”846 Architecture too, so it can be inferred, is subject to acclimatization. Like the settlers, it will gradually become one with the country as they “deepen their roots.”847 While the European-looking buildings did incorporate, to some degree, climate control measures, Sharon argued that these solutions were not radical or

844 On assimilation dilemmas, see Yitzhak Konforti, “Hayehudi Hakhadash Bamakheshava Hatsiyonit: Leumiut, Ideologiya Vehistroyografia,” Israel 16 (2009): 63-96; Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 64-72.

845 Sharon, “Habniya Hatsiburit,” 116.

846 Eretz Israel, literally: the country of Israel. This is how Palestine was referred to by the Jewish settlement prior to the establishment of the state.

847 Sharon, “Habniya Hatsiburit,” 116.

279 satisfactory enough, since they did not constitute a unique architectural imprint.848 Curiously, he regretted the fact that there was not enough experimentation with internal courtyards, thick walls and open-air staircases that lead to green roofs; using the latter as an allusion to

Le Corbusier’s Five Points to modernize the Arab vernacular he evoked.849

Giving shape to the rejuvenating and regenerating encounter between the New Jew and his old-new environment, architecture served as a mediator for the sensual connectivity with the territory rather than as a protective shelter in the traditional sense. The sensual connectivity with the territory and its elements was crucial to redeem what Neumann has called, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the body without organs of the halutz (Jewish pioneer). According to Neumann’s analyses of the pioneers’ discourse, the halutz figure of the second and third immigrations (1904-1914 and 1919-1923, respectively; Sharon arrived to Palestine in the latter) was perceived as a body without organs that mirrored a land without organs. Only via the relationship of work with which the pioneer’s body re- territorialized the land could his body articulate its organs and regenerate them.850 While this reconnection is imagined first and foremost via tropes such as blood and sweat,851 tools also came to assist in this reconnection and mutual transformation. Neumann mentions the hoe and the rifle, in particular, as prosthetic devices that were imagined as part of the halutz’s

“ego-body.” Similarly to the hoe and the rifle, architecture – particularly the envelope – functioned as a prosthetic device that extended the body onto the territory rather than

848 Ibid, ibid.

849 Ibid, ibid.

850 Neumann, 164.

851 Ibid, 31-60.

280 delimiting it by separation. As the frontier duality of the hoe and rifle suggests, this re- territorialization by means of appropriation of the land implied also the dispossession of others. Openness to the environment came at the cost of violently excluding its “hostile elements,” which in the Zionist settlers’ parlance meant people, rather than natural elements.

As is well known, Nordau’s Jewish regeneration through muscles as an antidote to the stereotype of the defenseless effeminate Jew was not limited a passive intake of the salubrious effects of the environment.

The metonymic relations between the New Jew’s body and the modernist building envelope is articulated in a caricature published in Habinyan Bamisrah Hakarov (Building in the Near

East, the Tel Aviv Chug Journal) that compared Tel Aviv building facades to an acrobat standing on his hands, mirrored by a dog, both moving to the sounds of the tune of a flute player (fig. 46). “Acrobatics and Architecture: Acrobatics According to Chagall,” the title reads. The reference to Chagall, who typically depicted Jewish Eastern European shtetl, is juxtaposed with the image of Tel Aviv, the first “Hebrew city” that epitomized the negation of Diaspora and Jewish traditional life. The only reminder of Chagall’s shtetl is the flute player, a recurrent figure (together with the violinist) in Chagall’s paintings of Jewish

Hassidic life. Fully dressed in the European tradition (although his pants have a clownish print), the flute player is contrasted with the acrobat who is barely covered with a bathing suit – referring perhaps to the beach culture that had developed in Tel Aviv - leaving most of his body bare, his muscles articulated, his skin exposed.852 While the flute player represents the “old” Jew, the acrobat represents a newly transformed one. Tel Aviv’s new apartment buildings that frame this scene seem to mimic the acrobat’s body: their balconies burst out in

852 Azaryahu, 272-288.

281 different directions like his twisted limbs and protruding muscles. Representing Nordau’s fantasy of the “deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men,” the acrobat regained his “gay movement,” now ridiculed as clownish.853 Mirrored by the dancing dog, the acrobat has no more willpower than the snake in Orientalist representations such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s

The Serpent Charmer of 1880 that represents in the Judo-Christian imagination the moral threat of bodily temptations. The caricature therefore implies the danger lurking in too much openness to the environment, as in the threat embedded in the development of a promiscuous Levantine culture in Tel Aviv.854 There is thus no assurance that the overcoming of one form of degeneration will not lead to another.

According to architectural preservationist Nitza Metzger-Szmuk, the balconies became the most dominant design feature in Tel Aviv’s urban landscape. Facing the street façade, they had decorative value in their play of mass, light and shadow, and curving horizontal lines.

The rounded balconies or curving building mass created “an atmosphere of freedom, optimism and cheerfulness.”855 Other than functioning as a metonym for the extending limbs and gay movement of the New Jews, the balconies provided the stage for the New Jews’ performance. While in the 1920s, as Metzger-Szmuk notes, the balconies faced the courtyards, in the thirties the living rooms and their balconies turned to face the street.

Whereas in Vienna, Loos’s displacement of theatricality into the interior of the house, leaving the exterior anonymous, was particularly attractive to assimilated Jews,856 in Tel

853 Nordau, “Jewry of Muscle,” 547.

854 Azaryahu, 64-6, 259-261, 269.

855 Metzger Szmuck, 24. (My translation-AL).

856 Shapira, 213-238.

282 Aviv, the New Jew extroverted domestic functions like evening dining by moving them out onto the balcony, where the private sphere met street life.857 In this liminal space, the Jewish assimilation problem of being a “man outside” and a “Jew within,” was supplanted by the blurring of lines between the intimate sphere of the petit-bourgeois family life and the life of the nation.

A Self-Protecting Building

At Ife, Sharon managed to achieve the unique architectural imprint he had been searching for in Palestine. Responding to climate with the reversed pyramid shape – a decision he made as early as 1962 when designing the Humanities Faculty (figs. 41-4) – prescribed the architectural tone of the entire core, including the buildings that would follow in the next decade. As stated earlier in this chapter, Ife University had to be given a distinct modern outlook that would rival that of University College Ibadan, which was then the most ambitious modernist project in the Western Region and possibly in the entire country. The need to distinguish Ife University and give it a memorable image was further enhanced in the following years, since it was subjected to temporary facilities in Ibadan from 1962 to

1966, when the various faculties began to gradually move to the permanent site. The geographical proximity, and Ife University’s lack of original buildings of its own in Ibadan, resulted in a perception of the university as an extension of University College Ibadan, and not the unique independent institution its founders destined it to be.858 Furthermore, the problem of carving a distinct – even spectacular - modern image addressed an international audience as much as it addressed the domestic one. The modern architectural image needed

857 Szmuk, 29. There would be no need for that in a kibbutz, since dining took place in a shared dining room.

858 Imevbore, 36.

283 to compensate for the rural setting, which placed Ife University at a disadvantage in relation to the University of Ibadan (known as such beginning in 1963, when it became independent from British administration) and the new University of Lagos. It therefore needed to present a “top quality” modern architecture which would attract cooperation with universities internationally despite its peripheral setting as a Nigerian rural university.859

The Humanities Faculty series of three reversed pyramids painted white and dark grey produced a striking architectural image. However, in order to present a viable modernist alternative to Fry and Drew’s design it had to be justified climatically. Sharon distinguished this design from the neighboring University College Ibadan and other works of British and local architects by claiming the reversed pyramid was “self-protective”:

One of the main planning considerations was to relate the building design to the climatic factors. Most of the public buildings in Nigeria are oriented from east to west, their main elevations facing north and south, thus being protected from heat and glare. This also ensures cross-ventilation by prevailing breezes, coming mainly from the south. Many of these buildings erected by English or local architects use as sun protection either concrete canopies and frames around the windows, or louvers and precast ornamental elements around the terraces. We proposed to make the buildings self-protecting against the monsoon rain and the intensive sun and glare by cantilevering the floors one over another. (…) this solution proved useful and efficient, because all the continuous openings protected by simply turning glass louvers are, de facto, open and they can catch the breezes along the whole elevation line. At the same time, they are protected from sun and rain by the cantilevering terraces.860

859 Ibid, 18, 23, 25, 29, 36-7. VC Oluwasanmi emphasized international recognition by encouraging faculty’s participation in international conferences, promoting research, cooperation with international universities from Europe and the US, and awarding honorary degrees to prominent international figures, such as President of Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor.

860 Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 128. (My emphasis-AL).

284

In this explanation, Sharon differentiated between sun protection devices and the building’s mass. Contrasting a “self-protecting building” with “applied solar shade device,” he rendered the latter additive and removable as ornament (fig. 44). This additive quality was especially pronounced in this climate, since the brise-soleil had to be detached from the wall in order to be effective. It seems that Sharon followed the modernist functionalist and aesthetic purification even further than the master Le Corbusier, who appropriated the brise- soleil as his own invention. If the latter once proclaimed “the task of the architect is to vitalize the surfaces which clothe these masses, but in such a way that these surfaces do not become parasitical, eating up the mass and absorbing it to their own advantage,”861 by the

1940s, he prided himself on having “invented” the brise-soleil as the building’s clothing:

“you have given it a skeleton (independent structure), its vital organs (the communal services of the building); a fresh shining skin (the curtain wall); you have stood it on its legs

(the pilotis). And now you have given it magnificent clothes adaptable to all climates!”862

Just as in the story the Emperor’s New Clothes, only in reverse, the magnificent clothes ended up covering the cloth that enveloped the masses, now rendered as skin to mask the first’s redundancy.

As Hanna le Roux has observed, the site that received tropical architecture’s most attention was the building’s boundary. Brise-soleil and other screens were incorporated as filtering devices that modified light and heat penetration and freed the indoor spaces to function like

861 Cited in Wigley, 114.

862 Cited in le Roux, “Building on the Boundary,” 443. See also Daniel A. Barber, “Le Corbusier, the Brise- Soleil, and the Socio-Climatic Project of Modern Architecture, 1929-1963,” Thresholds 40 (2012): 21-32.

285 “the cooler, darker spaces of the European metropolis from where the [original] users come.”863 Similarly to tropical medicine, which was principally targeted to colonial officials and armies as clients,864 tropical architecture was designed primarily to accommodate the needs of the European colonizer. Even with decolonization, its norms of comfort that were

“based on metropolitan experiments and standards” continued to serve as a yardstick.865

Seeing their role as creators of the “future matrix of tropical existence”866 and their task as

“creating an environment in which the tropical peoples may flourish”867 Fry and Drew did not need to adapt their standards or their design attitude, since the westernized Nigerian elite followed the European ones: “The climatic conditions have dictated social costumes which allow large areas of bare skin to be exposed. It is the land of shorts, beads, bare breasts and arms, although conventions of the West have and are affecting this sensible dress.”868 As

Frantz Fanon explained, the reaction to the weather became one of the prominent indicators to distinguish between “social climbers” and those “who keep their notion of their origin”:

“If he [the Antillean returning from the métropole] says: ‘I am so happy to be back among you. Good Lord, it’s so hot in this place; I’m not sure I can put up with it for long,’ they [his friends and family] have been forewarned – it’s a European who’s come back.”869 Although

Fry and Drew implied that they deemed this colonial mimicry insensible, they saw their task as easing the way for the transformation. Correspondingly, they created an architecture that

863 Le Roux, “Building on the Boundary,” 444.

864 Sufian, 9.

865 Le Roux, 444.

866 Fry and Drew 1964, 20.

867 Ibid, 17.

868 Ibid, 31.

869 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 20.

286 would facilitate the wearing of European suits at the price of increasing Africans’ alienation from their environment. Thus instead of designing a building “like an Englishman dressed for the weather,” now the design was for a Nigerian dressed for the English weather in his native Nigeria, resulting in Le Corbusier’s double clothing in a climate that necessitated none.

Similarly, in Palestine, architects’ attention was given primarily to the buildings’ liminal spaces. Modern architecture principles as defined by Le Corbusier’s Five Points were applied predominantly and only partially at the exteriors - pilotis, flat roof, ribbon window – while the interior was far from adhering to the free plan principle, and neither the façade was truly “free.”870 The main adaptation to climate introduced in Palestine was the horizontally elongated balconies (the subject of the caricature analyzed above) that replaced the ribbon window.871 Since large glazed apertures were not climatically appropriate for the Middle

Eastern sun, window openings were smaller than in Europe, and were embedded within protruding concrete frames which limited the light that came in from above.872 For the same reason, protruding concrete hoods, or thin cast concrete hanging “aprons” shaded the balconies that replaced the long strips of windows.873 Alongside the aesthetic effect of their

870 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 158.

871 Ibid, 158-9; Metzger-Szmuk, 26; Levin, “Regional Aspects,” 253.

872 Metzger-Szmuk, 25-6; Levin, “Regional Aspects,” 244.

873 Ibid, 28-9.

287 streamlined horizontality, the balconies decreased the interior apartments’ sun exposure while giving access to airflow.874

Architectural historian Alona Nitzan Shiftan has described this effect as “double screen.”875

This phrase is equally apt to, or even better describes Fry and Drew’s systematic use of parallel screens, which they famously implemented in the UCI campus.876 Since, as mentioned earlier, the brise-soleil or other protective screens had to be detached from the building surface in order to be effective in the tropics, Fry and Drew’s designs that attempted to incorporate the screens into the building’s mass resulted in a recessed interior space with movable “partitions of air.” Following their observation that in both vernacular architecture and British bungalows all activity was displaced to the semi-outdoors of the verandah, Fry and Drew’s solution was to incorporate the verandah into the building: “… the old idea to build a wide verandah on all sides and be certain that neither sun heat, glare nor rain could penetrate the living-rooms. This succeeded, but led to such gloomy interiors that the occupants usually preferred to live on the wide verandahs, thus defeating the intention of the designer.”877 Ironically, by incorporating the verandah into the building’s mass they rendered this lively space - now a gap designed “to allow heat stored in the material of the outer skin to be dissipated by lateral breeze” - inhabitable, and parasitical, in

874 Ibid, ibid. The recessed balcony which was carved out of the building’s mass and created most convincingly the ribbon window allusion, was the least climatically functional since it captured a pocket of hot air behind its shading “apron.” See ibid, 29.

875 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism,” 161.

876 Le Roux, “Building on the Boundary,” 448.

877 Fry and Drew 1964, 32.

288 the eyes of Le Corbusier.878 Just as the occupants of the verandahs defeated the intention of the designer, contemporary University of Ibadan students did likewise by hanging panels of hessian and plastic to expand their living spaces into the gap.879 Similarly, many Tel Aviv apartment owners increased the size of their apartments in the 1950s, by closing off their balconies with Trisol, a local rendition of the brise-soleil.880

In a schematic sketch of Tel Aviv apartment buildings’ exterior surfaces, Sharon charted the surfaces’ “evolution” from the 1920s thick walls and small apertures to the 1960s gridded façade with deep openings, which replaces the brise-soleil of the 1950s, and the 1930s ribbon windows that preceded it (fig. 47). The reappearance of a bulky corner tower, reminiscent of the 1920’s architecture, in the 1960s building marks this culmination as the closing of a full circle. While the appearance of the 1960s building remains modernist in its gridded façade, in Sharon’s interpretation the logic of its deep recessed openings derived from the thick isolating wall that was common in Arab houses. Recalling that he had already mentioned the thick wall in 1940 as proper for the local climate, it seems that the 1960s finally brought the appropriate climatic solution he was seeking. However, only at Ife did it become free from the grid and an original architecture expression:

In the course of several years we tried to develop our climatic attitudes, proceeding from the direct protection of openings and windows by louvers and brise-soleil (…) to the structural second outer space of terraces and cantilevered ceilings and canopies (…) A more basic climatic solution was provided for the university in Western Nigeria. Most of the faculties on

878 Le Roux, “Building on the Boundary,” 448-9.

879 Ibid, 449.

880 Efrat, 868-870.

289 the campus are erected as reversed pyramids without any direct window or elevation protection, such as louvers and blinds.881

Thus for Sharon, the opening of the fully extended balcony at Ife continued his and others’ experiments in Israel, but provided a more elegant solution, as the balcony of the reversed pyramid is neither an applied sun protection devise or a structural secondary outer space.

Interpreted in this narrative as a metaphorical thickening of the wall, it was as if the shaded volumetric openings were carved out of the staggered cantilevered stories, and therefore continued to serve as part of the building’s mass in line with the modernist principles.

In Ife, Nigeria, Sharon emphasized the volume of the building’s surface as the site where locality could be literally embodied without “dressing.” The reversed pyramid, therefore, contrasted with UCI campus design’s logic of the recessed, gnawed off cubic volume. As

Fry and Drew’s drawings show, interior partitions were difficult to incorporate without blocking ventilation. In order to maximize airflow, Sharon’s inverted pyramid does away with most of the partitions to maximize the correspondence between the building’s used interior space and its volume. The cantilevered balconies function not only as access galleries to the classrooms but also as shaded spaces to extend classroom activity outdoors.

As such they continue the public function of the traditional verandah as was imagined by

Alison and Peter Smithson’s “street in the air” in the 1950s.882

881 Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 188.

882 Mark Crinson, "From the Rainforest to the Streets," in Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past Rebellions for the Future, eds. Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Osten (London: Black Dog, 2010), 98-111.

290 To enhance the volumetric presence of the building, the walls and the cantilevers are distinguished by a dramatic play of color: the walls and columns are painted dark grey, and the cantilevers that are exposed to the sun, are painted white. This chiaroscuro causes the darkened areas to dematerialize, and creates the illusion that the cantilevers float one on top of the other. Yet this illusion is interfered with by the bulky stairs cylinders (the equivalent of the service towers in the Tel Aviv architecture evolution sketch) that cut through the cantilevers’ horizontal lines. Painted too in dark grey, the towers stress that the darkened area is in fact the mass that constitutes the very flesh of the building, even if the elongated façades are faced with wide spans of glass louvers. When shaded, even the transparent glass becomes part of the dark mass in continuity with the body of the towers, thus forming a sort of a reversed chiaroscuro (fig. 48).

Referring to the Humanities Faculty, the Wisconsin team appreciated the buildings’ ingenious response to climate, commenting that the series of three reversed pyramids classroom buildings and two lecture halls connected by passageways resulted in a “very appealing complex.” It is however evident that the Wisconsin team appreciated more, climatically speaking, the elegant articulation of the sunscreens in the Agriculture Faculty

883 complex. This is not surprising, given that Fry and Drew’s and Olgyay’s literature that the team’s research was based on emphasized the use of sunscreens.884 The team concluded its report with a series of recommendations to “reduce heat production; reduce radiation gain;

883 Neumann and Tishler, 78.

884 Neumann and Tishler refer to Fry and Drew’s Tropical Architecture 1964 edition, and to Victor Olgyay’s 1963 Design with Climate.

291 promote evaporation loss” and again stressed the need for screenings, louvers, jalousies and grilles.885

The three additional buildings that housed the faculties of Administration, Law, and Social

Sciences on the campus core, designed by AMY architect Eliezer Schreiber (1972-1975, construction began 1975-6), adhered to most of the report’s recommendations, but the latter.

As the Wisconsin report explained, the roof was the single most important component for thermal insulation in the tropical climate, recommending a double roof for ventilation and a wide overhang for rain protection and reduction of glare.886 The three buildings followed this suggestion with a raised umbrella roof whose perimeter far exceeded the rectangular building, acting as overhang that provided shade to the north and south façades and allowing for warm air to evaporate (figs. 49-51). While in silhouette the three buildings followed the reverse pyramid form of the Humanities, with trusses extending from the roof to the ground diagonally, their design differing completely as the buildings were raised from the ground, creating a shaded courtyard and an internal mall that took the place of the balconies in

Sharon’s design for the Humanities. Designed as a hanging garden with planters and seating areas, the mall covered the sunken lecture halls in the ground level. These sunken lecture halls presented the main digression from the report’s recommendations that were otherwise followed closely. On top of the reports’ recommendations to site the buildings in north-south orientation, to elevate the buildings on pilotis to allow airflow underneath the buildings in relation to topography, the use of planters and seating areas, the creation of shaded areas,

885 Ibid, 50.

886 Ibid, 51.

292 and maximization of exterior-interior open space, the buildings’ design even followed the suggestion to use pastel colors to eliminate glare.

In this series of buildings, Schreiber adhered to most of the recommendations methodologically while maintaining visual continuity with the Humanities complex and minimizing even further the use of sunscreen devices.887 At the same time, however, this series of buildings followed a design for another building on the campus core that preceded the Wisconsin report: the Faculty of Education (1968-1972) designed by Harold Rubin (figs.

52-3). An intermediate between the Humanities and the other three, this reversed pyramid structure continued the Humanities building by employing extended upper floors for shading, but added a raised umbrella roof. Its elevation from the ground by massive concrete trusses, and siting on a raise, allowed a breeze to sweep the open ground floor, acting as an extension of outdoor space and serving as a cool shaded area. In addition, small spaces on the second floor served as resting areas for the building,888 foreshadowing the hanging gardens at Schreiber’s buildings. Even its color scheme anticipated the Wisconsin’s report recommendations to use pastel colors, as its predominant original color was light yellow.889

887 Eliezer Schreiber’s estate includes the translation of entire sections of the Wisconsin report into Hebrew, compiled alongside the original images as a manual. Parts of these drawing are also found in Arieh Sharon’s estate but in scattered and fragmented form.

888 Master Plan 1980-85, Vol. II, 121.

889 Ibid, 122. The original color scheme included: a light yellow structural frame, white spandrel beams, yellow doors, grey and white soffits.

293 As the master plan reviewers commented in 1980, this was a very successful development of building type for ventilation.890

While the Humanities set the tone for the visual language of the campus core, these latter buildings utilized the Wisconsin team’s report to complicate this language. Probably far from what the American team had anticipated, the resulting buildings took the inside-outside ambiguity of the verandah and turned it into a courtyard logic consisting of hanging gardens, a resting area under a raised roof held by massive concrete trusses. As the central motive in the faculty buildings’ designed after the Humanities, the raised courtyard replaced the enclosed patio used extensively in Israel at that time in university buildings.891 Perceived as a traditional climatic solution in Mediterranean architecture which also had a parallel in

Yoruba compounds,892 the patio was at the center of the Israeli team’s initial designs for the

Central Library and Secretariat buildings. However, these were rejected by the university administration, probably with the influence of the Wisconsin team, since patios did not stimulate the desired airflow in a tropical climate. Together with the bridges that connected the buildings, the raised courtyard solution created dynamic inside-outside relations with a shaded ground level and hanging gardens in the upper floors.

Far from the passive conception of the student as a container of energy that requires conserving, as in Fry and Drew’s conception of UCI’s tropical architecture, the dynamic

890 Ibid, ibid. It is unclear whether Rubin had access to an early version of the Wisconsin team’s report, or followed their observations in meetings held at the university. There is no such documentation is Sharon’s archive.

891 At the Hebrew University campus on Givat Ram in the 1950s and the Tel Aviv University camps in the 1960s.

892 Beier, 19.

294 environment not only increased ventilation and evaporation, but also the virility and freedom of movement of the student inhabiting the space. Before concluding this chapter, I would like to focus briefly on a comparison of two contrasting images of students in their surrounding environments that demonstrates vividly the distinction between Fry and Drew and the Israeli team’s approach (figs. 54-5). In an image taken in the Wesley Girl’s

Secondary School, Cape Coast (after independence, Ghana), three female students are carefully positioned at the foreground of the photograph.893 Wearing school uniforms matched by their uniformly short haircuts, their posture is far from relaxed. A sweater unfit for the climate rests on their shoulders as part of English uniform conventions, as well as to follow the tradition of neo-classical pictorial representations’ use of drapes and folds to capture light and shade. In the background, the courtyard axis culminates in a bell tower that serves as the college’s focal point, flanked by gridded façades on both sides. The enclosing courtyard suggests a shelter from the supposedly menacing or corrupting environment outside of campus. But the sense of enclosure continues in the courtyard, with the repetition of screens ostensibly protecting the young women, ironically, from the climate they have been accustomed to their entire lives. As a strikingly quintessential image of colonial disciplining, it is not surprising that Fry and Drew omitted this image from their later publications ensuing Ghana’s and Nigeria’s independence. The second image depicts three male students wearing minimal sports clothing (one is even topless) rushing into the Central

Library at the Ife University Campus. The image is taken diagonally from their back on the ramp leading to the library to emphasize how the architectural complex facilitates their dynamic movement. Unlike in the previous image, where the students literally framed the

893 Fry and Drew 1956, plate 249: Wesley Girl’s Secondary School, Cape Coast, Gold Coast. The caption reads: “view from entrance. Chapel and bell tower in centre, dormitories to right and left.”

295 architectural complex, this image places the students at the center, thus reflecting their new status as sovereign subjects who feel very much at home on the campus grounds.

The contrast between these two images of colonial and postcolonial youth is further enhanced by gender. If the African male presented a physical virility that threatened the

European, females presented a much less threatening subject to the colonial desiring gaze and reformative aspirations. Sharon also repeatedly asked for images of the university buildings occupied by female students, perhaps to accentuate the “sensual character of the

African scene,” as he once referred to the landscape.894 However, the few images that do portray female students blending casually into their surroundings fail to capture fully the dynamic relationship with the environment the buildings’ design constituted. Neither do other images of casually dressed male students. It is particularly the image of the Nigerian male athletes that demonstrates the translation of Sharon’s pioneering Zionism to this postcolonial setting: the constitution of a “self-protecting” self-sufficient building-as-body does not imply a relaxed, anxiety-free relationship between the post-colonial subject and his or her environment. Rather, as this image and the phrase “self-protection” disclose, in this colonial-settler interpretation feeling at home in one’s national territory does not necessarily mean feeling at ease, as the idea of sovereignty needs to be constantly reaffirmed through the virility that the national subjects exert over their environment in order to reclaim it as their own. Thus while Sharon did not consider the tropical environment an enemy that students needed protection from, he could not completely relinquish the design to a static harmonious whole. The environment still needed to be conquered, since only through this active relationship could the new “human material” take shape. Sharon’s post-colonial

894 Cited in Akintoye, 22.

296 critique was therefore imbued with the uncertainties of Zionism, and indeed of modern nationalism at large.

The imbuing of postcolonial Nigeria with the anxieties of Zionism is particularly evident in the choice of the black male athlete to represent this virility. As Frantz Fanon has noted, the figure of the black athlete became particularly eroticized.895 As a sublimation of the

“hallucinating sexual power” the black male possesses in colonial imagination, the athlete presented a less threatening figure than the figure of the primitive ruthless warrior,896 since his prowess was channeled into competitive sports and regulated within western rules. In this sublimated, civilized and reformed character, the Nigerian athlete could serve now as a

Zionist ideal object of identification for Zionism’s own desired masculinity.897 In the process of shaping “human material” in the image of Zionism’s desired masculinity and nativity, the colonial sublimation that allows this identification is disavowed, just like the sublimation of the taming of the environment through architecture.

Epilogue: The Cultured skin

Referring to a sculptured gate, the Opa Oranmiyan replica, murals, and corrugated grooving that tie the architectural language of the campus core into a comprehensive whole (fig. 56), architectural historian Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler characterizes the employment of Yoruba traditional art elements in the design of the campus as “a heightened discourse between

895 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 136.

896 Exemplified in the postcolonial era in dictators like Idi Amin, see Mark Leopold, “Sex, Vilnce and History in the lives of Idi Amin: Postcolonial Masculinity as Masquerade,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 3 (2009): 321-330.

897 In his comparison of the Jew and the Black men experience, Fanon fails to acknowledge the embodied difference of the Jew. See Fanon, “Black Skin,” 135-44.

297 modernism and its assimilation of a culture.”898 Although most of these traditional elements were abstracted to the point of non-recognition, Ben-Asher Gitler argues that this embrace of local culture differentiates the Israeli team from contemporary expatriate practices, and situates it at the forefront of Nigerian design culture closer to the work of the local emerging

Nigerian architects Demas Nwoko, the British-turned-Nigerian Alan Vaughan Richards, and

Design Group:899

It integrated and displayed locality in a clear-cut and unambiguous manner, in an engagement previously rarely seen in such large-scale civic commissions. It challenged contemporary references to local African traditions within imported, modernist idioms which, despite claims of their integration by architects and their critics/historians, were comparatively subtle or resided largely in the realm of declared intentions.900

Referring to examples such as American embassy buildings and the work of the British network of tropical architects as being “comparatively subtle” in their integration of local art forms, Ben Asher Gitler’s assertion raises the problem of how to assess the degree of explicitness of the references to local art when they are rendered as a series of abstractions.

In this modus operandi, “subtlety” of local references was the norm, including at Ife

University campus, where the references were no more Yoruba than Le Corbusier’s Open

Hand in Chandigarh was Punjabi. What differentiated the Ife campus was mostly the

898 Both Nnamdi Elleh and Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler consider the loose courtyard layout to be reminiscent of Yoruba compound or palace architecture. However, considering both the university administration’s rejection of the patio design (probably following the Wisconsin team’s recommendations), as well as given the planning considerations detailed in the previous chapter, it is highly unlikely that this was the case. See Ben-Asher Gitler, 122-3; Nnamdi Elleh, African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 309.

899 Ben-Asher Gitler, 133. The Design Group designed a few buildings on campus such as the central dining hall (now the Architecture School).

900 Ibid, ibid.

298 boldness of its sculptural and mural gestures, for which Yoruba art was just one of many sources of inspiration, in addition to other traditions in Nigeria, and possibly South Africa, where Harold Rubin was first trained as architect and an artist. This translational movement from South African to local Yoruba art was facilitated by the European modernist primitivism that divested African art from its local cultures. For this reason, even when contemporary African artists re-appropriated local traditions, the definition of the “local” from which they drew was highly problematic. While it pertained to the traditions of a specific village, ethnic group, or the nation as a whole, it was also always-already influenced by the European appropriation of African visual languages. Western artistic mediation further complicates Ben Asher Gitler’s assertion regarding degrees of explicitness, since it remains unclear who would be the ultimate judge of their communicability, the architectural critic or the local user who may not even recognize the references that got lost in abstraction, or their translation into a synthetic concept of Africanism far remote from whatever she has known.901

Ben-Asher Gitler argues that what differentiates Sharon and his team was his close working relationship with the university personnel. While this was certainly the case, especially in the first decade of planning the campus, there was almost no local agency in the artistic decision making process.902 It was only in 1974, when the Nigerization act was put into

901 These local references, besides the literal replica of the Opa Oranmiyan, were lost on local architectural historians. See Amole; Cordelia Osasona, Lee O. Ogunshakin and David A. Jiboye, “Ile-Ife: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Throes of Transformation,” in Proceedings of African Perspectives 2009, The African Inner City: [Re]sourced, ed. Karel A. Bakker (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2009), 151-2.

902 It seems that the Assembly Hall, designed by Harold Rubin, was the most controversial and spurred some responses, first by VC Oluwasanmi, who thought that the mural has sexual connotations (resembling female genitalia), or by the students, who did not appreciate the colors the architects on site chose for the building

299 place, that the team partnered with the local architect Augustine Akhuemokhan Egbor, and even then his involvement was merely formal.903 Furthermore, though by the 1960s it had become common to integrate the work of local artists into the design of public buildings – as proponent of local Nigerian art Ulli Beier explained in 1960, this was African crafts’ main venue for survival – 904 the Ife design team refrained from doing so until the late 1970s.905

This incorporation of art was not much different from contemporary practices in the west, especially as developed in France as a “synthesis of the art” as a postwar solution to the crisis of representation of modern architecture.906 In many cases in Africa, however, this resulted in a divorce between structure and art, or technology and tradition. Far from achieving a “synthesis,” architects employed art as an addition that stood out in its materials and manual techniques, and gave no more than lip service to local culture and tradition.907

(diverging from the original black and white scheme chosen by Rubin). See Rivka Feldhay, “Memoir in Black and white,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 14 (1980): 45. Cited in Levin, “Exporting National Expertise,” 62.

903 The university involved the local architectural office Design Group for some of the university buildings.

904 Beier, 20. See also Kevin Carroll, Architectures of Nigeria: Architectures of the Hausa and Yoruba Peoples and of the Many Peoples between Tradition and Modernization (London: Ethnographica; Lester Crook Academic Publishing, 1992), 116.

905 A local artist was commissioned to carve the doors of the dining hall in the agriculture faculty complex, similarly to the carved doors in Lagos City Hall, designed by AMY architects Eliezer Schreiber and Mordechai Moneh as early as 1965. By the late 1970s, perhaps spurred by Festac 1977, the Second World Black and Africans Festival of Arts and Culture that took place in Lagos, and thanks to connections with the expert community at Ife University, Israeli residents at Ife became highly interested in the local culture, specifically Yoruba cosmology, which consequently affected the design of some of the buildings. One notable example is the central library extension’s dome, which according to its architect was inspired by the numerical system of Yoruba divination. Zvi Szkolnik, interview.

906 Paul Damaz, Art in European Architecture. Synthèse des Arts (New York: Reinhold Publisher, 1956); Joan Ockman, “Plastic Epic: The Synthesis of the Arts Discourse in France in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Architecture + Art: New Visions, New Strategies, eds. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Esa Laaksonen (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Academy, 2007). Since many African artists work in a variety of media, including white South Africans as Harold Rubin, it would not be far fetched to trace an African lineage to the French movement.

907 See for example, the case of Eugène Palumbo in the 1960s Congo and Henri Chomette throughout Francophone Africa and Ethiopia. James Cubitt too was known to employ local artists in his projects in British West Africa. See Johan Lagae and Kim De Raedt, “Building for ‘l’Authenticité’: Eugène Palumbo and the Architecture of Mobutu’s Congo,” Journal of Architectural Education 68, no. 2 (2014): 178-89; Diala Touré,

300 As a result, traditional African art was relegated to the degraded status of ornament in modern architectural thinking. In the design of the University of Ife campus, it was Harold

Rubin, a significant member of the architecture team, rather than a commissioned artist who was in charge of the artistic additions, similarly to his contemporaneous experimentation in the office’s works in Israel with the addition of reliefs, texture, and sculptural shapes. Thus

Rubin’s parallel career as an artist did not only help mediate between modernism and

African art, but also between art and architecture. In addition to designing the Education

Faculty, Central Library and Oduduwa Hall, Rubin designed the murals, sculptural gate, and the covered path between the Central Library and the Humanities, and basically gave the university the “sensual character” Sharon was after. Just as Le Corbusier’s “synthesis of the arts” usually meant that it was his art that was incorporated, even in foreign cultures,908 so this synthesis meant at Ife the execution of a modernist “total work of art” exclusively by foreign architects.

In lieu of assessing the degree to which the designers of the Ife campus conformed to local artistic practices, I would like to redirect the discussion to their attempt to incorporate murals, reliefs, and sculptures as a form of synthesis with the architecture rather than as an additive ornament. As argued earlier in this chapter, Sharon considered even the brise-soleil and the grilles that doubled in Fry and Drew’s designs as climatic devises and ornaments as too additive, and therefore parasitic to the building’s skin. The problem Sharon solved with his “self-protective” building was how to render the building’s envelope a climatic device so

Créations Architecturales et Artistiques en Afrique Sub-Saharienne (1948-1995): Bureaux d'Études Henri Chomette (Paris, France: Harmattan, 2002).

908 Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 2002).

301 it would be integrated within the building’s mass without becoming “parasitic” to it. This modernist concern is rendered nationalistic in the Zionist context, and in turn can be reformulated in the Nigerian context as follows: How not to dress a modernist building with a Yoruba garb, but to render the modernist building’s skin Yoruba.

In Sharon’s recollections, although the university delegation had mixed feelings about the design and scale of the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) campus in

Mexico City they visited on their study-tour,909 they were impressed by the frescoes and murals designed by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros that espoused racial pride, technological progress, and respect for pre-Columbian ancestors.910

Curiously, Sharon did not mention the frescos designed by architect and muralist Juan

O’Gorman for the UNAM Library, the most iconic building on campus. The campus planners who had envisioned an international style image for the campus rejected the pre-

Columbian pyramid original scheme for the building.911 Although the opaque building surface connoted pre-Columbian architecture, the resulting superimposition of frescos on a concrete block may have seemed to Sharon a folklorist dressing.912 According to Sharon, the frescos inspired him “to exploit these impressions by proposing sculptural Yoruba elements

909 See prvious chapter.

910 Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 127. For a study of the murals see Edward R. Burian, “Modernity and Nationalism: Juan O’Gorman and Post-revolutionary Architecture in Mexico, 1920-1960,” in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, ed. Jean-François Lejeune (NY: Princeton University Press, 2005), 211-223.

911 Ibid, 220.

912 Sharon may have approved the more the synthetic approach at the University of Venezuela, which the delegation was supposed to visit but eventually did not.

302 in the Ife university buildings.”913 Thus Sharon’s uneasiness with the incorporation of frescos as an applied ornament did not result in their rejection, but as sublimation into freestanding sculptural objects such as the sculptured gate and the Opa Oranmiyan replica.

By displacing the ornament from the building and freeing it to become an object in space,

Sharon continued the conflicted modernist dealing with the ornament as its rejected, repressed, or displaced “underbelly.”914

However, at Ife, similarly to the sculptural buildings of the 1950s Reyner Banham has named pejoratively the “ballet school,” this sculptural tendency returned back to the realm of the building.915 The sculptural quality of the buildings developed gradually in the design and construction of the campus core first with the controlled plasticity of the Humanities, which found its sculptural outlet in the external staircases on the north side, and bulky semi- cylinders on the south side. This tendency increased with Rubin’s structural expression of concrete beams and trusses at the Education building and the cutouts in the Central Library and Oduduwa Hall, where this sculptural tendency reaches its climax (figs. 56-8). A hexagonal mass, it comprises an auditorium and an open-air amphitheater connected in the center by a stage tower that caters both semi-circular thrust stages that open up to each of the performance spaces. The interconnected stages allow for flexibility and simultaneous use,

913 Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus, 127.

914 Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2012), 9-11. Payne interprets architectural modernism’s abstraction not so much as a crisis of the ornament, but its displacement to furniture and other everyday objects that continue ornament’s traditional function as mediator between the body’s scale and the building. Her discussion is particularly relevant since she explains this shift as a move from the optic to the haptic.

915 Reyner Banham, “Monument with Frills,” New Statesman 60, no. 10 (December 1960): 918.

303 and are designed specifically to accommodate Yoruba theatre.916 Under the slanting auditorium, the foyer is left completely open to the exterior, as circle and semi-circle cutouts pierce its tall walls that frame the concrete stairs and galleries, mirroring the library cutout and its adjacent arched pergola. Although, as Ben Asher Gitler writes, the foyer’s pierced walls give a feeling of lightness to the building’s concrete mass, one can question the walls’ necessity at all if lightness was indeed the desired effect. Since in terms of climate there was no need for the use of solid walls,917 the foyer could have been left completely open to offer a shaded exterior space as in the case of the faculties of Education, Administration, Law and

Social Sciences. Similarly to the emphasis on the mass of the building in the Humanities reversed chiaroscuro, the cutouts, grooved texturing of the walls, and the white amorphic murals painted on top of the grey substrate create a plastic festive space, a sort of Louis

Kahn’s modern monumentality rendered free-form. In this reading, the cutouts’ main purpose was not to give a feeling of lightness, but on the contrary to refer back to the materiality of the wall, which was further accentuated by the grooving.918

By the 1960s, textured grooving became prevalent among architects as a form of “repressed” ornamentation, literally pressed unto the building’s surface.919 When Sharon referred to it in the context of Ife, he mentioned the UNSECO building in Paris as an example. At the same

916 Ben-Asher Gitler, 128.

917 Niemann and Tishler, 50.

918 Similarly, the Ooni’s palace’s traditional thick walls that can reach over three feet render visible the boundary between the market and the ceremonial space of the Ooni’s courtyard, as well as the Ooni’s residence within the civil courtyard. This is especially true in Ife, where the Ooni’s palace used to have an unusually thick gate. See G.J. Afolabi Ojo, “Traditional Yoruba Architecture,” African Arts 1, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 15, 17, 70.

919 See Timothy M. Rohan, “Rendering the Surface: Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale,” Grey Room 1 (Fall 2000): 84-107.

304 time, however, he suggested the employment of local craftsmen, who according to him would do the job much better than Solel Boneh workers.920 While grooving was not as prevalent in Yoruba architecture as it was in other parts of Nigeria,921 there was a specific grooving tradition associated with Yoruba famed terracotta and bronze sculptures dating back to the eleventh century. In his monograph, Sharon juxtaposes an image of such Yoruba sculpture with an image of the textured surface of the Oduduwa Hall, suggesting this was the specific reference for the building’s corrugated grooving. Since by the mid 1970s it became more popular to incorporate local references, this juxtaposition could have been a retroactive “localization” of this design feature. Yet already in one of his drafts for the 1961 report on the town of Ife, Sharon had noted these sculptures were of “special architectural interest” alongside the Ooni’s palace.922 Significantly, Sharon singled out this sculptural tradition rather than referring more generally to the entire collection at the Ile-Ife Museum that housed it or the variety of artistic traditions still practiced in Ife at that time.

Furthermore, Sharon specifically referred to its architectural rather than artistic value. What architectural lessons could the Yoruba grooved sculpture offer to the modernist Sharon?

Compared with the abstracted African sculptures and masks known in the west through their modernist appropriation, these Yoruba sculptures are distinctly naturalistic.923 Unlike

920 Arieh Sharon to Harold Rubin, February 14, 1975, AAAC, ASE; Arieh Sharon to Eldar Sharon, February 12, 1975, AAAC ASE.

921 Across north and east Nigeria. See Caroll, Architectures of Nigeria.

922 Arieh Sharon, no date, AAAC, ASE. Since there is no date, this could have been also a later draft, based on that report, revised for university publications or reviews.

923 For the German Ethnologist Leo Forbenius, who is famous for the “discovery” of Yoruba art, the importance of these sculptures was that their ideal naturalism associated Yoruba with Hellenic traditions, legitimating Yoruba’s entry into world history as an ancient civilization.

305 Picasso’s rendering of African masks and tattoos as markers and vehicles of abstraction, these sculptures’ grooving accentuated their three dimensional naturalism. Similarly to mural inscriptions in Yoruba shrine architecture, the grooving is reserved for the face of

Yoruba royalty and chiefs and signifies their spiritual attributes (fig. 59). Reminiscent of the practice of tattoo, these bodily inscriptions thicken the skin as low relief, and make it visible as a boundary at once expressive of interiority and the symbolic realm of society.924 The skin’s thickness directs attention to its double function as a boundary and expression, what

Anne Chang identifies as skin’s “complicated relation to essence versus surface.”925 As

Chang explains in her discussion of the racial aspects of Adolf Loos’ architectural bareness, skin is “a medium of transition and doubleness: it is at once surface and yet integrally attached to what it covers. It also serves as a vibrant interface between the hidden and the visually available.”926 In the case of Yoruba culture, the hidden is not the privilege of interiority, since it derives from the spiritual world both inside and outside of the body and marked on the surface of architecture or body, especially face, as its emblem: the spiritual is localized, pinned down to the individual and place, by the performance of inscription and the traces it leaves.927 Thus more than simply delineating the boundary between private and

924 Enid Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” Annual Review Anthropology 33 (2004): 319-44.

925 Chang, Second Skin, 28.

926 Ibid, ibid. Mark Wigley and Teresa de Lauretis make similar arguments. See especially Wigley’s discussion on Gottfried Semper: “The body is only defined by being covered in the face of language, the surrogate skin of the building. The evolution of skin, the surface with which spatiality is produced, is the evolution of the social. The social subject, like the body with which it is associated, is a product of decorative surfaces. The idea of the individual can only emerge within language. Interiority is not simply physical. It is a social effect marked on the newly constituted body of the individual. Culture does not precede its masks. It is no more than masking” Wigley, 13. Semper’s theory is of course particularly appropriate for the African context where there is formal and symbolic continuity between body paint, textile and murals.

927 See Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books 1998 [1987]), 177-188. Clastres links between inscription and torture as a perquisite for entry into society, but does not deal with the aesthetic aspects of this process.

306 public, individual and society, the thickening of the skin by marking the surface demonstrates that just as much as the surface is an expression of interiority, the interior is inscribed by exterior social-cultural-religious forces. In this reading, the Oduduwa Hall wall serves both to demarcate a boundary for a specialized activity, as well as to imbue it with meaning through the grooving and the murals. Besides the Oduduwa Hall, and the concave stand that serves as a background for the Opa Oranmiyan replica and connects it to the scale of the architecture, the grooving is reserved for only one more building on the campus core, the Central Library. This constitutes a hierarchical order within the campus, and expresses the cultural significance attributed to both buildings as receptacles and disseminators of

Yoruba culture and knowledge.

If, according to art historian Alina Payne, the traditional role of ornaments was to mediate the building’s scale and the human body,928 then in this case the association of the body as expressed in the naturalistic head figures of the sculptures is projected back onto the scale of the building. The sculpture therefore serves as an intermediary object that justifies the projection of Zionist dialectic between object and subject - as expressed in the national subjects’ transformation from “to build” to “being built” - onto a culture particularly susceptible to such anthropomorphic analogies, as expressed in African cultures’ continuity between body art, textiles, and murals.929 However, in Yoruba culture these surfaces function as dressing, including the building’s skin, which in order to be painted in murals is first cleansed by whitewashing, covered in dark paint, and is only then ready to function as a

928 Payne, 8.

929 Schildkrout, 319-44. See also how these aspects of African art influenced Art Nouveau practices in: Debora L. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part II,” West 86TH 19, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2012): 175-95.

307 substrate for murals painted in bright colors.930 Sharon therefore chooses the sculpture over

Yoruba murals as a reference to further him from the function of dressing and closer to direct application of symbolic inscription on the bare matter of the sculptured skin where

“human material” is literally shaped.

Sharon was already preoccupied with the expression of materiality of the architectural skin as early as 1940. Deploring the foreignness of the modernist buildings in Palestine, Sharon criticized specifically the extensive use of whitewash. Sharon claimed “we transferred the bareness of the building’s envelope to this country and [as a result] most of the buildings are coated from ground to ceiling with a homogenous smooth white plaster.”931 Preceding Neo-

Brutalism by more than a decade, he advocated for the “expression of material” of the building’s surface, even with industrially produced blocks or poured concrete. Targeted specifically against the “rectilinear, smooth, and taut exteriors” of modernist buildings in Tel

Aviv, the objective of his call for material expression was to root the buildings better in their local environment. As the “Acrobatics and Architecture” caricature discussed earlier in the chapter demonstrates, the relationship between bareness and expressiveness was particularly charged in the Zionist context. Abba El-Chanany, one of the few Israeli architecture theorists of the period, explained in 1961 that the origins of modernist “architectural honesty” were “the chaplets and crinolines of the nineteenth century” that “developed in us exhibitionists complexes that merged healthy instincts for liberation from hypocrisy and

930 For a fascinating discussion on the meanings of colors and practices of mural painting in Yoruba art see: Bolaji Campbell, Painting for the Gods: The Arts and Aesthetics of Yoruba Religious Murals (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2008), especially 41-61, 80-84.

931 Sharon, “Habniya Hatsiburit,” 16. (My translation-AL). Instead, he was calling for an expression of material, like in Jerusalem’s use of stone. Le Corbusier’s Villa de Mandrot of 1931 in Pradet may have inspired Sharon.

308 over-decoration, with typical traumas of difficult past memories.”932 Speaking to a professional Hebrew readership, Elhanani put architectural modernism on the psychoanalytic couch. In his interpretation, liberation from decoration was tied to traumatic repression which resulted in “exhibitionists complexes.” The exhibitionism of over- decoration did not pass with modernist bareness, but was actually enhanced with its repression of the ornament. As the caricature of Tel Aviv’s balconies suggests, the repressed ornament returned in the guise of the decorative excess of the balconies. In Zionism, the bareness of the white wall became a double form of repression and exhibitionism. In the analogy to the acrobat, the New Jew’s muscles are just another form of dressing,933 an excessive form that betrays, and compensates for, its inauthentic relationship with the territory.

Against the Zionist charged relationship between bareness and (involuntary, symptomatic) expressiveness, the African’s black skin, situated in its native environment, presented an object of desire. A children’s poem by Anda Amir, an Israeli poet who spent some time in

Kenya with her husband who acted as agriculture and settlement advisor, depicts an Israeli girl’s envy for her doll’s black skin. Allowing her to stroll carelessly under the sun, her skin not only protects her from the environment, but is also beautified by it: “and to her smooth

932 Abba El-Channani, “Our Contribution to Modern Architecture,” Handasa ve-Adrikhalut 19, no. 5-6 (May- June, 1961): 133. (My translation-AL; while there is an English parallel text on the same page under the same title, it is different than the Hebrew version). Curiously, Loos’s “Ornament and Crime” was translated to Hebrew already in the 1920s. See in the Afterward that appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, where it was published in German in 1929. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998), 175.

933 This analogy recalls Gottfried Semper’s suggestion that in some cultures ornament represent muscular structure: “some cultures actually have a correct knowledge of the positions and functions of muscles which are covered by the skin, so that these activities on the surface of the skin could in a similar way be represented, or could be represented even more through graphic linearity; because of this it appears that the ornament of these cultures is already conceived in a structural-symbolic sense.” Cited in Canales and Herscher, 254, n. 49.

309 skin/ will be added more grace, a shine.”934 The poem presents a fetishization of the black skin as an empirical undeniable marker of nativity whose qualities are enhanced by its unmediated and symbiotic encounter with the environment. The “fact of blackness,” from this perspective was not an obstacle, but a visible sign of belonging and compatibility with the environment which is subject to natural (Amir) and cultural (Yoruba sculptures) beautification. Unlike Fanon’s critique of the reaction to black skin in the white world, this fetishization does not lock Africans into their blackness, since the black skin serves as a substrate for environmental and cultural inscription. That is, as long as they stay in Africa.935

Similarly to Steinbeck in Altneulnad who saw the solution for the black problem in African

Diaspora’s return to Africa, Amir (who incidentally was trained too as a microbiologist; her brother, in turn, became an architect, studying in Vienna after having contracted malaria as a pioneer in Palestine. Together the siblings present a later historical embodiment of the fictitious Steinbecks) perceived blackness as a biological condition for environmental belonging and cultural rejuvenation. However, since this rejuvenation was territorially bound, just as the New Jew became imprisoned by his spatial-territorial fiction,936 the unlocking of the African from his blackness meant locking him back into the territory.

934 Cited in Bar-Yosef, 53. (My translation-AL). Another of her poems praises the black skin of the female farmer: it shines from sweat and sun, and is taut just like the skin of a drum. This poem expresses the envy of a mature woman in her African counterpart, whose skin does not wrinkle. Cited in Bar-Yosef, 80.

935 Similarly, against accusations of Israelis’ insensitivity toward African trainees in Israel, Golda Meir stated with overt naïveté that she sees no insult in the term Kushi (the Hebrew equivalent of “Nigger.”) See Bar- Yosef, 208. For Meir being black was a positive identity marker, since it signified a specific territorial belonging.

936 Massad, 340.

310

Part III: Ethiopia

311 5. Zalman Enav in Addis Ababa: An Aid Enterpenuer

When Zalman Enav (b. 1928), a recent graduate of the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architecture Association (AA) in London, arrived in Ethiopia in 1959 for a visit, he had not imagined it would become his prime residence for the next seven years and the site of a rich career adventure that would last for over a decade. Originally planned as a visit to his brothers, who managed an Israeli government-owned meat factory in Asmara, Eritrea,

Enav’s trip brought him to Addis Ababa, where the untapped development opportunities presented to the young ambitious architect were too tempting to be left unexplored. In that same year, Addis Ababa had experienced a construction boom, part of emperor Haile

Selassie’s continuous attempts to modernize the country that were given extra impetus with the choice of the Ethiopian capital for the seat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in 1958, and the seat of the Organization of African Union in 1963. Positioning

Addis Ababa as both a national and a continental capital, the construction boom asserted not only national independence but also the reconsolidation of imperial power seeking to represent to the pan-African world a symbol of African liberation and an uninterrupted continuity with tradition.937

Unlike in former colonies where postcolonial development was largely determined by persisting colonial networks and the gradual introduction of new actors based on new geopolitical alliances, in Ethiopia, which had been formally colonized by Italy for only six

937 Historian Shimelis Bonsa Gulema dubs the 1960s the “golden age” of the city of Addis Ababa. See Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, “Urbanizing a Nation: Addis Ababa and the Shaping of the Modern Ethiopian State 1941-1975,” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2011), 584-595. He notes that the importance attributed to the capital as a national symbol is evident in the emperor’s speeches and the writings of urban elite already before the Italian occupation, but it increased since the 1940s. See Gulema, 388.

312 years, architecture production was open to private entrepreneurship. Continuing a long established tradition of welcoming individual foreign experts as part of the modernization efforts of the country that began at the end of the nineteenth century, in the postwar period

Haile Selassie’s regime increasingly promoted private ownership of land and created a particularly lucrative setting for developers and architecture firms while enjoying the maneuvering of development aid from both Cold War blocs as well as from the non-aligned

Yugoslavia.938

How should we narrate Enav’s extended sojourn in Ethiopia? Unlike other Israeli architects working at the time on the continent as part of Solel Boneh’s joint companies or IPD, Enav’s practice in Addis Ababa was a private initiative and consequently differed in scope and variety in terms of his effect on the local architectural scene and the development of the city.

As a second generation of “the network of tropical architecture,” Enav’s case presents the extension of this network’s purview by adding new actors and new territories.939 However, as this chapter demonstrates, Enav worked at the crossroads of different professional and social networks that challenged the extension of British hegemony across the post-colonial tropics. This chapter traces the loyalties and alliances Enav forged locally and internationally to sustain his career in Addis Ababa and that allowed him to further extend its global reach upon his return to Israel. Far from acting as a detached foreign “expert,”

Enav artfully “networked” himself into the local elite social fabric, including that of the

938 For a detailed history of the maneuvering of American and Soviet aid in Ethiopia, see McVety. The Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa reported frequently on the development work of Yugoslav technical experts in Ethiopia in the early sixties. Another indication of the importance Ethiopia attributed to this diplomatic relations was the fact that the street leading to the Yugoslav embassy was named after Josip Tito.

939 Yacobi, “The Architecture of Foreign Policy,” 47.

313 royal family, and in a highly competitive professional environment managed to situate his practice as particularly relevant to the local conditions. Free from institutional ties to Israeli or Ethiopian governments, he operated in their interstices while taking advantage of and promoting Israeli strong trade, military, and diplomatic connections in the country, including the setting up of an architecture school that would play a strategic role in the competition over aid between Israel, West Germany, and Sweden.

Enav’s involvement in both the AA attempts to maintain England’s centrality after the demise of the British empire as well as the competition over the creation of new centers via educational aid in Africa presents an opportunity to discuss the development of architectural education in the postcolonial world. This chapter will therefore discuss at some length the formation of the AA tropical architecture department as well as the Engineering School and the Ethio-Swedish Building School in Addis Ababa in order to fill important gaps in existing scholarship.940

A Security-Trade-Diplomacy Complex

Although Enav arrived in Ethiopia on his own initiative and established his practice independently from formal Israeli aid, his involvement in Ethiopia was made possible thanks to the increasing strengthening of the relationship between the two states. It was only in

October 1961 that Ethiopia had accorded de jure recognition to Israel, leading to the opening

940 For a brief history of architecture education in Ethiopia see Ikem Stanely Okoye, "Architecture, History, and the Debate on Identity in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 3 (Sep. 2002): 389-390. For a first hand recollection of the Department of Tropical Architecture at the AA see Patrick I. Wakely, “The Development of a School: An Account of the Department of Development and Tropical Studies of the Architectural Association,” Habitat International 7, no. 5-6 (1983): 337-346.

314 of an Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa the following year. Yet relations between the states were initiated soon after the establishment of Israel. Unlike relations with Nigeria and Sierra

Leone discussed in previous chapters, relations with Ethiopia preceded the Bandung

Conference and even dated back to the Jewish settlement in Palestine under the British

Mandate.941 Due to the geographical proximity, ancient historical ties between the Israelite

King Solomon and the Ethiopian Queen Sheba, and the presence of Beta Israel, a Jewish community in Ethiopia (also named derogatively “falasha”: invaders in Amharic), Israel’s relations with Ethiopia were much more multifaceted and strategically significant than with any other African country. The strategic component was formalized in the Periphery Pact that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had signed with Ethiopia, Turkey and Iran against the Arab League. With the growing strength of Egyptian non-alignment leader

General Abdul Nassr, who claimed leadership of the continent, Haile Selssie presented a non-revolutionary alternative that resulted in the splitting of African countries into the

Monrovia and Casablanca blocks.942

Zalman Enav’s brothers, Azriel and Shmuel Enav, had arrived to Ethiopia prior to the formalization of trade relations between the countries, which occurred in March 1959.943

They took over the managing of Incode, a canned meat factory in Asmara partially owned

941 Haggai Erlich, Brit va-Shever: Ethiopia Veyisrael Biyemey Hayle Selassie (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 2013), 35-58.

942 Ibid, ibid, 77-85, 88-91, 124-6; Haggai Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), especially 127-140. For the history of the polarization of the Pan-African movement see Esedebe, 165-189.

943 Erlich, Brit Vashever, 90. The following month, in April 18, Israel contributed 50 tons cement, as announced in the Ethiopia Observer no. 78 (July 1959): 268.

315 by the Israeli government who depended on its product supply for the IDF army.944 The setting up of this plant in the early 1950s was part of the informal relations the Israeli government was cultivating with Ethiopia despite the official policy of the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs to condition trade on the formalization of diplomatic relations. Perceiving

East Africa as an essential economic frontier in the development of the Israeli south, Prime

Minister David Ben Gurion sent to Ethiopia the head of his recently established “Negev

Committee” in October 1950 to explore trade possibilities between the countries.945

Prolonging the establishment of official relations, the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie used

Incode as an informal channel for communicating with the Israeli government.946 The latter embraced this idea and even encouraged it, as manifested by the fact that the plant served for many years, even after the opening of a general consulate in Addis Ababa in 1956, as a cover for Mossad agents’ operation -- among them Azriel Enav, Zalman Enav’s brother -- in the predominantly Muslim colonial territory of Ethiopia.947

944 The factory was originally set up by Israeli Parliament Member Ya’akov Meridor, who in the 1940s had been deported from Palestine and incarcerated in Eritrea by the British army. In the wake of diplomatic negotiations with Ethiopia as early as the beginning of the 1950s, he returned to Eritrea and together with some local Jews established a canned-meat factory named Incode. The government stepped in and purchased his part when the plant was in financial trouble, before it was passed over to Enav’s brothers. By 1960, it became the largest industrial enterprise and the largest single employer in Eritrea. See Erlich, “Brit Vashever,” 72-3; Carol, 58. Years later, Azriel Enav supplied canned meat to American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. El’azar Levin, “Azriel Enav Yuva Memenukhot,” Globes, December 10, 1996. http://www.globes.co.il/news/article.aspx?did=140736 (accessed January 1, 2015).

945 Elrich, Brit Vashever, 72.

946 Ibid, 71.

947 Ibid, 85, 89. Elrich explains that it was at the Emperor’s request that Azriel Enav contacted the Israeli Mossad. However, according to Azriel Enav’s family, he operated as an intelligence officer even prior to becoming the manager of Incode. Therefore, Enav brothers’ appointment was not strictly business-oriented to begin with. See Daniella Ran, “This is the Way it Was,” http://www.palyam.org/English/IS/Einav_Azriel_Azrilik, accessed January 1, 2015.

316 The overlapping of the formal with the informal or clandestine relationship, reached its peak when the diplomatic corps were supplanted completely with intelligence officers in the years

1957-58. This merging of intelligence and diplomacy continued until the joint head of Israeli intelligence in Ethiopia and the consulate split into two separate jobs in December 1960.948

Since Enav arrived to Addis Ababa before this separation, the contacts he established at the

Israeli consulate with his brothers’ recommendation should be considered within the framework of a trade-intelligence-diplomacy complex.949

Through the deputy consulate who made the introduction, Enav received his first commission from Shalom Shelemay, a prominent Jewish merchant from Aden who resided with his family provisionally in Ethiopia after the 1947 Aden riots. Having already established trade business in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1940s, Mr. Shelemay was involved in the rescue attempts of IZL (Etzel, Ha-Irgun Ha-Tzvai Ha-Leumi be-Eretz Yisrael, lit.

"The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel"), a Zionist paramilitary group whose outlawed members were deported and interned in British camps in Eritrea.950 In

Addis Ababa, he was a prominent member of the trade community and was even at one point offered Ethiopian citizenship.951 Another way the imperial government acknowledged his prominence was by offering him the opportunity to purchase Benin Sefer, the Jewish

948 Elrich, Brit Vashever, 89.

949 It is unclear to what extent, if at all, Enav contributed from his professional expertise to the security personnel. The latter had prepared a strategic map of Addis Ababa, which to their embarrassment was used by the December 1960 historical abortive coup’s conspirators. See ibid, 93. By then, Enav had developed a keen interest in security planning in work in the Lakhish region. Zalman Enav, interview by Ayala Levin, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 15, 2009.

950 Elrich, Brit Vashever, 58. Including the above mentioned Ya’acov Meridor.

951 Kay Kaufman Shelemay, A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois, 1994 [1991]), 63. As holders of British passports granted to Adenite Jews, the family declined the offer.

317 community compound named after Menahim Messa, known as Benin, another prominent

Jewish merchant from Aden who preceded Shelemay as the leader of the Jewish community.

Taking advantage of the acute housing problem in Addis and the influx of diplomatic and aid personnel, primarily employees of the American embassy, Shalom Shelemay decided to use the land for the construction of a rental apartment building with a commercial ground level and basement for the family’s trade business.952 This was a one time opportunity for

Enav to showcase his originality and improvisatory talent by overcoming an especially narrow and steep site (figs. 60-1) and by displaying his ability to address the taste and life- style of its future occupants. The highly irregular building that ensued consists of at least three staggered apartment types; the largest ones are multileveled with spacious living area and dining rooms separated by a mezzanine level for the kitchen, designed specifically to accommodate Addis Ababa’s main leisure time activity for expatriate elites - hosting and entertaining at lavish dinner parties.

The dynamic articulation of volumes on the façade, which regularized the variety of staggered spaces, presented a stark image compared to the rectangular massive (probably

Italian-built) three-story apartment building that it still faces. The unusual modern building became a landmark in the city, as patches of modern buildings, following the few built during Italian occupation, were very rare and highly visible. Moreover, the Emperor himself granted the building special attention due to the high volatility of the site, which was adjacent to one of the Muslim community’s most prominent mosques.953 During the

952 Only a very small minority lived in apartment blocks, which were few in number. See Gulema, 441.

953 Jack Shelemay, interview by Ayala Levin, Cambridge, Mass., December 16, 2011. Originally commissioned by Benin, who imported Muslim builders from Yemen for his compound’s construction, the

318 building’s construction, the emperor drove past the site every afternoon to make sure that the building would not stir “another Suez crisis” in the neighborhood.954 This concern was not far-fetched, since protesting voices against Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish endeavors were being heard in Eritrea, where the Muslim community cried out against the “second Palestine” they feared was being recreated in the area, especially by the commercial farms Enav’s brothers ventured into following the success of Incode.955

The Shelemay apartment building was not only Enav’s first opportunity to showcase his professional ability, but also his way into the social fabric of the city. What started out as a business relationship developed into close family ties when Enav married Shalom

Shelemay’s daughter Margaret. Through his ties with the Jewish expatriate community,

Enav gained more access to other expatriate communities in this highly cosmopolitan city as well as to the local population,956 elite and poor, than he would have had if he limited his contacts exclusively to the Israeli diplomatic, security, and aid personnel, who increased in numbers and became more visible, especially after the embassy opened in 1962.

In order to deepen his social and professional ties, and assuming the two were intricately linked, Enav sought to partner with a local architect. After some inquiries, Enav heard of the then sole Ethiopian architect, Michael Tedros, who was working at the Ethiopian Ministry of

mosque has continued to bear his name (even though its recent reconstruction was financed by Saudi donors).

954 Shelemay, interview.

955 A. Levin to Africa-Asia Division, Foreign Ministry, July 29, 1963, ISA, MFA 1903/12 A.

956 This highly cosmopolitan environment consisted of Italians, Yemeni Arabs, Indians, Greeks, Americans, English, Germans, French, Swedes, Sudanese, Egyptians, Norwegians, Israelis, Yugoslavs, Lebanese, and other non-Ethiopian Africans. See Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 8 (February 1964), IES.

319 Education. As a way of examining his work, Enav met Tedros at a house the latter had designed and rented out to an Israeli police officer.957 Tedros’ position as a government employee and the fact that he owned land indicated that he belonged to a very narrow class of the local educated elite. Born and raised in England, Tedros had some training in the building trades, which he acquired in postwar England’s veteran training. Following this training, he was enrolled in a night school studying architecture when an opportunity presented itself in the form of request on behalf of the Ethiopian government to work and train under the English administration at the Ministry of Education.958 In 1942, following the

British army’s “liberation” of Ethiopia from Italian occupation, Britain sent about twenty advisors to rebuild Ethiopia’s governing institutions while maintaining military control.959

British control terminated by 1945, when the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement expired. Although negotiations with Washington preceded the end of the British military control, American aid in the field of education commenced only in 1952, when the Point Four program came into effect.960 Michael Tedros was invited to follow his brother the engineer to work and train under British administration with the explicit aim of Ethiopianizing government

957 Michael Tedros, interview by Ayala Levin, Burke, VA, October 20, 2011.

958 From 1941 to 1945, a British official acted as an advisor to the minister and the director general of education concerning educational policies and the organizational setup of the educational system. The principles of all the main schools in Addis Ababa were British. A shift from British to U.S. control started in 1945 when two U.S. officials were appointed as superintendents of Ethiopian schools. However, the ties with Britain were not severed, as evidenced from the fact that Haile Selassie sought to affiliate the University College of Addis Ababa with the University of London before he decided to accept US aid. See Paulos Milkias, Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Ethiopia (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2006), 79-81.

959 Erlich, Brit Vashever, 57. British troops joined the long-fighting Ethiopian resistance (one of these troops arrived from Palestine with Jewish volunteers. See ibid, 50-5). However, when Haile selassie returned from exile in February 1941, they prohibited him for entering the capital. The British were reluctant to exit and maintained military occupation through the British Military Mission to Ethiopia. In return for a loan, the emperor signed in 1942 an agreement that granted the British “precedence over any other foreign representative” and allowed British advisors a dominant role in the nation’s financing. In addition, London maintained full control of Eritrea and Ogaden. See McVety, 70-71.

960 McVety, 125-128.

320 administration. The Tedros brothers were among a significant number of returnees who occupied important technical and bureaucratic positions.961

Michael Tedros continued to enjoy his returnee status in Ethiopia, where he was granted government scholarships as part of American educational aid to complete his formal architectural studies at Ohio State College and afterwards at the University of Pennsylvania under famed architect Louis Kahn.962 He and Enav formed the first architectural firm in

Ethiopia where an Ethiopian was a full partner. Despite his prestigious training and the fact he was a few years older than Enav, the latter headed design at the office and acted as

Tedros’ mentor, while Tedros’ more agreeable personality served to communicate with the workers.963 Notwithstanding the mutual respect and friendship between the two partners, there is no doubt that partnering with a “local” architect was strategically successful for

Enav as it distinguished him from his competitors,964 including architectural moguls such as the Italian Arturo Mezzedimi (from Asmara) and the French Henri Chomette, as well as East

European and Scandinavian firms such as the Yugoslav Z. Kovacevic and I. Straus, the

961 Milkias, 43. While Tedros was not of a privileged background (his family did not have blood ties with the royal family or the aristocracy: His father was an adventurer, who left the family a donkey as a farewell gift to compensate for his abandonment, and pursued jobs in the hotel industry in Europe, starting in Italy and eventually ending up in London), their family gained the Imperial government’s special recognition during the Italian occupation when the Ethiopian government exiled in Bath. Michael’s brother who served as an engineer in the British Army would come occasionally to the exile ministers’ house to help them operate and repair the mechanical appliances within the house. Following this, the family’s house in London served as a trustworthy destination for the Ethiopian elite, where, for example, their children could stay on their way to boarding schools. Micheal Tedros, interview.

962 Ibid.

963 Ibid.

964 This cultural capital has not attenuated even today, as demonstrated in a recent dissertation where the writer cites the partnership as “an important landmark in the larger development of Ethiopianization.” Gulema, 549.

321 Norwegian Norconsult, and the Bulgarian Technoexportstroy.965 The fact that the Minister of Finance became Tedros’ brother in-law did not hurt either.

Whatever governmental connections they may have had either from Tedros’ family relations or social interactions with the educated elite were not sufficient to secure a favorable eye in prestigious competitions, since it was his imperial majesty himself who had the final say. To his utmost embarrassment while facing the vexed emperor during their first presentation to him, Enav found out that his partner could not speak a word of Amharic.966 From then on it was Enav who conversed directly with the emperor, while the intimidated Tedros was commanded to learn the language if he were ever to speak to the emperor again.967

Following the tradition of entrusting expatriates with discreet royal affairs,968 Enav’s unmediated relationship with the emperor was further sustained when he kept a watchful eye on one of the emperor’s more unruly grandsons. Enav, who had designed this wayward offspring’s house around an alcohol bar to suit his drinking habits, befriended him and, acting on the family’s wishes, accompanied him in his carousing. Their friendship became

965 For a comprehensive overview see Dejene H. Mariam, “Architecture in Addis Ababa,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Centenary of Addis Ababa, November 24-25, 1986, eds. Ahmed Zekaria, Bahru Zewde and Taddese Beyene (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa City Council, 1987), 199-215; Gulema, 549- 555.

966 Although by the beginning of the 1950s, English became the official language of the Empire, and French was the Emperor’s preferred language, Amharic was the national language. Amharization began with Emperor Melenik, but the policy was implemented “with apparent ruthlessness” during Haile Selassie’s regime, in which all books, periodicals and magazines were published in Amharic or a few European languages such as English and French. See Milkias, 56, 81.

967 Tedros, interview. However, he never did, even after years of residence in the country. 968 Richard Pankhurst, “Melenik and the Utilisation of Foreign Skills in Ethiopia,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 5, no. 1 (January 1967): 29-86. Foreigners were sometimes perceived as more trustworthy than locals since they did not have a stake in local affairs. This was especially true in an environment filled with intrigues and suspicion as in Haile Selassie’s court, as depicted (perhaps with some exaggeration) in the documentary novel: Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (New York: Vintage Books, 1989 [1978]).

322 so tight that the prince surprised Enav one day with a gift of a shiny red Mini Minor. The royal family’s intimate appreciation of Enav is further evidenced by the fact that the family entrusted him to design a mausoleum for the emperor and the empress.969

As the representatives of the first “local” architectural firm, Enav and Tedros’ image benefitted from their commitment to the development of a local professional community.

Alongside Enav’s teaching part time at the College of Engineering, a subject I will return to later, the two were involved in the establishment of the Ethiopian Association of Architects and Engineers in 1963 and the publishing of its journal Zede. Typical of their strategic alliance, in which Tedros served as the “local face” of their partnership, it was a photo of

Tedros helping a student rather than an image of Enav that made it onto the university brochure in 1966,970 serving as a compelling image of the Ethiopiazation of the university and the profession. Similarly, Tedros became the first president of the Association of

Architects and Engineers, while two of the major articles featured in the first issue of its journal Zede were written by Yehuda Peter (the second Israeli dean of the College of

Engineering) and Zalman Enav.971 Although the extent of Enav’s involvement in setting up the association is unclear, the fact that Tedros was chosen for the task despite the engineers’ majority provides evidence that Enav was active back-stage in its formation.

Beyond Locals and Foreigners: Race, Skill and Expertise

969 Enav, interview.

970 College Day Science and Engineering, May 14, 1966, List 6, IES.

971 Zede: Journal of the Ethiopian Association of Engineers and Architects 1 (November 1965).

323 When Enav searched for a local architect, by “local” he meant strictly Ethiopian, even if he was born and raised in England, and as he later found out, could not speak the national

(imperial) language. Considered to this day the “first” Ethiopian architect, Michael Tedros was probably the first Ethiopian to obtain a professional degree in architecture.972 This decision was more at the level of a symbolic statement than emanating from practical reasons, since if Enav was looking for an architect who was familiar with the local construction industry and labor, he could have reached one of the many builders who had practiced architecture for generations in Ethiopia, albeit with no formal education, whose families had emigrated from Armenia, Greece, or India.973 Born or raised most of their lives in Ethiopia, these foreigners were no doubt more culturally immersed and had significantly more local practical experience than Tedros.

With his English manners and American education, yet imbued with his father’s patriotism,974 it may be argued that Tedros was less “local” than other architects of non-

Ethiopian origin in terms of cultural customs and familiarity with the local building industry.

Such, for example, was Alexander (P.) Miriyalis, who was born in Addis Ababa to a Greek engineer. His father, George Miriyalis, had arrived during the reign of Menelik (1889-1935),

Haile Selassie’s predecessor, and served as the chief engineer of the most important buildings constructed at that time, including the Grand Palace and St. George Church.975 His

972 This was a generation of “firsts”: his wife was the first Ethiopian nurse. Michael Tedros, interview.

973 Pankhurst, 57-63.

974 Tedros, interview. However, this patriotism extended to the rest of Africa, where Tedros decided to stay even after he was offered a job in an international organization based in Europe.

975 The rebuilding of St. George involved Orphanides, another Greek architect, and was constructed by the Italian builder/engineer Castagna in 1906-1911. Pankhurst, 63.

324 son continued the family business and designed apartments, villas, and buildings. Another famous example is the Armenian builder (considered an engineer, although he had no formal education) Minas Kherbekian who worked for fifty years for the Ministry of Works and

Addis Ababa’s municipality, specializing in road and bridge construction. Born in Armenia in 1886, he came to Ethiopia when he was nine years old to join his father who had already worked as a builder of houses and roads in Harär. In Addis Ababa, which enjoyed a construction boom at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had a long career of constructing houses, public buildings, roads and bridges. The Miriyalises and Kherbekians are only two notable examples of the influx of foreigners who contributed to the development of Addis Ababa during Melenik’s reign. The building of the palace, churches, and foreign legations involved European engineers and entailed the immigration or importation of a large community of non-European craftsmen.976 In fact, the entire building trade was almost exclusively managed and performed by foreigners: Swiss, German,

Russian and Italian engineers, and Indian, Arab, Greek and Armenian masons and artisans.

Brick making started around 1907 by the Italian builder Castagna, and the trade soon expanded to Greek producers. By the late 1920s, tiles were also produced by Italians.977

Following geographer Garth Andrew Myers’ analysis of the intermediary position of an

Indian architect in the Public Work Department in Zanzibar, historian Shimelis Bonsa

Gulema characterizes Kherbekian’s position as an “insider-outsider,” since he spoke

976 Ibid, 50.

977 Ibid, 74-5.

325 Amharic, married an Ethiopian,978 and was known to live and eat with the common people.979 According to Gulema, this position enabled him to become a mediator between the expatriate or local elite and the urbanized poor.980 The overwhelming majority of Greeks,

Arabs, Indians and Armenians in the cosmopolitan community of Addis Ababa at the beginning of the twentieth century (accounting for about 800 of 1,000 foreign nationals in

1912) indeed calls for a distinct conceptualization of the figure of the non-western foreigner in the imperial and subsequently postcolonial landscape of modern Ethiopia. According to historian Richard Pankhurst, the Ethiopians were not very conscious of the difference between the foreigners’ nationalities, and their distinction between Greek and Armenians, and north or west Europeans, primarily reflected the attitudes of the foreigners’ communities themselves.981 The vague national distinction gave way to a clearer class division between

“grik” and “färänj.“ Rather than a nationality, the term “grik” came to designate a class of

“manual workers, eating-house proprietors and small traders, irrespective of whether they were really Greek, Armenian or Italian,” while “färänj” designated the class of diplomats, government officials and traders.982 While not based on nationality, this distinction had some racial overtones as is made clear by the labor division outlined above between

European engineers and Indian, Arab and Armenian craftsmen. However, although Menelik utilized the expertise of European advisers in many fields, from setting up a post and

978 This is a significant fact considering that intermarriages were less common among the Armenian community. (Intermarriages were most common among Italians, Greeks and Arabs, and least common in the case of West Europeans, Indians and Armenians). Furthermore, Armenians used to reside in foreign-type houses like the Europeans and the Indians did. Pankhurst, 80-81.

979 Gulema, 556.

980 Ibid, ibid.

981 Pankurst, 82.

982 Ibid, 85.

326 telegraph to schools, hospitals, electricity and arms production, the class of advisers also included non-European experts. Among the military advisers in Melenik’s court, for example, were several Sudanese and a considerable number of Senegalese in addition to some French, German and Swiss advisers.983

Moreover, soon after Italy’s defeat in the Battle of Adwa and the employment of Italian prisoners of war (the majority of the 1,865 soldiers captured in the battle were taken to

Addis Ababa) as masons and road builders,984 the Europeans’ prestige had considerably diminished in the eyes of Ethiopians. As one disgruntled European observer noted, “now their heads were much swollen and they believed themselves to be the elect of nations.”985

While the respectful treatment of foreigners (including Italian veterans who chose to stay in the country, also after the period of Italian colonization during Haile Selassie’s reign),986 did not diminish Melenik could increasingly afford to be more selective, and even to reject missionaries who used to train Ethiopians in useful trades such as masonry, bricklaying, and carpentry.987 In fact, the abundance of skilled workers relieved Ethiopian citizens from the

“dirty work” of manual labor, which was traditionally viewed with disdain. Thus this dependence on foreign labor was not seen as a humiliating subjection but on the contrary served as a sign of Ethiopian superiority over Europeans and non-Europeans alike.

983 Ibid, 67.

984 Ibid, 44.

985 Cited ibid, 47.

986 Ibid, 51, 83.

987 Ibid, 51.

327 On their part, Europeans either willfully took part in the convenient life Ethiopia had to offer or expressed their worries facing the strange reversal of power relations: “it seemed very strange to me coming from British East Africa to see an African ordering about a white man engaged in building his house,” one observer commented.988 Another observer, a British linguist, did not choose his words that carefully when he explained:

The white man has been compromised… by the lower-class quasi-European trader and artisan (…) The Abyssinians have of late years been brought into contact, in one way or another, with the French and Italians. Now in my opinion, the Latin races are mistaken in their treatment of less civilized races… they fraternize with natives too much, with the result stated in a certain wholesome proverb about familiarity. Their behaviour is not in accordance with the British, still less, one may add, with German or Dutch ideas and practices.989

In his attempt to restore the balance of power between whites and blacks, this linguist displaced his racism from Africa to the “Latin races” of Europe. The threat presented by the anomaly of Ethiopia among the colonial world and the transgression of the Europeans who took part in was so radical that the author felt compelled to redraw racial boundaries within

Europe itself. To complicate things, Ethiopians distinguished themselves from the rest of black Africa and saw themselves as superior to African Muslims. While the country eventually became a pan-African symbol of black pride, until the late 1950s Ethiopia considered itself geopolitically as part of the Middle East.990

988 Cited ibid, 83.

989 Cited ibid, 83-84.

990 Elrich, “Brit Vashever,” 84. On the other hand, it had uneasy relationship with the Muslim world, which it felt superior of, but also feared. Ibid, 30.

328 During Haile Selassie’s reign prior to the Italian occupation, Addis Ababa saw the intensification of Melenik’s attempts at modernization and the expanding use of foreigners as advisors and builders of western institutions and forms, developing roads and communications, education and health services; improving the capital’s living conditions; developing a state banking system; modernizing the army and centralizing administration in the capital.991 The Italian occupation and its aftermath had not detracted from the highly cosmopolitan nature of the society of Addis Ababa of the beginning of the twentieth century.

In the 1950s an influx of American diplomatic and aid personnel replaced the British administration that had supplanted the Italians in the 1940s, and while ties continued with countries such as Sweden and France, new actors such as French-Canadian Jesuits, West

German, Israeli, and Yugoslavian aid personnel entered the scene. As for Indian, Armenian,

Greek and Arab families, it is safe to assume that the majority stayed and immersed themselves to varying degrees within Ethiopian society. According to a census carried out by the municipality in 1962-63 of the 443,728 Addis Ababa residents, 11,824 were of foreign nationalities, including 2,824 Italians, 1,789 Yemeni Arabs, 1,206 Indians, 1,132

Greeks, 1,068 Americans, 562 Britons, 307 Germans, 293 French, 193 Swedes, 185

Sudanese, 168 Egyptians, 162 Norwegians, 140 Israelis, 139 Yugoslavs, 130 Lebanese, 200 non-Ethiopian Africans, and 1,902 various other nationalities.992 In this highly cosmopolitan environment which was under European colonization for only a short period, the hierarchical relations between foreign “experts” and local population did not have the same connotations as in other African colonies. To summarize briefly, foreign expertise, especially in terms of building, was not associated strictly with the west, although the

991 Martin Eric Johnson, “The Evolution of the Morphology of Addis Ababa,” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1974), 272.

992 Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 8 (February 1964), IES.

329 industrialization of building construction and use of heavy machinery had widened the gulf between “builders” and engineers. Secondly, while technical skills were highly valued, manual labor was perceived as demeaning for Ethiopians to undertake and was practiced mainly by whites, a fact that had stirred Ethiopians away from pursuing technical professions, including architecture and engineering.993

How did Enav and Tedros fit into this lingering imperial world? What was their position in this multileveled hierarchical scale based on a mixture of skills, education, and race? Did their unique partnership between a färänj and a repatriate Ethiopian assume the same “in- between” position that Gulema ascribed to Minos Kherbekian? Tedros belonged to the new educated elite in Ethiopia which was divorced from both the aristocracy and the commoners.994 Furthermore, as mentioned above, the language and customs of his upbringing set him apart from the common Ethiopian. On the other hand, like the non- western craftsmen, his career had a humble beginning in veteran training in England in the building trades before he embarked on night schools to study architecture. Elite in Ethiopia, but lower middle class in England, Tedros’ skin color had also made him vulnerable to racist discrimination in the English job market.995 Yet, it was by virtue of this skin color and ethnic origin that career opportunities and avenues for class mobilization opened up for him in

Ethiopia. Tedros thus represents another “in-between” figure at the interstices of two

993 Reporting on the law enrollment at the Technical College, Ephraim Spira, its first Israeli dean comments, “There seems to be a very distinct tendency amongst the young generation eligibke (sic) for higher studies not to choose the career of engineering, in contrast to he declared policy of the Imperial Government and to the manifest needs of the country. “ See Ephraim Spira to Ato Million Neqniq, Ethiopia Ministry of Education, October 28, 1959, ISA, MFA2031/10; Ephraim Spira to Hannan Aynor, October 29, 1959, ISA, MFA2031/10.

994 Milkias, 135.

995 Tedros, interview.

330 empires,996 the British and the Ethiopian, or between the British and the emergence of

Ethiopia as a postcolonial state after Italian occupation. In England, Tedros was in the dubious position of being “of color” without having been a British colonial subject. By accepting the offer of the postcolonial Ethiopian government, Tedros could pursue his career aspirations without the hindrance of race and class he encountered in England. As a returnee, he benefitted from education opportunities that far exceeded his possibilities in England, and class mobility that transgressed both class divisions in England and Ethiopia’s traditional social hierarchy. Thus the conditions presented to him in Ethiopia at that time, where his entry into his desired profession was encouraged and groomed by the state, would have been unparalleled elsewhere.

Similarly to Tedros, Enav began his career in the building trades in Kibbutz Ma’agan

Micha’el where he volunteered before embarking on architectural studies at the Technion.

However, this humble beginning was ideologically rather than economically driven, as he was born to a Tel Aviv petit bourgeois family.997 Enav’s decision to stay and work in

Ethiopia can be compared to that of Alan Vaughan-Richards (1925-1989), who decided to establish his own practice in Lagos after the Architects’ Co-Partnership, his British employer, withdrew from Nigeria upon independence. One of the reasons Vaughan-

Richards stayed, and which also enabled him to embark on an independent career path, was his 1959 marriage to Ayo Vaughan, a local Elite socialite. In 1971, Vaughan-Richards

996 See Stoler and Cooper: “…political possibilities do not just lie in grand oppositions but in the interstices of power structures, in the intersection of particular agendas, in the political space opened by new and renewed discourses and by subtle shifts in ideological ground.” Stoler and Cooper, 18.

997 Enav, interview.

331 partnered with the Nigerian architect Felix Ibru.998 Similarly to Enav, his range of projects was vast and he was involved in architectural education and the artistic and cultural life of

Lagos. Unlike Vaughan-Richards, however, Enav did not immerse himself completely within the local community, as he married an expatriate Jewess whose family had ties with

Israel.

Yet in some significant ways Enav did transgress ethno-racial barriers. First, although he married an expatriate white Jewess, she was of Sephardic descent. In the highly prejudiced society of Israel of the 1950s-1960s, which discriminated against North African and Middle

Eastern Jewish immigrants, the marriage of an Ashkenazi (European descent) man like Enav to a Sephardic (Oriental descent) woman would have raised some eyebrows. But this racial hierarchy did not translate to Ethiopia, where the wealthy, educated and cosmopolitan family held both social and economic prestige and British passports. Considered under

British and Italian colonial rule as white, Adenite Jews enjoyed considerable privileges compared to their Yemenite counterparts, a distinction that got completely blurred in

Israel.999 Thus under colonial hierarchies, but not Israeli ones, Enav “married well.”

Furthermore, Enav’s partnering with Tedros of his own volition, when there were no strict

998 Most probably, following the laws of Nigerization introduced in the early 1970s. Incidentally, Vaughan- Richards’ partner Felix Ibru trained in Israel, after graduating the Nottingham School of Architecture in 1962. He worked briefly with the Jewish Agency on various projects relating to farm settlements and prefabricated buildings in Jerusalem and Haifa. He later enrolled at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, for postgraduate studies and qualified with an MSc in 1963. He returned to Nigeria at the end of that year and took up an appointment with the Federal Ministry of Education as the first resident Lecturer in Architecture at the Yaba College of Technology.

999 Adenite Jews enjoyed considerable privileges in comparison to their Yemenite counterparts under British rule as well as Italian. Under the latter, they were considered white, while Yemenite Jews were considered black. See Bat-Zion Eraqui Klorman, “Yemen, Aden and Ethiopia: Jewish Emigration and Italian Colonialism,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 19, no. 4 (October 2009): 415-426. On racism within Israeli society see Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yonah, eds. Gaza’anut Beyisrael (Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; Hakibbutz Hameukhad, 2008).

332 regulations to do so as there were in 1970s Nigeria, challenged the racial stereotypes embedded in the local division of labor by introducing an Ethiopian into the architectural job market. When interviewing Israeli architects to join their office, one of the questions Enav asked was whether they would be willing to take orders from a black man.1000

Second Generation of Tropical Architecture Network

Enav’s openness to the cosmopolitan environment in Addis Ababa, his ease with transgressing racial hierarchies, and his determination to partner with a local architect all derive to a considerable extent from his study experience at the Tropical Architecture department at the Architectural Association in London. Although much has been written recently on the school and its founders, namely Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and Otto

Koenigsberger, there is very little, if any, mention of its students. This omission seems surprising, since it is a well known fact that if it were not for a Nigerian student at the

Manchester School of Architecture, Adedokun Adeyemi, who initiated the 1953 conference on Tropical Architecture -- arguing for the need of a revised curriculum that would better suit the experience and needs of overseas colonial students like himself -- the school would have probably not have come into existence.1001 Furthermore, this omission seems peculiar in light of recent scholarship’s emphasis on the networks of dissemination of knowledge and practice of tropical architecture,1002 in which the school acted as one of the most important

1000 Enav, interview. Similarly, polish architects worked under Ghanaian (Israeli-trained) managers at the Ghana National Construction Cooperation. See Stanek, “Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana.”

1001 Wakely, 337; Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture,” 343.

1002 Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture;” Le Roux, “Building on the Boundary;” Le Roux, “Modern Architecture in Post-colonial Ghana and Nigeria;” Baweja, “A Pre-history of Green Architecture;” Chang, “Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network;” Iain Jackson and Jessica Holland, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics,

333 nodes of passage. Any attempt at a comprehensive account of these networks must include the generation of the students as well as the teachers, as the latter depended on the first to continue their influence in the decolonizing and post-colonial world and were instrumental in disseminating this body of knowledge in new territories that were not under British colonial rule.

As Vandana Baweja has argued, by the 1950s “tropical architecture” was not exclusively the domain of British colonial practitioners, as it was developed along inter-imperial, intra- colonial, and transnational networks.1003 The establishment of the department at the AA in

London during the critical period of the demise of the British Empire and decolonization served to assert England’s continuing global significance in a post-colonial world. Hannah le

Roux, Mark Crinson and others have argued that architecture and the building industry at large served as a means to maintain dependency at the end of formal colonialism.1004 This was supported by governmental aid or multinational political associations such as the

Commonwealth of Nations of the former British Empire or its French counterpart, the

French Community, that sought to continue to monopolize the markets of the independent countries following colonial-based business ties, for example by conditioning aid in the employment of British architects, contractors, and purchase of British building goods.1005

(Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014); see also, Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonialism, Ecology, and Technology (New York; London: Routledge, forthcoming).

1003 Baweja, 113.

1004 Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture;” Chang, “Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network;” Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire.

1005 This practice of conditioning aid by the use of equipment and personnel of the donor country was practiced among many of the donor countries to various degrees (including Israel, see chapter 3), not only the former colonies.

334 Since the consolidation and dissemination of tropical architecture as a body of knowledge was essential for its survival in the post-colonial era, it was also imbued with anxiety over losing its exclusivity.1006

The department of tropical architecture at the AA had a central role in this continuing dependency because of the special role education had in the post-colonial era.1007 With the high demand for education in the post-colonial world, it became the prime “soft” tool of ideological dissemination and cultural influence. Already during World War II, the center of higher education for African elite in the British colonies shifted from Britain to the US.1008

With decolonization and the emergence of the Cold War, this tendency increased exponentially.1009 Britain had to keep up with the new competition if it wanted to salvage some of its imperial prestige and continue its role as a metropolitan center.

The renowned AA that reached its peak in the early 1950s with instructors such as Alison and Peter Smithson served as a magnet for architecture students from the decolonizing and developing world. However, very few could afford the school’s five year degree program and the living expenses in England. The tropical architecture department, on the other hand,

1006 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, Israeli, Polish, and Hungarian architects claimed to have “tropical knowledge.”

1007 Or the Empire era, as defined by Michael Hardt and Antonion Negri in Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

1008 Ajayi and Tamuno, 14-6.

1009 Via scholarships to study at the donor country, or in a third party country; aid in setting up local institutions; the setting up of specialized institutions in new centers such as the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, or the Histadrut Afro-Asian Seminar in Tel Aviv. The latter received $300,000 in scholarships from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1960-62. It was suspected that this was used as a cover to channel funds from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Carol, 104.

335 offered a much shorter certificate program for postgraduate students, consisting of a six month full-time course with the option for local practicing architects to attend only the lecture course as evening classes.1010 Another popular option was to take this course in the fifth year of the degree program as a form of specialization.1011 This course opened the doors of the prestigious institution to a much larger pool of students of lesser income from postcolonial or other “developing” countries.1012 Since from its early inception the department established contacts with various governmental and international agencies,1013 it is safe to assume that these agencies helped recruit and finance many of the students, some of whom were government employees in their home countries. Such was the case of the Portuguese architect Luís Possolo, who was sent to partake in the first cohort of the department in 1954-

55 by the Portuguese Overseas Planning Office (Gabinete de Urbanização do Ultramar), under which upon graduation he worked in the Portuguese colonies.1014 Another prominent example is the Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam (1923-2012), Enav’s classmate, who

1010 Later extended to 9 months.

1011 Among the degree program students who took the course were Kenneth Frampton and Bob Gillis, who would later work in Dov Karmi’s office, together with their former classmate Ram Karmi.

1012 Since the opening of the department was conditioned on its ability to self-finance, much of the funding came from external grants. See Wakely, 338. Even Enav, who came from a middle class family, had to secure a scholarship, most probably from the British Council, to attend the program. Enav, interview.

1013 The list of organizations the school’s management decided to approach demonstrates this moment of transition from colonial to post-colonial administration. It included the Ford Foundation, the Colonial Office, the Rockefeller Foundation, the I.L.O, I.C.I, UNESCO, UN, ECAFE, the High Commissioner for India and Pakistan, the Burmese Embassy, the Indonesian Embassy, World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, the Colonial Employers Association, as well as “contractors with interests in tropical architecture.” In addition, the head of the school approached 43 government departments or organizations. See Minutes of the Ad Hoc Sub-Committee for the Department of Tropical Architecture, December 1953, AAA.

1014 Luís Possolo: Um Arquitecto do Gabinete de Ubanização do Ultramar (Lisbon: CIAAM, 2012).

336 was awarded a British Council scholarship to study at the department and worked before and after his studies for the Government of East Pakistan.1015

This mode of operation proved successful as the influx of foreign students increased steadily until it constituted the overwhelming majority of the department.1016 In 1963, out of the total of 27 students enrolled in the department that year, 23 were overseas certificate students.1017

But this overwhelming majority of foreign students was not the case, nor was it the intention, when the department first opened. If in 1954-55, the first academic year of running the department, only nine out of the 30 students enrolled were certificate students (mostly overseas) and the rest were fifth year diploma students (mostly English), in the next academic year this balance would completely overturn in favor of certificate students, most of whom would be from “developing” or “tropical” countries. In Enav’s year, 1956-57, there were already 22 certificate students, the majority of whom were foreigners. The foreign versus local students’ overturn reached its peak in 1957-8, the year Otto Koenigsberger took over the direction of the department, when out of the 36 students only five were fifth year diploma students.1018 Yet even then, a certain hierarchical differentiation continued to prevail, associating the “true” AA students with the five year degree program, as is

1015 Bangelapdeia, National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, http://www.banglapedia.org/HT/I_0123.htm (accessed May 22, 2014).

1016 Rt. Hon. Dennis Vosper, the Minister for Technical Co-operation stated on the occasion of the 1963 annual exhibition of the department, “The number of overseas students in Britain is increasing all the time. Indeed the latest figure that I have is that there are 66,000 overseas students here today. This is an impressive total. The AA school is no exception. And I am glad to see that it has seventy students from overseas out of a total of 350.” See “Department of Tropical Studies: Opening of the Annual Exhibition by the Rt. Hon. Dennis Vosper, TD, MP,” AA Journal 78, no. 781 (April 1963): 312. These numbers must have increased even more after 1964, when the Labor Government created the Ministry of Overseas Development, and part of Britain’s aid to the third world was in the form of scholarships to study in the UK. Wakely, 342.

1017 AA Journal 78, no. 781 (April 1963): 313.

1018 Wakely, 338.

337 evidenced by the language of the school’s official report: “Apart from the five AA students taking this course, other students came from Pakistan, Iraq, Trinidad, the Philippines,

Ceylon, Viet Nam, Jamaica, South Africa, Indonesia, Nigeria and Thailand.”1019 Collapsing racial categories with the students’ programs of choice, this divide was more often than not accurate, with “other students” only occasionally including students from the northern hemisphere such as Germany and the US.1020

The diminishing demand of local students and certified architects on the one hand, and the increasing interest of students from “the tropics” on the other attests to the growing realization in England and the colonies that the wheels of decolonization were set in motion, and turned from a distant promise to a tangible reality.1021 Maxwell Fry had already recognized it at the end of the 1955-56 academic year when he decided to step down as department head, advising the AA Council to close it down entirely, stating that he did not see much future for it in a time when fewer and fewer British architects were needed in the tropics.1022 Indulging in what seems to be post-imperial melancholy, Fry continued to define the main client of the department as the British architect, and was oblivious of the opportunity presented to re-envision the school’s role as a post-imperial metropolitan center.

The school council, however, recognized this opportunity. Under the leadership of

Koenigsberger, who had been the main protagonist involved in its formation from its early

1019 1957/8 Year Summary, Council Minute Book, 1955-61, AAA, 2007:66 (My emphasis).

1020 Ibid, ibid.

1021 On the uncertainties and ambiguity of the fact of decolonization on the part of the British administration see Nicholas J. White, Decolonization: The British Experience since 1945 (London; New York: Longman, 1999).

1022 March 5, 1956; May 3, 1956; June 20, 1956, Council Minute Book, AAA 2007:66. See also Wakely, 338.

338 inception, the department continued to develop and soon became an important center in a post-imperial era.1023 Envisioning the department as a provisional “stop-gap measure that would do itself out of a job as professional cadres in the Third World developed and indigenous training institutions were established,”1024 Koenigsberger, himself only a recent

British citizen, ironically solidified Britain’s centrality in the field of post-colonial architecture and planning.1025

Adjusting to the new demographic balance between locals or westerners versus students from developing countries was not without friction, as some local students were not willing to cooperate with the foreign ones. Following a case where a certain D. Grey and an N.

Brown were almost denied certificates due to poor attendance and their reluctance “to cooperate with any of the foreign students taking the course,” collaborating with “foreign students” became an implicit condition for a successful completion of the course.1026 It was decided that in the future, “if any student showed a similar unco-operative [sic] attitude towards the Course, he should be asked to leave it immediately.”1027 A cooperative attitude toward the course, therefore, included the collegial relationship between British students and overseas students, the overcoming of colonial stereotypes and an overall change of attitude from superiority to equality.

1023 Under Koenigsberger’s leadership, the department increasingly broadened its scope to accommodate the needs of its postcolonial students, centering on urban planning, a specialized educational building course, and providing teachers’ training, while shifting focus to policy issues. After it moved to UCL in 1971 and renamed the Developing Planning Unit, it continued to expand by creating an extension service in institutions throughout the Third World, as well as throughout Europe. See Wakely, 340-6.

1024 Wakely, 342 (Emphasis in original).

1025 For Otto Koenigsberger’s career and biography see Baweja.

1026 Minutes of the Meeting held in April, 27, 1955. Council Minute Book 1955-61, AAA 2007:66.

1027 Ibid.

339

On the occasion of the 1963 department exhibition, the English Minister of Technical

Cooperation was at pains to account for this change of clientele and to express a new sensitivity appropriate for a post-colonial metropolitan center: “This is not a one-way flow,” he stated, but his explanation seems to have indicated the contrary. “We send many architects overseas to countries where skilled man-power is in short supply; and they as individuals and the profession as a whole, gain much from this experience.”1028 Making a point about gaining from expanding post-colonial markets and the knowledge that is brought back to the British metropolitan center, the minister had very little to say about the benefits the school had to offer to overseas students, probably assuming that bathing in the aura of the school’s reputation was sufficient in itself. In this, the minister was not so much at fault, as the AA itself had failed to formulate a satisfactory objective regarding the benefits of the school to its overseas students. Ten years earlier, during the department’s inception, it was agreed that “the course would be intended primarily for English post-graduate students of architecture, wishing to gain knowledge of tropical building, but it would also provide facilities for qualified architects from tropical areas who wished to bring up to date their knowledge of building technique.”1029 Defining its main clients as English students, the department was conceived to cater primarily to British colonial administrators or other architects who were interested in venturing into the colonial building industry. The training of “qualified architects from tropical areas” was therefore perceived as a byproduct of this

1028 “Opening of the Annual Exhibition by the Rt. Hon. Dennis Vosper,” AA Journal 78, no. 871 (April 1963): 312.

1029 Minutes of the Ad Hoc Sub-Committee for the Department of Tropical Architecture, November 11, 1953 (attached to the December 1953 Report), AAA.

340 teaching, and not much thought had been put into tailoring a specialized course that would cater to their needs.

The problem of coherently and equally embracing this double clientele affected the curriculum, as can be learned from its objectives after one year of running the program:

[i]t does not attempt to provide a detailed knowledge of building practices in all tropical regions, but tries to make the student understand the basic effect on design problems of climatic, sociological, economic and other environmental factors. It is the aim of the course to prepare the student for a professional life under conditions which are different from those under which he has been brought up. For the student who comes from a tropical country the course will have the advantage of not only providing him with a specialized training, but also giving him a better understanding of the application of basic architectural knowledge to the problems of his own country.1030

As is evidenced by this description, the main challenge was the move between the general and the specialized: the course had to be general enough for the English architect so he could apply its methods to all tropical countries, and it had to be specialized for the “tropical” architect so that he would be able to identify the contribution of the course’s methods to his country’s specific conditions.

How did the department’s educators imagine this knowledge to be both general and specialized? An answer to this can be found in this retrospective account from 1963, explaining that:

1030 Syllabus for the 1955-56 Session, Council Minute Book 1955-61, AAA 2007: 66.

341 The first years of the course led quickly to the recognition that there would be no point in replacing the rules of thumb which were traditionally taught to students and apprentices in Britain by other sets for tropical countries. The conditions encountered within the tropics were too varied to make this practicable and it was necessary to go more deeply into the problem of environmental control and to establish universally applicable principles of design. This led to a more scientific and a scholarly approach in questions of physical as well as social environment.1031

In other words, in order for this knowledge to be considered scientific, it could not be based on a separate theory and set of rules that would undermine the main curriculum’s universality. Environmental control was therefore perceived as a scientific core that would uphold the department’s rigor against the inevitability of particularities and the uncertainty of rules of thumb. Paradoxically, these “rules of thumb,” which could not be replaced by a set of fixed rules, would continue to be employed in order to sustain the purification of theory from the messiness of the specific conditions architects encountered in their “real life” practice outside of school.

Training for a career in the global south, which in this context can be alternatively termed

“global tropicalism,” the students studied architectural properties in hot/dry, warm/humid, and monsoon climates. This tripartite division was reflected in a very basic studio and lectures curriculum supported by “general extension” lectures.1032 For example, the 1955-56

1031 “A Cross-Section of Recent Work and Teaching Methods,” AA Journal 78, no. 871 (April 1963): 302.

1032 The 1955-56 list of Lecturers included: F. Atkinson, George Atkinson, L. de Syllas, H. Bagenal, F. Rutter. Plus Dr. T. Bedford, Environmental Hygiene Research Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Prof. G. Crowden; applied physiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Prof. D. Forde, department of anthropology, University College London, M. Foyle, Bartlett, lecturer on civil engineering, Dr. Otto Koenigsberger, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The 1955-56 Lectures included technical aspects such as measurement of climatic factors and problems of lighting and acoustics in the tropics; practical issues such as standard and bye laws; economic problems, estimating and

342 studio tasks focused on designing a residential building, small hospital, and village club for each of the three tropical climates, in preparation for the students’ easy movement from one location to another, just as Fry and Drew had moved from West Africa to India,

Koenigsberger from India to West Africa and back to South East Asia, and Enav from Israel to Ethiopia, via the school in London. In Enav’s year, there was some correspondence between the assigned studios and the students’ country of origin. Enav’s projects involved a hotel he designed for the Jordanian coast of the Dead Sea, and when he worked on a city plan for Basra, he collaborated on it with a student from Iraq. Therefore there was some effort to include on the design team a member possessing intimate knowledge of the specified region. 1033

As certified architects with varying degrees of practical experience, the overseas students arrived at the department with specific objectives in mind that derived from their experience working at home, often in the public sector. As noted earlier, Islam had arrived after he had been working for the government of East Pakistan, and designed an important modern landmark, the Arts College building on the Dhaka University campus, very much in the tropicalist idiom. He may have been influenced by the promotion of tropical architecture by

self-help methods; disease prevention; building materials; and lectures in professional and administrative set up, with specific reference to the Commonwealth. Other lectures addressed cultural and historical aspects: the effect of tropical community traditions on planning problems (including history of tropical settlements in the three tropical climatic zones: the Middle East, Arabia and Persia; India, Malaya, Indonesia, Africa; West Indies and Latin Americas); services, community needs and amenities; tropical living habits and their effect on the design of houses and public buildings: outdoor life, religion, position of women, cooking and eating, the floor, bathing, etc.; special types of tropical buildings: schools, hostels, hospitals, history and historical and contemporary examples of colonial architecture. In the general extension lectures some lectures were devoted to the economics and culture of individual tropical countries, as well as to indigenous art. It goes without saying that this list of lectures covered in six months was ambitious and each subject could have been addressed only briefly at best. Syllabus for the 1955-56 Session, Council Minute Book 1955-61, AAA 2007: 66.

1033 Enav, interview.

343 Nehru in India as a nation-building project.1034 While the architecture discourse in Israel did not employ the term “tropical architecture,”1035 when Enav heard about the department during his internship in London at the office of Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, he associated the course with the desert climate for which he had to find design solutions as a planner in the Lakhish region and the city of Beersheba where he had been a municipal architect.1036 Considering these expectations, it may be the case that the emphasis of the course on generalized technical aspects of design was deemed unsatisfactory. Planner

Patrick Wakely, who taught at the department in its later permutation as the Development

Planning Unit at the University College London, explains that socio-economic issues often eclipsed the physical or technical aspects of design and as a consequence the curriculum has gone through various revisions since the early 1960s.1037 Significantly, in recounting his school days at the department, it was not the instructors or the classes that Enav remembered best, but rather the cosmopolitan richness of the department’s students. Describing his schooling experience as eye opening, he found the encounter and exchange of thoughts and learning about the social challenges of each respective country the most formative aspect of

1034 Baweja, 115-6.

1035 Although Fry and Drew cite the Building Research Station at the Technion in a list that closes their Tropical Architecture in the Humid Climate 1956 publication, this research station was established independently from British colonial administration by Rahel Shalon, and although climate was a major consideration in its research, it did not partake in the “tropical architecture” discourse. Similarly, Alexander Klein, another Technion professor, gave a talk in the inter-imperial conference in Mexico 1938, “Housing in Tropical and Sub-Tropical Climates,” without once using the term. See Housing in Tropical and Sub-Tropical Climates: 16th International Housing and Town Planning Congress, Mexico, 1938 (Brussels: International Federation for Housing and Town Planning, 1938).

1036 Enav, interview. See chapter 2 for Lakhish planning.

1037 Wakely, 339-40. In response to the broadening of its concerns, the department changed its name in 1961 from Tropical Architecture to Department of Tropical Studies, and in 1963 started a specialized Educational Building course, and focused on planning, housing, and policy.

344 his studies.1038 It therefore seems that the students compensated for the lack of cultural and political specificity in the curriculum by discussing the socio-economic conditions and the problems their societies faced among themselves.

With his arrival in Ethiopia, Enav was the first architect to introduce this body of knowledge among the contemporary local professional community. Although the majority of his designs did not follow the stylistic features that characterize tropical architecture such as overhangs, grilles and brise-soleil (see previous chapter), this divergence resulted from the particular climate of Addis Ababa, which due to its very high altitude is very mild all year long, and as well as we shall see later, from his attempt to tailor a specific image of an

Ethiopian modernity. The tropical architecture influence in Ethiopia had a more explicit expression with the next generation of Ethiopian architects, whom he may have had a considerable hand in teaching, in their designs in the 1970s-1980s.1039 While Enav did not adhere to the principles of tropical architecture religiously, he followed the collaborative spirit of the school when choosing to work with a local architect, despite his entirely different training, rather than “importing” a collaborator from the tropical architecture network. Furthermore, contrary to the implicit assumption that the network would continue using British contractors who were accustomed to the methods and the building materials used, Enav preferred to work with the Israeli contractor Solel Boneh and import Israeli

1038 Enav, interview.

1039 Specifically the firm National Consultants. See Mariam, 211-2.

345 products whenever possible.1040 Similarly, when he needed to expand the office, he turned to

Israel to find additional architects.1041

Rather than being seen as an attempt to break the tropical architecture network, this case could be interpreted as increasing its sophistication and strengthening it by way of adapting it to different markets on both ends of supply and demand. On the other hand, we should be wary of attributing the school and the tropical architecture network too much power, since as

Islam’s career demonstrates, the six months he spent at the AA in London were not an isolated event that determined his international affiliation. Prior to his arrival at the AA,

Islam studied at the University of Oregon, and after the AA, at Yale University under the supervision of Paul Rudolph. As he maintained close contact with American architects such as Rudolph and Louis Kahn, his experience at the AA seems to have been just one stop in the career path of a global-south architect; one that increasingly was determined by an

American rather than British education and market.

Networking Israeli Aid and Trade: Solel Boneh and the Engineering College

While the extent to which Enav played a part in the continuation and strengthening of the tropical architecture network is limited at best, he played a significant role in expanding

Israeli involvement in Addis Ababa in the fields of construction and architectural education.

As a free agent at the junction of various networks, the British tropical architecture on the

1040 Enav, interview. Hannan Bar-On to the Division of International Aid, Foreign Ministry, November 1, 1960, ISA, MFA 2027/18. In a newspaper interview Enav encouraged more trade relations with Israel, and complained about Israeli products. Yehuda Hagadrati, “ha-Tzabar she-Hinhig Bniya Khadasha be-Addis Ababa,” April 4, 1964, ISA, MFA 1922/12 A.

1041 Zalman Enav to Hannan Bar-On, October 31, 1960, ISA, MFA 2027/18.

346 one hand, and Israeli aid on the other, Enav was free to exploit each for his own ends.

Similarly, while not serving formally any governmental or non-governmental institution,

Enav played an important role in negotiating and mediating between various Israeli institutions and companies and Ethiopian professional and governmental institutions.

As explained earlier, Enav attempted to encourage Israeli trade with Ethiopia by purchasing

Israeli manufactured building products. Similarly, he was in a position to recommend the use of the contractor Solel Boneh for some of the major projects he designed, both private and public. Contrary to its mode of operation in many other African countries, Solel Boneh did not establish a local partnership in Ethiopia but operated as a private enterprise. In

Ethiopia, where trade unions became legal only in 1962,1042 Solel Boneh had no Histadrut connections or communication channels with the regime. Capitalist-minded Haile Selassie was resistant to the idea of a joint governmental venture until late 1963, when there was a failed attempt to negotiate with Solel Boneh such a partnership. The reasons for the

Ethiopian government’s resistance to this mode of operation can be attributed to Ethiopia’s reluctance to publicize its relationship with Israel prior to October 1962, when it accorded

Israel de jure recognition, and to its motivation to encourage foreign and local private investment. This tendency is evident in another Israeli aid enterprise that took place from

1960 to 1964, in which the Israeli bus cooperative Egged took over the management of the failing General Ethiopian Transport Share Company.1043 Instead of following the Israeli cooperative model, and while the imperial court held a controlling thirty-five percent interest,

1042 Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991 (Oxford, England: James Curry; Athens: Ohio University Press; Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2001), 200.

1043 Carol, 135.

347 the company operated like a private enterprise.1044 In addition, unlike other decolonizing countries where the contracting market was monopolized by metropolitan firms, the contracting market in Ethiopia was relatively free, with many local Italian contractors, mainly from Eritrea, keeping it competitive.1045 By the time Haile Selassie had warmed up to the idea of a joint company, Solel Boneh’s desire to establish partnerships at all costs had been diminished after experiencing losses following political instability or mismanagement in West Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other African countries.1046 When Solel Boneh was pressured a year earlier by the Histadrut to establish a joint company in Kenya, and by the

Israeli foreign ministry to enter the market in Tanganyika, Upper Volta, Niger and Central

African Republic, the board expressed an urgent need to have the Israeli government’s financial backing and insurance against political risk.1047 Since the company was not able to secure such governmental backing and had already suffered considerable losses in Ethiopia

(together with Turkey and Iran, of the Periphery Pact),1048 it is most likely that it demanded such assurances from the Ethiopian government. However, the emperor’s terms were considered too tough and the negotiations failed.1049

But this did not stop Solel Boneh from offering its services in Ethiopia as a private company, with the continuing encouragement of the Israeli government. Sometimes it even served as a

1044 Carol, 135-6.

1045 For a comprehensive list of Italian-owned building industries in Eritrea in 1959, see “Italian Industrial Enterprises in Eritrea - Year 1959,” http://www.dankalia.com/archive/1000/1111.htm (accessed May 27, 2014).

1046 Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 6/62, June 17, 1962, LA IV-204-4-536.

1047 Solel Boneh Board Meeting No. 4/62, February 5, 1962, LA IV-204-4-536.

1048 Ibid.

1049 Solel Boneh Overseas: Review 1973, LA IV-104-38-104.

348 cover for Israeli military personnel as it had in the pre-state years for the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah.1050 This mode of operation of opening a private branch rather than partnering with the local government was more in line with the way in which the company would pursue its later strictly commercial operations by the late 1960s. Often this privatization would also allow Solel Boneh to continue their business after the breaking of diplomatic relations, sometimes in the guise of American firms.1051 Beginning in 1960, Solel

Boneh operated in Ethiopia in three different capacities: in partnership with the two Israeli companies Harish and National Engineers (constructing mainly roads),1052 as a local branch of Solel Boneh, and, under the name Reynolds, a company Solel Boneh opened with

American partners and registered in the US in order to be able to win contracts funded by their government.1053 Formed in 1959 initially for works in Turkey, by the end of 1972

Reynolds operated in Turkey, Ethiopia, Iran, Spain, Calabar (Nigeria), Thailand and

Somalia. These works encompassed 16 percent of Solel Boneh’s operations abroad throughout those years. In Ethiopia, Reynolds was involved in the highly lucrative project of the Bole International Airport funded by American aid,1054 which opened in 1963, just in

1050 Erlich, “Brit Vashever,” 91. Similarly, Solel Boneh provided cover for intelligence personnel in the Middle East in the pre-state period.

1051 Ya’akov Shor, “Hakablanut Hayisraelit BeKhul” (a talk given in the Israeli Center for Management on June 27, 1968), LA, IV-204-4-1603.

1052 Each holding 17.5 percent of the shares. Solel Boneh Overseas Annual Meeting, March 7, 1962. LA, IV- 204-4-536.

1053 The American partner until 1964 was Theo Ben Nahum Group that acted as a silent partner. In 1964 it was replaced by the American Paul Schulman as general manager and partner. This partnership lasted until 1969, and Solel Boneh signed a new agreement in 1972 with another American entrepreneur, Mr. Leon Marantz. Solel Boneh Overseas: Review 1973, LA IV-104-38-104.

1054 Named after H.I.H Haile Selassie I: “Never a name was so well chosen, for not only the Bole Airport, but the whole Ethiopian Civil Aviation is a creation of the Emperor.” The Ethiopian Air Lines were established in 1946, with American aid. For its history and coverage of the opening of the airport see Oscar Rampone, “Haile Selassie 1st National Airport,” Ethiopia Mirror 3, no. 2, (April-June 1964), 6-13.

349 time for the summit of the Organization of African Union that took place at the end of May that year. The project played an important role in presenting the face of modernization of

Ethiopia as evidenced by the multiple photos taken of Haile Selassie greeting statesmen and stateswomen with the elegant control tower in the background. Together with Africa Hall, designed by Arturo Mezzedimi, Bole airport was a symbol of Ethiopia’s new international and continental stature.1055

The local branch of Solel Boneh had to compete with a range of local Italian and Arab contractors or international ones such as the Norwegian Norconsult or the Bulgarian

Exportstroy. It managed to get and successfully perform the construction of the Haile

Selassie I Stadium, completing construction ahead of schedule for the holding of the African

Cup.1056 Yet for the more architecturally complex projects, Enav’s recommendation proved instrumental, as is evidenced by foreign ministry correspondence.1057 Among Enav’s projects that Solel Boneh undertook were the Empress’ Apartment Building, the Filoha

Baths, the 82 Apartment Building (for UN personnel), and the Classroom Building at the

1055 Starting in August 1961, 1400 people worked in the peak of this undertaking. Three companies were in charge of the construction and equipping of the airport: Grove, Shepherd and Kruge Inc. created the main infrastructure at the cost of ED 27,564,687.50; Page Communication Engineering equipped the airport with radio, navigational and fire station apparatus at the cost of ED 5,723,717; Reynolds built the terminal building, hangar, control tower, office buildings, food service and stores at the cost of ED 16,821,000. One Ethiopian Dollar was approximately 40 US cents. Oscar Rampone, “Ethiopia Enters the Jet Era,” Ethiopia Mirror 1, no. 4 (July-Sep. 1962), 6-14. In addition, Reynolds constructed terminals outside the capital in Asmara, Jimma, and Dir Dawa. Solel Boneh Overseas Company Bulletin No. 18, May 14, 1962, LA IV-204-4-536.

1056 Certificate signed by Dr Haile Giorgis Workneh, March 10, 1962, attached to S. Golan to Golda Meir, April 4, 1962, ISA, MFA 1903/10 A.

1057 Hannan Bar-On to the Division of International Aid, Foreign Ministry, November 1, 1960, ISA, MFA 2027/18.

350 Haile Selassie I University (all during the period 1959-1965).1058 Contrary to the mode of operation in the case studies examined in the former chapters, which were typical of the overwhelming majority of Israeli architects’ involvement in the continent at that time,

Enav’s case presents a reversal of roles. If in the majority of these projects Solel

Boneh/AMY commissioned Israeli architects for specific projects when they did not use their own architects, this case displays Enav’s capacity to secure jobs for Solel Boneh.1059

As evidenced in the negotiations for setting up a school for the blind as part of an Israeli aid

“integrated project,”1060 Enav also benefitted from this informal dependence, as he was considered the natural candidate for the school’s design.1061

In his most celebrated project, the Filoha Baths, Enav involved not only Solel Boneh as contractors, but also the engineer Ephraim Spira,1062 the first Israeli dean of the Ethiopian

Technical College (later renamed the Engineering College). Established in 1952 by the

Ministry of Education and Fine Arts with American personnel, by 1959 its American directors were long gone and Germany had promised to take over its management in its

1058 Among Solel Boneh projects that did not involve Enav are the Haile Slassie I Stadium, the Harar water supply scheme, and one hundred twenty kilometers of roads, including sixty kilometers near Bahr Dar. By 1973, Solel Boneh undertook its largest enterprise in East Africa, building a 125 mile road connecting Ethiopia and Kenya. See Carol, 80-81.

1059 Probably with some – but not substantial -- encouragement in the form of loans from the Israeli embassy. According to Carol, “by 1969, some forty Israeli firms in Ethiopia were registered as Ethiopian enterprises, and during this period (1950-69) Ethiopia received some $114,000 in Israeli loans and credits.” Ibid, 6.

1060 An “integrated project” is a project that includes not only the setting up of the facilities, but also its management and training of workers in its initial stages. See Carol, 100.

1060 Technical Cooperation with Ethiopia (no date), ISA, MFA 1903/10 A.

1061 Telegram, Addis to the Division of International Cooperation, Foreign Ministry, May 14, 1962, ISA, MFA 1903/10 A.

1062 “Thermal Baths: Addis Ababa,” Architectural Design 135 (Oct. 1965): 522.

351 technical cooperation agreement with Ethiopia.1063 However, since this was also understood as a package deal (or “integrated project”) which included the construction of new facilities for the school on top of sending a dean and a group of faculty members, the implementation of the agreement was delayed, and in the meantime Israel was asked to send a dean. Spira was the first educator at a tertiary level out of many to be sent from Israel in the following decade. The pending agreement with the Germans to take over the Technical College did not stop the Israelis from increasing their aid by sending more personnel to the college and by offering scholarships at the Technion, publicized in Ethiopian press as “the MIT of the

Middle East.”1064 Although Enav was not an Israeli aid official, he joined the faculty as a part time instructor and helped establish Ethiopia’s first architecture department. As we shall see next, this architecture department played a strategic role in the competition of aid donors over education.

Architectural Education and the Competition over Aid

In parallel to the competition over the creation of post-imperial educational institutions in old and new metropolitan centers was the battle over exerting influence on education within

African countries. Very often, similarly to the colonial period, there was a direct academic relationship between institutions in the donor countries and the schools set up in African countries with their assistance. One of the methods of sustaining this relationship was by offering scholarships for leading students to complete advanced degrees in the donor country’s institutions. It was implicitly expected that after their training they would return to their home institution as faculty members. Thus complementary to the constitution of

1063 Ephraim Spira to Prof. D. Yitzhaki, October 29, 1959, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

1064 Ethiopian Herald, April 24, 1961. Cited in Erlich, Brit Vashever, 106.

352 metropolitan educational centers such as the AA in London, the establishment of independent academic institutions in Third World countries reinforced the prestige and influence of institutions in the donor countries and contributed to their emergence as new centers of knowledge and industrial production.

In Ethiopia, the single most important undertaking in the field of education was the establishment of the Haile Selassie I University, which absorbed the existing University

College and other tertiary institutions in Addis Ababa and around the country, including the

Technical College (to be renamed the Engineering College) and the Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology.1065 Formally announced in 1961, it crowned Haile Selassie’s modernization efforts.1066 Although the emperor first entertained the possibility of affiliating the University College with the University of London, for fear of depending on the US alone,1067 it was soon decided that the US International Cooperation Administration (ICA) would take over the project fully, including designing and constructing all major new buildings, purchasing teaching aids, paying the wages of the senior administrative and teaching personnel, and training an Ethiopian faculty.1068 For the US, the university played a strategic role in the dissemination of their culture and political ideology both locally and on the continental level. Alongside its aim of shaping a pro-American Ethiopian elite, the

1065 For a complete list of the institutions absorbed see Milkias, 47.

1066 Ibid, 46.

1067 Ibid, 81.

1068 Ibid, 49, 91. In 1972 the list of international financing institutions includes: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Ford Foundation, Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), and the British Inter-University Council (IUC). Also mentioned are the bilateral agreements with the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel. See: The President’s Report 1969-70, 1970-71, January 1972, HSIU Miscellanea 4, IES.

353 university was imagined as a regional center similar to the American University in Cairo, which disseminated American culture and ideology in North Africa, and the American

University of Beirut, which served the same purpose in the Middle East. Imagined as a counterpart to Lumumba University in Moscow which placed a special emphasis on the ideological training of African students, the Haile Selassie I University was established on

African soil in what was going to be the continent’s diplomatic capital.1069 This internationalism or continental centrality was also the aim of the Ethiopian administration, as exemplified by the high enrollment of foreign students in the academic year 1963-4, including female students.1070 As a university brochure of that year explained, of the total

1,620 students from 31 nationalities, five continents, and different religions there were 157 foreign students. Of these, 110 were scholarship students from fifteen African countries, thirty-two of them were studying under the Haile Selassie I Scholarship program for African students, and the rest were there under the USAID scholarship program.1071

That US personnel and funds dominated unequivocally the university did not preclude competition at the lower tiers of management and administration among various countries associated with the western bloc.1072 Cold War competition over aid did not only exist between the blocs, or between new (American) and old (English) powers within the blocs,

1069 Milkias, 89-90.

1070 The total number of female students for the year 1963-4 was 101. See: Haile Selasie I University, Office of public Relations, This is Haile Selassie I University (Addis Ababa: Artistic Printing press, 1964), 63, IES.

1071 Breakdown according to nationality: Armenia: 2, Cameroon: 8; Canada: 1, China: 2, Colombia: 2, France: 1, Gambia: 2, Germany: 1, Ghana: 1, Greece: 6, India: 12; Israel: 3, Italy: 1; Kenya: 29; Lebanon: 1; Liberia: 7; Mozambique: 1; Nigeria: 17; Northern Rhodesia: 2; Sudan: 4; Norway: 1; Nyasaland: 11; Philippines: 1; Poland: 1; Southern Rhodesia: 3; Tanganyika: 7; Uganda: 13; USA: 10; Zanzibar: 6. Ibid, 62.

1072 Academic staff by nationality, 1963-4: Ethiopian 88; American 75; British 26; Swedish 13; Israeli 12; Indian 10; Canadian and German: less than 10. Ibid, 29-30.

354 but also between politically weaker countries that were all supported by the US to varying degrees. Such was the case of engineering and architectural education, two fields that became the locus of a competition between West Germany, Israel, and Sweden alongside the three countries’ contemporaneous involvement in police and military aid in the country.1073

The foundations of this competition were laid prior to the establishment of the university.

Already in the 1940s, Haile Selassie had instigated a competition over the control of education between the colonial powers France and England, while preparing the settings for the US entry. He eventually turned to a non-colonial party, the French Canadian Jesuits, who in 1945 took over the Technical School, the only vocational secondary institution in the country, among other secondary schools, and opened the University College of Addis Ababa in 1950.1074 In 1952, American personnel established the Technical College that shared facilities with the Technical School. As noted earlier, by 1959 the American managers were long gone, and a technical cooperation agreement between the Ethiopian and German governments stated that the German government would provide the facilities and personnel for running the college. In the meantime, Israel sent a dean and staff from the Technion at the Ethiopians’ request.

Not far from the Technical College, in the southwest of the city, a Building College was established in October 1954 (although formally inaugurated only in February 1957) as part of a technical cooperation agreement between the Ethiopian and Swedish governments. Set up with the triple function of education, research, and testing, the Ethio-Swedish Building

1073 Zwede, 207. For a history of earlier Swedish aid in Ethiopia see: Viveca Halldin Norberg, “Swedes in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, 1924-1952: A Study in Early Development Co-operation,” (PhD diss., University of Stockholm, 1977).

1074 Milkias, 82

355 College offered by 1960 four year programs that led to a Bachelor of Science degree in building engineering, and opened research and testing sections as early as 1956.1075

Responding to the construction needs of the country, the college dedicated itself to the training of students for a variety of roles in the building trade - contractors, foremen, designers, surveyors and supervisors - not all requiring an engineering degree. In 1960 “the need of trained technicians in the building field is at present great and it is steadily growing.

Six years ago the production value in the building trade totaled about Eth.$ 10 million.

(Locally built chicka houses are not included.) To-day it is about Eth.$ 25 million.”1076 The term “trained technicians” suited better than “engineers” the variety of roles assumed necessary for the building trade. By 1962, the college directors intended to reduce the number of students who received engineering degrees in response to an oversaturation of them in the local construction trade, which on the other hand was in dire need of foremen.

This decision resulted in a students’ protest against their relegation to more menial jobs, and calls to expel the Swedish administration.1077

While it remains unclear whether the students’ threats had any governmental backing, the fact that the Israeli consulate reported on the event to the office in Jerusalem indicates that the consulate took this students’ uproar under advisement. Perhaps the Israeli consulate and office in Jerusalem recalled that in its early days, the Technion too faced such a dilemma between a university level and a vocational school. In the Jewish settlers’ case, the problem was not so much the low esteem of manual vocations as held traditionally by Ethiopian

1075 The Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology, Addis Ababa: Annual Report 1959-60, 9, IES.

1076 Ibid, 26.

1077 H. Goma to Middle East Division, Foreign Ministry, May 31, 1962, ISA, MFA 1903/10 A.

356 society, but the disproportionally high rate of engineers and architects among the immigrant

Jews versus building tradesmen, artisans, and industrial workers. That the problem was so widespread we learn from a 1923 Solel Boneh booklet that discussed the low quality of construction work performed by Jewish labor.1078 While this ideological pamphlet presented the ethos of the physiological and psychological transformation of the new Jew through vocational change, it also spoke of architects’ need for artisans and tradesmen to execute their plans and their fear of oversaturation in the limited job market.1079 When the matter was presented to the Palestine Executive of the Zionist Organization, which took over the setting up of the Technion following WWI, the general consensus was in favor of creating a middle category of technicians and professional craftsmen, training a “’man of function,’ between the European research worker and the Palestinian laborer.”1080 Yet soon after the

Technion opened, similarly to the case of the Ethio-Swedish Building Institute, the students demanded that upon completion they would receive proper diplomas certifying them as engineers or architects.1081 As a list of the first graduating class diplomas suggests, the students succeeded in their demands.1082

Following this experience, and conscious of the need to differentiate the Engineering

College from the neighboring Ethio-Swedish Building College, the Israeli deans emphasized its highly technical and professional training. When Spira arrived at the college in 1959, he

1078 Solel Boneh: Kovets, 65-8, 100.

1079 Alpert, 95-6, 98.

1080 Ibid, ibid.

1081 Ibid, 123-4.

1082 The first class of graduates included 10 engineers and 7 architects, among them one woman, Zipporah Neufeld. They received their diplomas in February 1929. Ibid, 141.

357 found poor facilities within the Technical School, a cumbersome bureaucracy as the college was run by the Ministry of Education, and demoralized students. With the expected incorporation into the Haile Selassie I University, Spira hoped for the betterment of the college students’ conditions and moral. As a student reporter who served as Spira’s mouthpiece explained, “students will now, immaterial of whether they are politicians or technicians enjoy the same rights, facilities and privileges.”1083 However, the Engineering

College’s image problem ran deeper than a university degree could have solved, as the problem of low student enrollment continued even after its incorporation into the university.1084 A number of interdependent factors caused this low enrolment: first, the five- year program was longer and more demanding than other fields at the university. Second, most of the students arrived unprepared for this kind of technical education, especially when compared to students from industrialized society. As Spira explained, the level of secondary school education was inadequate and therefore the college had to compensate for their deficiencies.1085 Thirdly, and most importantly, while the engineer was perceived as the main agent of the country’s modernization, the white collar professional image clashed with the profession’s daily practicalities. As the student reporter observed, “… passing back and forth in the compound, were students dressed as if for real work, unlike their more academically-looking fellows to be found on the campus of the University College.” “Not one of them wore college blazer, scarf, tie or badge,” he specified, “those students, looking like exiles from a modern world made by engineers, remind you strongly of the status of

1083 “College of Engineering,” Ethio-Engineer (July 1960), 8, IES.

1084 Yehuda Peter, “Engineering Education in Ethiopia,” Paper given at a conference in Kumasi, Ghana, July 1967. IES 67-5252.

1085 Ephraim Spira to Ato Million Neqniq, Ethiopia Ministry of Education, October 28, 1959, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

358 artisans in traditional Ethiopian society. Our old society did not favour such technically productive and constructive men and women.”1086 Paradoxically positioning the engineering students as exiles from the modern world they help to build, the reporter addressed the discrepancy between their “real work” unkempt appearance, and the modern professional attire of the “college blazer, scarf, tie or badge.” The engineer’s “real work,” studying, and working conditions were perceived as demeaning, and even un-modern, since they were associated with the poor status of artisans in Ethiopian traditional society.

Perhaps to boost the white-collar image of the college, an architecture department was set up soon after the college was incorporated into the university. Already in Spira’s first year of tenure, he brought in Enav as a part time architecture instructor. Spira, a construction engineer, perceived design and planning as essential capacities for a successful career in engineering that were direly lacking among the college graduates.1087 Yet he had no intention of opening an independent architecture department, and he limited his intervention into the school’s structure by expanding the curriculum from civil and industrial engineering departments to civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering departments. Among the books he ordered for the college the most architectural ones were by structural innovators Pier

Luigi Nervi and Buckminster Fuller.1088

1086 “College of Engineering,” Ethio-Engineer (July 1960), 6, IES (My emphasis.)

1087 Ephraim Spira to Ato Million Neqniq, Ethiopia Ministry of Education, October 28, 1959, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

1088 Hannan Bar-On to Division of International Aid, Foreign Ministry, December 9, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

359 The idea of opening an architecture department at the college came from above, rather than growing from the college’s needs,1089 in an attempt to bolster Israeli grip over the college facing its planned takeover by German staff. In his correspondence with the Israeli foreign ministry’s Department of International Cooperation, Spira expressed concerns about the

German-Ethiopian agreement, which he learned about upon arrival in 1959. He brought up questions regarding Israel’s continuous investment in the college, voicing a concern that all their hard work would eventually be credited to the Germans. In what seems to be a counterintuitive move, it was then decided in Jerusalem to increase Israeli involvement exponentially rather than minimize it.1090 Spira therefore employed more Israeli faculty – an act that was supported in Jerusalem as it gave the college “an Israeli character” – and initiated a scholarship masters program at the Technion for leading students.1091 The

Technion, on its part, was at that time happy to engage in foreign ministry cooperation programs with African and Asian students, finally realizing its ambition since its inception to become a regional – not only a national – center.1092

1089 Even as late as 1967, the second Israeli dean Yehuda Peter reported that students’ enrollment in the department is very low: “students are still hesitating to join the Architecture Department with its insufficiently known possibilities in the municipal and private sectors.” Yehuda Peter, “Engineering Education in Ethiopia,” Paper given at a conference in Kumasi, Ghana, July 1967. IES 67-5252.

1090 Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa to the Division of International Cooperation, Foreign Ministry, December 12, 1961, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

1091 Hannan Bar-On to Hannan Aynor, November 2, 1959, ISA, MFA 2031/10; Hannan Bar-On to Division of International Aid, Foreign Ministry, November 8, 1960, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

1092 See Alpert 96 -98, 319-321. Two notable examples of students who graduated from the College of Engineering and continued to graduate degrees at the Technion are: Zewde Berhane completed his master’s and doctorate in civil engineering at the Technion; Almeyahu Teferra, former Dean of the Faculty of Technology at Addis Ababa University, received his MSc from the Technion, and his Dr.Ing from the Technical University in Aachen. Another case in point is architect Beda Jonathan Amuli from Tanganyika, who enrolled at the Technion in 1960 in a full-time degree course in architecture (in Hebrew!). After 1961, the Technion tailored a special agricultural engineering program in English, for nearly 30 students from 12 Afro- Asian countries, Cyprus and West Indies. This program was discontinued in 1967 but trainees continued to arrive on individual or group basis for special courses. In parallel, Ethiopian students, and students of other

360

But nobody had informed the Germans about this unexpected turn of events. The German ambassador, who by then had been working towards this takeover for three years, assumed that by the academic year 1961-62, when Spira would leave, the German staff could step in.1093 Yet an Israeli successor was already on his way when the frustrated German ambassador literally begged his Israeli counterpart for help, asking him to go with him to

Ethiopian university management and explain that they had agreed that a German dean would take over the directing of the college.1094 The Israeli ambassador explained politely that he was not in a position to intervene in matters subject to the Ethiopians’ discretion.

Frustrated by the stubborn wall he faced in his attempts to realize the takeover, the German ambassador resorted to desperate measures, asking whether it would be possible, providing that the Israeli dean once held a German citizenship, that the latter could be considered as

German aid personnel.1095 Absurd as it may have sounded (and although he still referred to

Spira), this desperate request had some grounding, as Spira’s successor, Yehuda Peter, was born and educated in Germany.1096 In a letter in German from Jerusalem to Bonn, the Israeli foreign ministry attempted to make amends by offering a definite deadline for the personnel

African nationalities studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in various fields such as medicine, agriculture, and political science. See: Technical Cooperation with Ethiopia (no date), ISA, MFA 1903/10 A.

1093 Rahamim Timor to Division of International Cooperation, Foreign Ministry, September 20, 1962, ISA, MFA 2031/11.

1094 Ibid.

1095 Rahamim Timor to Foreign Ministry, July 27, 1962, ISA, MFA 2031/11.

1096 Yehuda Peter graduated from the Berlin Technological Institute in 1926. R. Timor to Lij Kassa Wolde Mariam, President of the Haile Selassie I University, September 14, 1962, ISA, MFA 2031/11.

361 change at the end of academic year 1962-63, with the option to continue to hire Israeli faculty on individual basis.1097

The Ethiopians, on their part, enjoyed the Israeli infiltration as a stopgap measure that forced the German government to make headway with their promise to build the college’s new facilities. It was in the Ethiopians’ interests to delay the arrival of the German faculty, so that the German government would not enjoy the aura of providing aid without making a considerable monetary investment in advance.1098 The Israeli personnel made an excellent

“second best” to fill the needs of the college in the meantime. When a German delegation arrived to inspect the operation of the college in 1960, it was pleased with the college’s structure and curriculum as set up by Spira.1099 This was indeed not surprising since the

Technion was initially conceived on the basis of the German Technikum model.1100 The pedagogic affinity also assured a smooth transition, which eventually occurred only in 1971 when the new facilities for the college were completed.1101

The rapidity with which Israeli aid operated served also to stopgap the building of the university’s main campus. Around the time the American office McLeod and Ferrera,

1097 Jerusalem to Bonn, November 28, 1962, ISA, MFA 2031/11.

1098 Rahamim Timor to Division of International Cooperation, Foreign Ministry, September 20, 1962, ISA, MFA 2031/11.

1099 Ephraim Spira to Division of International Cooperation, Foreign Ministry, November 6, 1961, ISA, MFA 2031/10.

1100 Even the original language of instruction was German, leading to what is commonly known as “the war of languages.” See Alpert, 5-9, 19-20. On the “war of languages” see ibid, 36-75.

1101 The result of a new cooperation agreement the German and Ethiopian governments signed in 1964. Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 13, July 1964, 23, IES; The President’s Report 1969-70, 1970-71, January 1972, 31, HSIU Miscellanea 4, IES.

362 commissioned by USAID to draft the master plan for the Haile Selassie I campus, had submitted their plans, the work on the Classroom Building had already begun (fig. 62).1102

Planned by Enav and Tedros, constructed by Solel Boneh, and paid for by the “Ethiopian

People,”1103 this building was the first, and until the J.F.K. Library opened in July 1970 the only new permanent building built for the purposes of the university on what used to be the

Emperor’s palace grounds.1104 Completed in September 1965,1105 the first and second floors housed the Faculty of Arts, the third floor the Faculty of Education, and the fourth floor the

College of Business Administration. Until the J.F.K Library, designed by McLeod and

Ferrera, was completed, it also housed the central library in its basement. Behind the homogenous horizontal façade were classrooms, offices, library, and auditorium-type classrooms. Unsurprisingly, when the faculties entered, this “all under one roof” building was immediately found inadequate to house them all.1106 Yet it was a necessary stopgap measure to get the university going without waiting for the master plans, which eventually were never realized due to the 1974 revolution.1107

1102 This is Haile Selassie I University, 20.

1103 All civil servants had to pay a full month’s wages over a period of two decades as an obligatory contribution. By 1961, Eth. $4 million had been collected from Ethiopian government employees. Milkias, 46.

1104 Some Notes on the Colleges and Faculties of the University, HSIU Miscellanea 4, IES. In addition to the existing buildings, and the new permanent ones, some provisional prefabricated buildings were set up for students’ accommodation, offices and laboratories. The President’s Report 1969-70, 1970-71, January 1972, 31, HSIU Miscellanea 4, IES.

1105 Some Notes on the Colleges and Faculties of the University, HSIU Miscellanea 4, IES.

1106 HSU Bulletin 5, no. 1 (Sept. 1965), 4.

1107 Following McLeod and Ferrera, another American team, Geddess, Brecher, Qualis and Cunningham, submitted another master plan in 1970. Haile Selassie I University: A Blueprint for Development, IES; The President’s Report 1969-70, 1970-71, January 1972, 32, HSIU Miscellanea 4, IES.

363 The addition of an architecture department to the Engineering College was an idea Yaakov

Dori, the Technion President, presented to the university administration during his East

Africa tour.1108 A civil engineer by training who served as the First Chief of Staff of the IDF,

Dori took advantage of the opportunity to promote various ideas to deepen the relationship between the institutions. Against the Germans’ attempts “to storm in,” as he explained in his military parlance, he suggested the opening of an architecture department. Familiar with the profession from directing the Technion, in addition to having an architect brother, Dori argued that an architecture department is easy to set up, and at least initially would not require much investment, compared to other fields that necessitated specialized machinery and laboratories.1109 Thus an architecture department, which proved to play an important role at the Technion from its founding, was perceived as a profitable investment that would yield much return, if not financial than at least symbolic,1110 and help Israel to continue running the college. Probably unaware that Enav was already teaching architecture at the college, or considering him not experienced enough for the job, he suggested hiring a prominent architect from Israel. That this did not eventually happen was not because of a lack of qualified and interested candidates. Among Technion faculty who expressed interest in traveling on technical aid missions were the well known architects-partners and Enav’s

1108 Ya’akov Dori to Ehud Avriel, August 25, 1962, ISA, MFA 1903/11.

1109 Ibid.

1110 In the Israeli context, the department was significant for military purposes, as is evidenced by the fact that Yohanan Ratner, the dean of the faculty of architecture at the Technion in 1943-45 and 1959-60 (who before that headed the department in 1932-41), was also a leading figure in the establishment of the planning division at IDF. See also Troen, “Higher Education,” 57.

364 instructors Alfred Mansfeld and Munio Weinraub,1111 the first of whom was the Dean of the

Faculty of Architecture at the Technion from 1954 to 1956.

At the time, the Ethio-Swedish Building College also offered some basic architecture classes.

In 1959-1960, the college’s director was an architect, Mr. Ingvar Eknor, who was trained at

Chalmers University of Gothenburg and, similarly to his Israeli counterpart at the

Engineering College, taught building construction. Among the full time teaching personnel was J. Bernhard Lindahl, an architect trained at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in

Stockholm, who taught preliminary courses in drawing and architectural planning.1112

Another KTH graduate, Carl Erik H. Fogelvik, was the Chief of the Building Research

Institute. Coupled with the Building Materials Testing and Research Institute, the two fulfilled the research and testing aims of the college. In their attempt to contribute to the building trade of the country, the two were comparable to the Building Research Institute at the Technion and the Standards Institute of Israel (Makhon ha’Tkanim). Inspired by professional periodicals from Britain, the US, and Sweden, the staff was also informed by publications of United Nations agencies dealing with housing problems. In addition, they invited guest lecturers whenever an opportunity presented itself, as in the case of Enav and

Hannan Pavel - the latter also an Israeli architect who served as part of Israeli aid for two years as Chief Town Planner at the Ethiopian Ministry of Interior and joined the

1111 List of Faculty Who are Willing to Undertake Technical Aid Missions for Short Periods, May 12, 1959, ISA, MFA 2031/10. This list includes Aryeh Doudai and Al Mansfeld (see chapters 2 and 3).

1112 The only course offered in architecture was introduction to architectural planning, divided into the first and third terms: The first term focused on “dwelling: functional requirements, living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, toilets and bathrooms.” The third term on “general planning – town planning, fact finding and space programs, building shapes in relation to cost, space grouping, development in stages, sketching a specialized building.” The Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology, Addis Ababa: Annual Report 1959-60, 20, 58, IES.

365 Engineering faculty in 1963.1113 Both Enav and Pavel were invited to talk about their experience working in the planning of the Negev Desert in Israel. The college also published textbooks comparable in their technical focus to Public Works Department manuals in the

British Colonies.1114

The Building College focused on pressing problems of low cost housing and developed self- help methods without naming them as such. Emphasizing the study of Ethiopian traditional building techniques and materials alongside general technical training, the Building

Research Institute experimented with the construction of low cost housing prototypes. A college publication of 1958 “Elementary Planning and Building for Community Leaders” addressed the amateur builder, providing “elementary knowledge (…) based on old, existing traditions in the country.”1115 The specification of materials is a mixture of European and local building traditions, including wood, chicka, stone, bricks and blocks, and straw roof, tiles or galvanized corrugated iron sheets for roofing.1116 The book concludes with floor plans for a basic school, a community education center, low cost small and large modern villas, clinic buildings, churches, and countryside dry latrines.1117 Read as a manual for the layman rather than a textbook, this booklet is comparable in its technical simplicity to the

1113 ACME Perspective 5, no. 2, (Dec. 3, 1964): 2.

1114 The Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology, Addis Ababa: Annual Report 1959-60, 28-9, IES.

1115 Ibid, 11.

1116 Ibid, 13, 28.

1117 Ibid, 70.

366 Public Work Department manuals produced in the British Colonies,1118 only here the user is not the colonial administrator but the community leader. Warning that “this book is not, however, to be used for more advanced constructions,”1119 the manual was an exercise in the democratization of building for the poor in Addis Ababa, or in the countryside or small towns where development funds were made systematically unavailable. This self-help approach was so ingrained in the pedagogy of the school that even the building of the campus became a collaborative educational exercise; the planning, design and calculations were carried out by the staff, while the construction was undertaken partly by contractors and partly by employees and students of the college. In addition, they dug their own well on campus grounds, freeing the college from dependence on the poor water infrastructure of the municipality.1120 The stone, brick and concrete buildings on campus were complemented by

“a group of so far eight traditional Ethiopian houses from various parts of the country,” which formed “a picturesque village among the eucalyptus trees” on the campus grounds while serving as experimentation in traditional techniques.1121

When the students reached the rural areas, they did not only research traditional building techniques to be brought back to their research institutes in the capital, but also implemented their studies in low cost construction. In January 1964 it was reported that the college “has

1118 Yemi Salami, "British Architects in the Colonial PWD: Unravelling Nigeria's Early Government Architecture” (Paper Presented at Final Conference of the Cost Action -- Crossing Boundaries: Rethinking European Architecture Beyond Europe, Palermo, April 2014).

1119 The Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology, Addis Ababa: Annual Report 1959-60, 11, IES.

1120 Listen Building College Students’ Magazine, May 1, 1961, IES.

1121 The Ethio-Swedish Institute of Building Technology, Addis Ababa: Annual Report 1959-60, 10-11, IES. Other, European-type houses (“low cost villas”) were erected on the grounds of secondary schools in Addis Ababa, to be used for training students in home economics.

367 completed the setting up of 6 demonstration brick kilns for the purposes of helping the growth of brick making industries in rural areas. This programme is designed to demonstrate to the public the techniques of building good houses at reasonably low costs. This six kilns are located at Debre Markos, Bako, Wondo, Gindeberet, Yirgalem and Wollamo Saddo

[also spelled Wollamo Sodo- A.L.]. At all the locations there are demonstration centers where the process of brick making is illustrated to the local people.”1122 Similarly, in 1965 twenty-three students of the Building College, accompanied by nine Swedish volunteers, fulfilled their duties to the Ethiopian University Service by building low cost classrooms for the university and low cost schools in three provinces: Wollega, Harargh, and Sidamo.1123 In addition to their participation in the process of building, their responsibilities included outlining profiles of buildings and employing, paying, and supervising laborers. Furthermore, they partook in the “planning and organization” of new settlements in the district of

Wollamo-Soddo, probably with some collaboration with the local communities.1124 The backing of the Swedish government in these aid projects, channeled through the Building

College and the Elementary School Building Unit (attached to the Ministry of Education and

Fine Arts), assisted the Ethiopian government in continuing to absolve itself of responsibility toward the rural population. From 1958 to 1968, 109 elementary schools were constructed mostly in remote regions of Ethiopia, at Sweden’s insistence. By 1973, 3,644 classrooms were built with basic school equipment. Sweden and the rural communities

1122 Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 7 (January 1964), IES.

1123 The Ethiopian University Service was a literacy campaign, where the students volunteered throughout the countryside. According to Paulos Milkias, this university program grew in response to the National Ethiopian Student Union’s independent initiative to radicalize the peasantry. Against the students’ politically subversive agenda, the university diverted the literacy campaign to regular elementary and high schools, thus severing the students’ direct contacts with the peasants, and solving the regime’s shortage of teachers. See Milkias, 117-8. 1124 HSU Bulletin 5, no. 2 (Oct. 1965): 4, IES; HSU Bulletin 5, no. 4 (January 1966): 9-10, IES.

368 shared the expanses equally.1125 Thus the cooperative, grassroots attitude promoted by the

Building College enabled the Ethiopian government to abdicate its responsibilities toward the rural population and relegate them to not only external aid agencies but also to the rural communities themselves.

Contrary to the cooperative grassroots approach at the Ethio-Swedish Building College, architecture at the Engineering College was taught with a capital A. Referring to the engineering profession, which he knew better than architecture, Peter explained that the profession “is intrinsically international and independent of boundaries” and that the prospects were high for students who wished to organize in the form of “consultants’ and contractors’ service for other developing countries, even before the needs of Ethiopia are fully covered by natives of the country.”1126 In this statement he not only mirrored the

Technion’s ambition to become a center of knowledge production disseminated internationally, but also the practice of sending Israeli consultants even before “its [Israel’s] needs are fully covered” by Israelis. Part of this professionalization was the establishment of the Ethiopian Association of Architects and Engineers, of which he was a founding member, the recognition of the school by European counterparts including the AA, and the schools staff’s participation in professional organizations.1127 Such ambitions left little room for the study of vernacular architecture or addressing specific local needs.

1125 Milkias, 44-5.

1126 Yehuda Peter, “Engineering Education in Ethiopia,” Paper given at a conference in Kumasi, Ghana, July 1967. IES 67-5252.

1127 Yehuda Peter, “From the Dean’s Desk,” Ethio-Engineer 6 (June 1964): 7-10, IES.

369 Even when the Engineering College architecture students had field trips to rural areas where development schemes and settlement projects were underway, the focus was on the tourist potential of the areas rather the needs of the local communities. In a three day student trip to

Wollamo Soddo, where the Building College students were involved in the planning of new settlements and building of schools, the students surveyed the sites chosen by the provincial governor for the building of a hotel: “a hill right in the town of Soddo – this place was originally intended for the palace of His Majesty, the Emperor – but now the hotel would cater for such an arrangement; the second spot is the shores of lake Abaya usually known as

Lake Marguerita [sic]; and the third one and probably the most romantic of the three is near a waterfall, tallest in Ethiopia.”1128 Conceived at first as part of “political tourism,” such hotels would accommodate the emperor and foreign aid delegations in their rural development tours.1129 Once a highway connecting Addis Ababa to the area was completed, it was expected that the hotels would also “offer a good week-end resort for safari goers from Addis Ababa,” thus developing middle class interior tourism.1130 Another study tour in the town of Waliso focused on the building of modern institutions such as the Leprosy

Hospital Buildings, the Blind School at Sebetha, and Dormitory Buildings for Secondary

Students. That tour concluded with a visit to the newly built Radio Station of the Voice of the Gospel in Addis Ababa.1131 This approach is not surprising given Enav’s professional activity in Addis Ababa that focused on middle and upper-middle class apartment buildings

1128 ACME Perspective 5, no. 2, (December 3, 1964): 7, IES.

1129 The location of touristic facilities in developing areas served for “political tourism,” developed to facilitate the visit of diplomats, who could observe these sites first-hand these sites. Arturo Mezzedimi, “Haile Selassie: A Testimony for Reappraisal (1992)” Arturo Mezzedimi Architetto, http://www.arturomezzedimi.it/en/home.swf, accessed November 20, 2014.

1130 Ashwin R. Kamani, “A Trip to Wolamo-Sodo,” ACME Perspective 5, no. 2 (December 3, 1964): 8-9, IES.

1131 ACME Perspective 4, no. 6 (Jan. 31, 1964): 2, IES.

370 and mainly public buildings. Although Enav defined his projects as labor-intensive, and while he experimented with vernacular forms, his designs were based on industrially produced building components.1132 This was also the case in his design for a low-cost school prototype for Ethiopia’s rural areas, commissioned by the World Bank.1133 The differences in the schools’ approach to architecture may also result from the style of Swedish aid that unlike other aid donors, including Israel, did not condition aid in the purchase of Swedish products.1134 While resented in the Swedish industry for obvious reasons, this policy allowed much more experimentation with local building techniques and focus on the rural areas.

Furthermore, although Israeli ideology supported economic self-help, in architecture self- help meant the modernization of building technology, so that the Jewish builder would not have to compete with Palestinian building expertise and cheap labor. At the end of the day, while the Swedish approach was more sustainable, it was rather the Israeli approach that satisfied Haile Selassie’s desire for urban modernization.1135

Despite the fact that the two colleges presented such contending approaches to the teaching of architecture in developing countries, in the late 1960s, when the two colleges merged under the Faculty of Technology, while keeping their premises separate, the Engineering

School Department of Architecture was relocated to the Ethio-Swedish Building College, renamed the Building College. This concluded a long and subdued battle over the managing

1132 Efrat, 613. What Enav meant by “labor-intensive” was not so much the pre-fabrication on site, as in the case of the Sierra Leone parliament construction (see chapter 1), but limiting the prefabricated units to “human scale,” so that they could be placed on site by men, rather than by heavy machinery.

1133 Ibid, 616.

1134 Göran Ohlin, “Swedish Aid Performance and Development Policy,” Development Policy Review A6, no. 1, (November 1973): 56-7.

1135 See more on this subject in the following chapter.

371 of the Engineering College. The latter’s students, who had been long promised new facilities, followed anxiously the negotiations with the German government. In October 1964, Dr.

Heinrich Lubke, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, laid the corner stone for the new building,1136 and in January 1964, an architect from Germany, Prof. Nebel, arrived with a model.1137 Yet the building’s plan was designed to accommodate only the civil, mechanical, and electronic engineering departments since the agreements between the two governments were made before the architecture department was added.1138 Although Dean

Peter assured the students that “no one will inquire us as what types of departments we keep once we have the building,”1139 he failed to mention that he would not be in any position to ensure that once the building was completed, since German staff would supplant him. The department of architecture, therefore, attested to the Israeli ability to move fast to assert their presence against German takeover, but when the Germans finally made a concrete move toward realizing the takeover, the architecture department did not have a place either in their plan for the building or in the curriculum in general. Conceived originally to boost the prestige of the college, it was now perceived as unfitting and redundant. Apparently neither the Germans nor the Ethiopians were willing to rock the boat after finally arriving at a workable agreement, and preferred, like Peter, to keep the department’s future existence in limbo.1140

1136 ACME Perspective 5, no. 1 (November 18, 1964): 2, IES.

1137 ACME Perspective 4, no. 5 (Jan 13, 1964): 2-3, IES.

1138 Ibid, ibid.

1139 Ibid, 3.

1140 As Lidg Kassa Woldemariam, the President of Haile Selassie I University, explained to the frustrated students, out of the 27 agreements made between Ethiopia and West Germany, only three materialized. ACME Perspective 5, no. 6, (March 10, 1965): 3, IES.

372

But reaching a concrete agreement did not end the new building saga. In February 1965, to the students’ surprise a Swedish government representative announced that his government wished “to help the College of Engineering in question of its campus.”1141 In lieu of new facilities, however, it was suggested that the civil engineering department be relocated to the

Building College campus. When the confused students asked the Swedish government representative whether this proposed aid would supplant the anticipated German aid, he evaded the question similarly to his Israeli counterpart facing German demands a few years earlier.1142 In this overt opportunism, the Building College wished to appropriate what was then the most popular department at the Engineering College, since its graduates could easily find jobs in the Public Works Department and the Highway and Water Resources

Departments, as well as in the growing private market of consulting and contracting firms.1143 Alongside the relocating of the department’s facilities while formally still under the purview of the Engineering College, this dubious proposal also assumed the introduction of a new curriculum to fit the department better to its new premises. Of less interest to the

Building College, the mechanical and electric engineering departments were “to remain in the present campus for the time being.”1144 Since the department of architecture was not discussed, it can be assumed that it was considered a sub-division of the civil engineering department the Building College wished to absorb. The Building College administration

1141 “Should We Rejoice or Mourn?” ACME Perspective 5, no. 6 (March 10, 1965): 1-2, IES.

1142 Stating, “this depends upon your country’s decision, but we will try to work in cooperation with the German aid.” Ibid, 2.

1143 Yehuda Peter, “Engineering Education in Ethiopia,” Paper given at a conference in Kumasi, July 1967. IES 67-5252.

1144 Ibid, ibid.

373 probably saw it as a natural component of their college, since the head of the architecture department in its first years of existence was Prof. Sven Hesselgren, who prior to that acted as the Associate Dean of the Building College.1145 It could also be the case that since enrollment to the architecture department was low – students were unclear whether they would find jobs upon graduation 1146– it was not considered attractive enough to fight for.

Not surprisingly, the Swedish proposal was not realized, as evidenced by the fact that another space was found to house provisionally the College of Engineering at the buildings of the former University College Campus (closer to the main university campus in Sidist

Kilo), and the department of civil engineering remained under the same roof as the other two engineering departments.1147

It was not until the beginning of the academic year of 1968-69, as a result of the university’s reorganization, that the Swedish government’s proposal was partly realized when the department of architecture was relocated to it. The Building College was renamed the

College of Architecture and Building Technology, whereas the three engineering departments remained in the College of Engineering. Renamed the College of Technology, it finally moved to the new and long anticipated building, which officially opened in

November 1971.1148 As it turns out, the architecture department the Israelis set up to bolster their presence became a negotiation card, or at least a consolation prize, between the

1145 ACME Perspective 5, no. 8 (May 20, 1965): 8, IES.

1146 Yehuda Peter, “Engineering Education in Ethiopia,” Paper given at a conference in Kumasi, July 1967. IES 67-5252.

1147 HSU Bulletin 5, no. 1 (Sept. 1965), IES.

1148 378 HSU Miscellanea, IES.

374 Germans and the Swedes. By then, the Israeli staff was long gone: Enav had returned to

Israel in 1966, the same year the Technion staff gave way to their German counterparts.1149

Epilogue: From Foreign to Local to Global

After Enav left Addis Ababa, the office continued to work and even expanded its operation in East Africa, including opening another office in Zambia.1150 Thus paradoxically it was

Enav’s concentrated work in Addis Ababa, where he evolved from a foreign tourist to being proudly considered by friends as “Ethiopian,” that enabled him to extend his practice elsewhere in Africa. Similarly, it was Enav’s commitment to working in coordination with

Israeli diplomacy, aid and trade that had provided him with the support he needed to pursue a career in Addis Ababa in the first place. This case presents how the global career path of an architect was grounded in national and social commitments that far exceeded in complexity the connections of a professional network as assumed by the “network of tropical architecture.” Enav’s governmental and institutional independence did not hinder the formation of these commitments but rather strengthened them as they were pursued voluntarily and to the extent that the various parties (Ethiopian or Israeli) saw fit.

The extent to which Enav became “local” shows how in such a cosmopolitan environment becoming local meant knowing the system and how to operate within it. Enav not only gained access to development aid funding but to much greater opportunities for implementing his schemes (as we shall see in more detail in the following chapter) from

1149 Yehuda Peter, “Engineering Education in Ethiopia,” Paper given at a conference in Kumasi, July 1967. IES 67-5252.

1150 With additional work in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Yacobi, “The Architecture of Foreign Policy,” 49.

375 within the city’s social fabric, rather than as an external agent of international expertise. A case in point is Enav and Tedros’ office selection to the first World Bank project commission in Ethiopia. Although according to protocol World Bank openings were published internationally, the Bank generally preferred architects who resided locally, since experience showed that they could pursue projects more efficiently. Furthermore, World

Bank projects entailed the active involvement of the local governments if they so wished, while other agencies were assigned to different ministries of the government to oversee the entire process.1151 In Ethiopia, the government was involved already in the selection process of the architectural firm and narrowed down the list to the four leading architectural firms in

Addis Ababa, including Enav and Tedros’ firm that was eventually selected.1152 The

Ethiopian government’s stronghold on the architects operating in its territory may have contributed to the fact that it was Enav and Tedros who designed the American School in

Addis Ababa, rather than American architects, as well as the Ethio-Japanese Textile Factory.

On the other hand, it may be the case that the Israeli Institute for Planning and

Development’s project in Zambia that involved Enav and Tedros’ participation contributed to their decision to open a branch there.1153

1151 The entire design and building process was supervised by architects provided by the Swedish International Development Cooperation (SIDA), Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), UNESCO etc., who were assigned to different ministries in the Ethiopian government. While Enav was in charge of the design work, the follow-up process was in the hands of external experts. The first prototype school was built in Debra Marcos. See Kim De Raedt, “Architecture as Development Aid,” (PhD diss., University of Ghent, forthcoming).

1152 Doxiadis Associates, then a mogul of architectural planning, especially in the Middle East and Asia, complained in a letter that it had not been invited to make a proposition for the project. Of the thirteen firms that applied from Japan, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Australia, USA, UK, Israel, Germany and Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government retained four. These were the prominent architectural firm operating at the time in Addis Ababa: Studio Arturo Mezzedimi, Studio Henri Chomette, the Norwegian Norconsult, and Enav, Tedros and Associates. Ibid.

1153 Y. Horowitz to Matityahu Dagan, August 6, 1971, ISA MFA 4380/10. After the partnership ended, Tedros continued to work in Ethiopia. Following the Ethiopian revolution, Tedros left the country upon invitation

376

While the extent to which Enav collaborated with Israeli and Ethiopian security personnel in

Addis Ababa remains unknown, in Israel he pursued these connections more overtly, though as in Ethiopia he did it as a civilian “volunteer” rather than a member of the military establishment. This professional independence allowed him to continue to cultivate private commissions via institutional connections in the highest political and military echelons.

Thus his involvement after the 1973 war in the drafting of the lines for the Israeli withdrawal in Sinai led to his participation at the Camp David Peace Talks in 1978, following which he received a planning project in Egypt.1154 His continuous relationship with the political and military personnel in Israel resulted in the planning of IDF military bases, Jewish settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, and the design of private villas for prominent officials including former Chief of Staff and Prime Minister Ariel

Sharon, whose farmhouse in the Negev desert is a fitting image for Ehud Barak’s metaphor comparing Israel to a villa in the jungle.1155 Capitalizing on this experience, he named his current office “SAFE”: Security, Architecture, Foreplanning, Engineering.1156 Since the

from the Tanzanian government to collaborate on the project of the new capital Dodoma. Later on, Tedros lived and worked in Eritrea.

1154 Enav acted as Head of the Deployment, Mapping & Infrastructure Unit of the IDF Planning Branch for the Israeli – Egyptian Talks – 1973-1979; Member of the Israeli Military Delegations to the Talks between Israel and Egypt, in Egypt – 1973-1974, Geneva-1975, and Washington DC – 1978-1979. The planning project in Egypt was an urban design for Hilouan, a satellite town of 60,000 people residents. See: Enav Planning Group company profile brochure, 2007. See also “Zalman Enav: Drawing the Lines in Sinai,” Israel’s Documented Story, the English-language blog of the Israel State Archive, http://israelsdocuments.blogspot.com/2014/04/zalman-enav-drawing-lines-in-sinai.html, accessed October 2, 2014.

1155 For a discussion on this metaphor, see chapter 1. Haim Yacobi compares it to colonial bungalow style hill station houses. See Yacobi, “The Architecture of Foreign Policy,” 49.

1156 On Israel’s security export see Neve Gordon, “The Political Economy of Israel’s Homeland Security/Surveillance Industry,” The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting; Working Papers III,

377 1980s, Enav has been cultivating partnerships in the US and China, and has continued to promote Israeli export of services as the Head of the Israel Export Institute delegations to

Thailand and Singapore in 1989, China in 1993, and the U.N. and World Bank in 2004.1157

http://www.sscqueens.org/sites/default/files/The%20Political%20Economy%20of%20Israel%E2%80%99s%2 0Homeland%20Security.pdf, accessed December 12, 2014. 1157 The list of Enav Group’s partnerships with international firms includes: Louis Berger International (L.B.I.), New Jersey; Amman & Whitney, New York (later bought by L.B.I.); H. Halpern & Partners, London, UK, 1985–1990; “ASTRO” Company (owned by the Astronaut Richard Gordon), California, USA, 1985; Prof. Zhang Li-Shenyang, China, 1993-1996; Jerry Sudarsky Consultancy, Los-Angeles, USA, 1984. Enav Planning Group company profile brochure, 2007. For one of Enav’s latest partnerships see: https://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/rafi_sela.pdf, accessed January 3, 2015.

378 6. The Modernity of Imperial Benevolence: Haile Selassie’s Addis Ababa

On December 13, 1960, a coup d’etat shook the grounds of Addis Ababa. Although order was restored immediately upon the emperor’s urgent return to the capital from a state visit to Brazil,1158 the specter of the coup continued to haunt the regime until its eventual downfall in the 1974 revolution. Among the insurgents were educated young Ethiopians, whose beliefs were nurtured by modernization efforts, led by Haile Selassie (1892-1975), that in reality provided no prospect of any meaningful reform. It is thus not accidental that the Emperor’s palace, where the coup instigators had entrenched themselves, was handed over in the coup’s aftermath to the students to become the main campus of Haile Selassie I University. This act of paternal benevolence, intended to contain and sublimate the revolutionary forces within the imperial regime, was, as I argue in this chapter, a highly symbolic gesture that epitomizes Haile Selassie’s approach to the modernization of the country.

During that time, Addis Ababa had been experiencing a construction boom, part of emperor Haile

Selassie’s continuous attempts to modernize the country, given extra impetus with the choice of the

Ethiopian capital as the seat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa headquarters

in 1958 and as the seat of the Organization of African Union headquarters in 1963.1159 Positioning

itself as both a national and a continental capital, the construction boom asserted not only national

independence, but also the reconsolidation of imperial power, seeking to represent to the pan-

African world a symbol of African liberation and an uninterrupted continuity with tradition.

1158 For the history of the coup, see Zewde, 211-215. For a discussion on the Israeli involvement in suppressing the coup see Erlich, Brit Vashever, 91-94.

1159 For the history of the Organization for African Union see Esedebe.

379 Unlike former colonies where postcolonial development was largely determined by persisting

colonial networks and the gradual introduction of new actors based on new geopolitical alliances,

in Ethiopia, which was formally colonized by Italy only from October 1935 to May 1941,

architecture production was open to private entrepreneurship. Continuing a long established

tradition of welcoming individual foreign experts as part of the modernization efforts of the

country begun at the end of the nineteenth century,1160 in the postwar period Haile Selassie’s

regime increasingly promoted private ownership of land and created a particularly lucrative setting

for developers and architecture firms, while enjoying development aid from both Cold War blocs

as well as from the Non-Aligned Yugoslavia.1161 This highly competitive market included

architectural moguls such as the Italian Arturo Mezzedimi (from Asmara) and the French Henri

Chomette, as well as East European and Scandinavian firms such as the Yugoslav Z. Kovacevic

and I. Straus and the Norwegian Norconsult, among others.1162

While historians differ in their characterization of Ethiopia’s pre-revolutionary regime, describing

it as absolute, feudal, or autocratic, they all agree that whatever modernization took place, its sole

purpose was the concentration of ever more power into Haile Selassie’s hands, with the specific

aim of removing it from traditional stake holders: the aristocracy and the church.1163 This stance

has led many of these historians to claim that to the degree modernization did take place, it was at

the surface level alone; a facade that hid behind it a hierarchical social order and human suffering.

1160 Pankhurst, 29-86.

1161 See previous chapter.

1162 For an overview of the contemporary architectural scene in Addis Ababa see Mariam, 199-215.

1163 A selected literature includes: Zewde, especially 201-207; Milkias; McVety, 121-194; Gulema; Messay Kebeda, Survival and Modernization - Ethiopia’s Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse (Lawrenceville, NJ; Asmara, Eritrea: The Red Sea Press), 299-345.

380 From this perspective, if architects wanted to tap into the development resources Ethiopia enjoyed

due to its highly strategic role in the region, the only role they could play, was to serve as “court

architects,” embellishing city facades while turning a blind eye as accomplices in perpetrating the

regime’s injustices.

However, any analysis that reduces the regime’s modernization efforts to “true or false” claims

fails to account for the complexity of Haile Selassie’s attempts to modernize the country on his

own terms – that is, not necessarily as dictated by western powers, specifically Britain, that

maintained military control until 1945 after “liberating” Ethiopia, and then the U.S., which Haile

Selassie himself invited to the country. While this was the case as early as the drafting of

Ethiopia’s 1931 constitution after Japan,1164 Haile Selassie’s emphasis on Ethiopian agency in

delineating its own course of development intensified especially after the coup, taking a stricter and

more conservative approach.1165 Positioning himself as the guardian of Ethiopian society and the

shepherd who would safely lead it along the path of development, the maintaining of his power

was constructed not as an end in itself, but as a safeguard against social anomaly and crisis. The

regime’s challenge was to forge an “Ethiopian modernity” that would incorporate changes

gradually on the basis of traditional Ethiopian society, in a careful dialectic that would nonetheless

retain the monarchical system intact.

1164 For a discussion on Ethiopia’s links with Japan see Donald N. Levine, “Ethiopia, Japan, and Jamaica: A Century of Globally Linked Modernizations,” International Journal of Ethiopian Studies 3, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2007): 41-51; Sumio Aoki and Eisei Kurimoto, “Japanese Interest in Ethiopia (1868-1940): Chronology and Bibliography,” Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers of the XIIIth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Kyoto, 12-17 December 1997, ed. Katsuyoshi Fukui, Eisei Kurimoto, Masayoshi Shigeta (Kyoto, Japan : Shokado Book Sellers, 1997), 713-720.

1165 Erlich, 92; McVety, 175-6.

381 Going beyond false and truth claims, this chapter explores how the drive for a modern appearance

shaped the city historically as a dialectic of foreign influence and political Ethiopian desires.

Defining this particular form of modernity as “imperial modernity” in continuum with Italian

colonization, which introduced far reaching changes to the city’s urban structure, this chapter

argues that the material manifestations of these modernization attempts in the physical space of

Addis Ababa cannot be dismissed simply as “false.” Moreover, in order to fully account for the

effects of the modernization efforts in this particular context, questions of success and failure

should be set aside. Similarly to education reforms, without which a disgruntled educated class

could not have arisen to begin with – attempts to modernize Addis Ababa have left an indelible

mark on the city that determined its future physical development. This chapter raises the question

of how the city was shaped as part of the conflict between modernization and political

conservatism, and how Israeli architect Zalman Enav, who established a partnership with the

Ethiopian architect Michael Tedros (see previous chapter), saw his role in this process of

containment, sublimation, and education of the public in this “gradual development.”

Facades City

Born out of the conflict of Haile Selassie’s mix of modernization and tradition, the palace-turned-

university campus encapsulated his specific formula of autocratic modernization. In his book

historian Paulos Milkias delineates the intertwined relationship between western education in

Ethiopia and the role of students in the radicalization of Ethiopia’s politics that led to the 1974

revolution. This revolution was preceded by a number of insurrections among the student

population, starting with the abortive coup of 1960, instigated by brothers Germame and Mengistu

382 Neway.1166 The latter, a commander of the Imperial Bodyguard, had been radicalized by his

American-educated brother, who graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia University. The

two had substantial support from student leaders at the University College of Addis Ababa.1167

According to Milkias, Haile Selassie’s gift of his Guenete Leul palace for the university’s main

campus the following year is intimately tied to the abortive coup that took place in that palace.

While the official version for giving up the palace was gender-based - the empress refused to return

to the blood-drenched place where captives of the rebels were machine-gunned – Milkias argues

that the gesture was also an attempt to win the students’ loyalty.1168 To this can be added the

practical reason that the geographical location of the palace grounds, on the northern axis

stretching from the Old Ghebi (Menelik’s palace) through Arat Kilo where the Ministry of

Education and the University College were located, was an appropriate spot for the main university

campus. Replacing the emperor’s residence, it marked the northern edge of the governmental-

monarchical-educational axis, which was now extended from Sidist Kilo in the north all the way

south through Arat Kilo to Haile Selassie’s new premises at the Jubilee Palace. The latter, as will

be discussed later in this chapter, became by the sixties the city’s new center of political gravity

(fig. 65).

Yet this highly counter-intuitive gesture of rewarding the students with the palace almost

immediately after their supposed betrayal merits further probing. To fully appreciate the magnitude

and effect of this gesture, we first need to understand the relationship the emperor established with

1166 Milkias, 101-110; Zewde, 211-215.

1167 Ibid, ibid.

1168 Milkias, 52. The violent history of the site during Italian occupation, when the palace served as the residence of the Viceroy of Italian East Africa, serves as evidence that the recent bloodshed was only a pretext.

383 students historically. Since the 1920s, while preparing the ground for taking over the throne, Haile

Selassie had established himself as the direct patron of education. After WWII and until the day he

died, he headed the Ministry of Education.1169 According to historian Bahru Zewde, students were

among the main addressees of Haile Selassie’s cult of personality:

An assiduously fostered cult of personality stripped Hayle-Sellase of all human attributes, and elevated him to superhuman heights. The media played a crucial role in this regard. In the early stages, the educational system served the same purpose. Pupils grew up chanting songs praising the emperor and wishing him a life as long as that of Abraham and Methuselah. In an exercise of paternal munificence, he showered them with gifts of cakes, oranges and sweaters on Ethiopian Christmas Day, 7 January. The more privileged students were visited on an almost weekly basis. Almost all significant urban landmarks bore his name: two schools, a hospital, a theatre, the stadium, what was then the main avenue, and a square in Addis Ababa.1170

As a plethora of photographic evidence shows, the Emperor asserted his presence at scholarship awarding ceremonies and graduation days, positioning himself as the ultimate father figure, at once tangible and awe-instilling with his god-like omnipresence and omniscient gaze (figs. 63-4).1171 His paternal relationship with the young educated elite fostered a bureaucracy that would answer directly to him, free from ties to the church and aristocracy.1172 By providing for the University

College students’ needs, including free education, dormitories and stipends, the emperor sheltered them from the poverty stricken areas of the city, thus furthering the severance of previous ties

1169 Erlich, 139-140.

1170 Zewde, 202.

1171 See for example at the Ethiopian Multimedia Gallery, http://ethiograph.com/album/displayimage.php?pid=3398, last accessed June 26, 2014.

1172 Milkias, 135. This is also manifested in Haile Selassie’s choice of ministers. He recruited men of low and humble background to ensure their loyalty to him as well as to use them as counterweight to the nobility. See Zewde, 203.

384 between the intellectuals and the people.1173 Nurturing an ultimate dependence and answerability, it is not hard to imagine the sense of betrayal the emperor felt facing the University College students’ revolt. His immediate response was to punish the involved students by taking away their dormitories’ rights and monthly stipend.1174 This fatherly slap on the wrist pales in comparison to the trials and executions that faced the coup instigators.

Taking away the privileges he once endowed the students, and then surprisingly rewarding the

entire student body a year later with nothing less than his palace, seems initially as if he was

conceding to the revolting students’ demands. When the students held banners proclaiming

“Equality, Brotherhood, and Freedom,”1175 they had in mind nothing short of storming the Bastille.

Similarly, when the palace was handed over to them, the psychological effect of opening the

heavily fenced and guarded lavish premises must have been exhilarating, although this victory was

somewhat bittersweet and confusing, since in this assertion of yet a greater benevolence and

infinite mercy, the emperor contained the students’ rebellion. As sociologist Marcel Mauss has

famously theorized, the gift was binding no less than benefitting.1176 This gesture of handing over

his palace as a way to enhance his authority epitomized Haile Selassie’s more general response to

the coup manifested in the Second National Development Plan (1962-1967). While the plan

seemed more “social” than the previous one, as it was designed to appease the growing progressive

voices in the country and American demands for democratization (reflecting the shift in style of aid

1173 Milkias, 140.

1174 Elrich, 140.

1175 Milkias, 103.

1176 See Mauss; Levin, “The Binding Gift.”

385 from Truman’s Point Four to Kennedy’s USAID),1177 the regime grew even stricter and more

conservative than before.1178

This dualistic image of progressivism on the one hand and political conservatism on the other had a

clear physical manifestation in the city of Addis Ababa, which became the locus of exhibiting the

country’s modernity to international and domestic audiences. The predominant historiographical

tendency is to describe the modernization projects in Addis Ababa in terms of Potemkin village

facadism, as in Milkias’ vivid account:

…[u]ntil 1974 there were two distinct sectors in Ethiopia. The first sector had a façade of modern social and economic transformation. In this sector, the progress of change was striking to the casual observer. Travel was carried out in jets manned entirely by Ethiopian crews which landed at a well- equipped and well-run modern airport, similar to those found in the developed world. Limousines sped along wide tree-lined boulevards to the center of a bustling city. Along the streets, huge supermarkets were lavishly stocked with all the engaging gadgetry of modern consumer products. There was a university as well as several light industries producing many types of contemporary commodities for the burgeoning urban elite. The economic landscape seemed impressive. Government statistics showed an oil refinery, and a series of dams, ports, hydroelectric projects, roads, bridges, schools, and clinics. However, this was a false image which led to a clearly misleading perception of the country at large. In contrast, some 15 miles outside the city, an entirely different world existed. This second sector was the real Ethiopia. The mode of production of this domain was extremely primitive. Peasants tilled the soil with grueling old-fashioned tools and techniques. Instead of limousines, one saw mules, camels, and donkeys. Disparities between official optimism about the nation’s economic development and the realities of the country were indeed staggering.1179

1177 McVety, 175.

1178 Erlich, 92.

1179 Milkias, 68.

386 The idea of fictive modernity as exemplified by the notion of facadism and the dichotomy between the urban and the rural manifested also within the city itself. At the beginning of the 1950s, another site was chosen for the future university. As a way to cordon the area, a gate was placed before any building was erected. For over a decade, this property served as a grazing field for goats and donkeys until a hospital was erected there instead. Even then, however, the eight-floor hospital proved too big to maintain and was left empty until the Swiss Red Cross took over the first two floors, while the rest remained unoccupied.1180 This disproportional waste of resources was even more remarkable considering the shortages of services and infrastructure, particularly in housing and employment that greeted masses of rural population who flocked the city.1181 Especially since

1963, when preparations began for the Organization of African Union summit, there was a continuing, concerted effort to hide thousands of unemployed beggars and vendors. They were put in so-called “relief centers” at Shola, a district in the outskirts of the city, joining the already thousands of squatters that were living in shantytowns around the market area to the west of the city.1182

This duality ran deeper than rural and urban physical manifestations, as it was embedded in the

very political system itself. As an informed American observed in 1961, “democratic institutions,

including Parliament are little more than a façade.”1183 By this he referred to the ineffectiveness of

the revisions introduced in 1955 to the original constitution of 1931. According to Zewde, this

1180 The building referred to is most probably the Black Zion hospital (also named Duke of Harar Memorial), which was constructed by the Yugoslav company Union of Engineers (today the Serbian Napred). See Milkias, 67-8, Catherine Hamlin and John Little, The Hospital by the River: A Story of Hope (Monarch Books, 2004), 165, and Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 10 (April 1964): 22.

1181 Gulema, 393-4.

1182 Milkias, 69, 119.

1183 Cited in McVety, 172.

387 revision “was designed to give Ethiopian government an even more impressive façade of

modernity as well as to rectify the anomaly created after the federation of Eritrea with Ethiopia in

1941 by the juxtaposition of the Constitution of 1931 with the more advanced Eritrean

constitution.”1184 Devoting more than a quarter of its provisions to the questions of imperial

succession and the powers of the emperor, the revised constitution fortified the monarchy as

absolute and sacred, while it introduced two significant changes: the constitution of universal adult

suffrage and provisions for the election of parliament members.1185 However, popular voting was

still low, and even if it had grown, its prospects to effect change were close to nil. The

nonexistence of political parties and the property qualification for election ensured that parliament

electives represented mainly their individual interests rather than broad public ones.1186 The

emperor further incapacitated the parliament by retaining his power of final say on policy matters,

appointment of ministers, and even the appointment of the prime minister who “was little more

than a glorified conduit for the flow of appointments and decisions.”1187

Imperial Modernity

Founded in 1896 by Menelik II, Haile Selassie’s predecessor, in its first decades the city consisted

of a cluster of camps (safars) that spread over the hills centripetally around Menelik’s camp,

positioned at the highest point. The Old Ghebi, as his camp-turned into-palace came to be known,

St. George’s Cathedral and Arada, the market adjacent to it, became the nodal points around which

1184 Zewde, 206.

1185 Ibid, ibid.

1186 Ibid, ibid.

1187 Human rights provisions, such as freedom of speech, were accompanied by nullifying phrases such as “in accordance with the law.” Ibid, 204-6.

388 the city developed.1188 Yet Haile Selassie, then still Crown Prince Taffari Mekonnen, had vaster

ambitions for this new capital. These were ignited by his 1924 tour of the European capitals Paris,

Brussels, Rome, and London, as well as the Middle Eastern Cairo and Jerusalem.1189 His

coronation on November 2, 1930, for which a long list of international dignitaries and reporters

were invited to the city,1190 spurred a series of “feverish, and largely cosmetic, interventions,” as

described by one contemporary. These “cosmetic interventions” included, however, Ethiopia’s first

tarmac roads, which linked the Old Ghebi with St. George’s Cathedral, as well as the installation of

the country’s first electric streetlights. Alongside these infrastructural changes, measures in the

spirit of Potemkin village facadism were hastily implemented, including the erection of triumphal

arches of canvas and plywood, outfitting the city police and the soldiers in khaki uniforms, and

whitewashing the fronts of houses facing the streets.1191

The momentum for the modernization of the city on the occasion of the influx of foreign visitors

was recreated in the preparations for the Silver Jubilee in 1955 and the first conference of the

Organization of African Unity in 1963. Far beyond “cosmetic” changes, these two occasions

advanced an unprecedented growth of the city to the south, westward and eastward. While the 1930

coronation entailed the paving of roads that connected the city’s three primary nodal points, the

1955 jubilee celebrations went one step further by erecting a new nodal point to the south of the

1188 Bahru Zewde, “The City Centre: A Shifting Concept in the History of Addis Ababa,” in Urban Africa: Changing Contours and Survival in the City, eds. AbdoulMaliq Simone and Abdelghani Abouhani (Dakar: Cedersia Books; London: Zed Books; Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2005), 122-3.

1189 Elrich, 39.

1190 The list of distinguished guests included Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester and son of King George V; Italy’s Crown Prince; senior representatives of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and British Somaliland; Belgium, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the US. In addition, dozens of international journalists arrived for the occasion. See Gulema, 390 n. 839.

1191 “Coronation Day 1930 – Eyewitness Account,” Ethiopia Mirror 1. no. 2 (November 1972): 30-38. Cited in Gulema, 390.

389 Old Ghebi: the Jubilee Palace.1192 This extension to the south, via the creation of a new nodal point,

followed the logic of planning during the Italian occupation, namely identifying existing nodal

points (the market, the church and the palace), clearing grounds for roads and piazzas between and

around them, and adding new buildings in relation to existing structures, as a basis for further

planning.1193 Creating a new nodal point to the south of the old palace literally followed one of the

later plans drawn by Ignazio Guidi and Cesare Valle that designated the area for the new political

center of Italy’s East African capital (fig. 66).1194

Other governmental buildings soon followed and punctuated the southern part of the imperial-

governmental-educational axis that expressed most visibly Haile Selassie’s efforts to transform

Addis Ababa into an international center. Facing the Jubilee Palace, which would become the

emperor’s prime residence after the 1960 coup, Africa Hall was completed in December 1959 (fig.

67), just in time for the first international conference of the United Nations Economic Commission

for Africa (UNECA).1195 It was on this avenue, named Menelik II Avenue, that Enav and Tedros

would leave their most significant mark on the city with the 82 Apartment Building, designed to

house the personnel of the adjacent UNECA headquarters (figs. 69-71), the Institute of Geography

and Mapping opposite to it, and most importantly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs across the street

to the north of the palace (figs. 72-4). The parliament house, located north to the Old Ghebi, was

1192 Zewde, “City Centre,” 132.

1193 Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism (London; New York: Routledge, 2010 [2007]), 197-213; David Rifkind, “Gondar: Architecture and Urbanism for Italy’s Fascist Empire,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 4 (December 2011): 492-511.

1194 Fuller, 203; Zewde, “City Centre,” 135.

1195 Mezzedimi.

390 symbolically disconnected from this new triangular nexus of power between the emperor’s

residence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Africa Hall.

The extension of the imperial-governmental-educational axis and its new international stature had

implications for the future development of the city southward. This orientation began as early as

1917, when the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway was laid (finished in 1937), and continued with the

inauguration of Ethiopian Airlines and the launching of its first international service in 1946 in an

airfield inherited from the Italian occupation, located in Lideta in the southwest of the city.

Refurbished in the mid fifties by Arturo Mezzedimi, it constituted another nodal point, as the road

leading to it was punctuated with trade colleges such as the Ethio-Swedish Building College and

the Technical School (see previous chapter). By 1963, however, a new international airport

constructed to the southeast served as the main entry point into the city through a broad avenue

named Africa Road (known as Bole Road), passing through Masqal (Cross) Square that fed

directly into Menelik II Avenue (fig. 65).1196

In parallel to the imperial-governmental-educational axis, which also included the University

College and later the Haile Selassie I University to the north, a cultural-commercial north-south

axis developed to the west based on the Italian-paved avenue Viale Mussolini, renamed Churchill

Road after independence. Stretching from the train station in the south, it was crowned in the north

by a new city hall, designed like Africa Hall by Arturo Mezzedimi, which opened too in 1963.

Along this axis, on Adwa Square, in the mid 1950s Henri Chomette completed the Haile Selassie I

Theater (renamed the National Theater after the 1974 revolution), whose construction had begun

1196 Zewde, “City Centre,” 131-132.

391 during Italian occupation. Within a few years, Chomette would also design the adjacent National

and Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (fig. 80).

As this pattern of appropriation demonstrates, there was nothing demeaning in the re-use of Italian

plans and services.1197 According to historian Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, Italian planning and

construction presented both a challenge and an opportunity to post-liberation Ethiopian planning.

On the one hand, Ethiopia needed to undo the Italian redistribution of urban property in order to

restore the monarchy’s economic base of legitimacy. On the other hand, it presented an opportunity

to utilize existing plans and buildings, and benefit from their modern and imperial applications to

signify state order and control.1198

This opportunity or temptation, in turn, presented an even graver challenge, namely how to reclaim

the colonizer’s achievements so that the Italian occupation’s imprint would be incorporated

seamlessly into the city’s fabric, and be remembered, if at all, as no more than a short episode in

the history of the city. This challenge was more pronounced in the neighboring Eritrea, where

prolonged Italian colonization brought a considerable modernization of industry and

architecture.1199 Federated with Ethiopia in 1941, and in effect colonized by Ethiopia’s stronghold,

Eritrea doubled the stakes for the modernization of Ethiopia as the latter attempted to prove to UN

observers that it should maintain control over Eritrea, or, in other words, that it was “modern”

enough to colonize it. It was not enough that Ethiopia revised its constitution in 1955 to

1197 This included the source of the capital’s electric supply: the hydroelectric plant the Italians set up south of Addis Ababa. See Zewde, Modern Ethiopia, 198. As noted by Zewde, the Qoqa dam - Ethiopia’s single most ambitious infrastructural project post independence, which became the main source of power for a large part of the country - was funded by Italy as war reparations.

1198 Gulema, 385-386.

1199 See for example, Edward Denison, Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City (London: Merrell, 2003).

392 accommodate Ertitrea’s more progressive one; it also needed to outdo Eritrea’s modern

appearance.1200 Thus the challenge was grounded in the temptation to assert imperial power by

emulating the Italian colonizer. From this perspective, the brief Italian occupation of Ethiopia did

Haile Selassie a service, as its planning efforts could be used as a jump-start to implement the

ambitions and taste for monumentality he had been developing since his 1924 tour.

The Italian occupation presented Haile Selassie a challenge of appropriating its logic of governance

through its physical ordering of the city, while reversing the land reform the first implemented. In

this sense, this imitation of power at the physical level, without following its economic logic, can

be interpreted as a superficial colonial mimicry. However, the relationship between the colonizer

and the colonized in this case presents a much more complex dynamic that can be explained as part

of what literary theorist Shadin Tageldin has named “translational seduction.”1201 In a nuanced

reading of the workings of cultural imperialism, which she argues works more as an “attractive

proposition” than a “willful imposition,” Tageldin asks, “what happens when a 'native’ signifier

binds to a ’foreign’ – especially a colonizing – signifier to shore up the power of the native through

the power of the foreign?”1202 Addressing specifically the lure of cultural revitalization by the

colonizer, it seems at first glance that her analysis would fit better the Italian mode of cultural

preservation in their North African colonies.1203 However, the case of the Italian occupation of

Ethiopia, where Italy could not claim cultural continuity by virtue of a shared Roman past, and

1200 As Gulema explains, modernization served as an international propaganda tool to exhibit to the UN observers that Ethiopia “was civilized and capable enough to take over and administer modern, albeit colonized, ex-territories like Eritrea.” See Gulema 392-3.

1201 Tageldin, 10.

1202 Ibid, 4, 7. (Emphasis in origin).

1203 See Mia Fuller’s comparison of Italian preservation and urbanization practices in its North African versus its East African colonies, specifically in Tripoli and Addis Ababa, 151-170, 197-213.

393 where it asserted a clear racial boundary, presents an even more complex dynamic that

demonstrates the potential reversibility of power in this act of seduction. The cultural dynamic

based on inter-cultural “seduction” played out in this case much more strongly because of Italy’s

historical failure to conquer Ethiopia in the 1896 Battle of Adwa and its insecurities about its own

modernity and racial superiority in relation to other European colonial powers. Like no other

colony, Ethiopia presented a challenge to Italy’s self esteem, being the only African country that

defeated a European army. The stakes were particularly high in this Ethiopian capital, since it was

only after it was conquered that Italy could overcome the bitter memory of its earlier defeat, and

Mussolini could declare Italy an empire.

Ostensibly an absolute other, that could not be subsumed under the guise of a shared heritage as in

its North African colonies, Ethiopia nonetheless surprised Italian occupiers with emblems of power

they could easily recognize, such as a fort in Gondar, built by Portuguese builders in the thirteenth

century, and the nodal points of the palace, market and church familiar from Italian towns. More

poignantly, the Ethiopian capital welcomed them with many structures built by Italian prisoners of

war (captured during the Adwa Battle) or by Italian builders who were hired by Ethiopian wealthy

patrons.1204 The city therefore literally embodied Italy’s painful defeat, but also, as in the case of

the Ethiopian return to power after Italian conquest, presented an opportunity to re-appropriate it as

part of Italy’s victory. As cultural anthropologist Mia Fuller has observed, “(f)or Mussolini, taking

over the physical site of Menelik’s centralized power meant visibly absorbing it, controlling the

apparatus he had created, and expanding it for his own purposes. This Italians would ‘inherit’ the

1204 Fuller, 200-201.

394 high stature of the previous Empire.”1205 Thus paying tribute to Ethiopians’ symbols of power was

a way to subsume them as their own, while paradoxically returning Italian achievements to their

proper owners.1206

When Haile Selassie, in turn, incorporated Italian built piazzas, monuments, and grand avenues, he

reestablished his ability to employ European and Italian expertise in the service of his empire. In

this reading, Tageldin’s conceptualization of cultural imperialism “as a politics that lures the

colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, to translate their cultures into an

empowered ’equivalence‘ with those of their dominators and thereby repress the inequalities

between those dominators and themselves,”1207 works both ways between colonizers and colonized.

As a site where contestation manifested through appropriation and absorption, city planning in the

Italian-Ethiopian case was a medium through which the reversibility of power was asserted in an

almost harmonious continuity, masking both sides’ vulnerability and aggression.

Following the Italian plan after independence enabled Haile Selassie to intervene within the city

pragmatically and strategically while various plans were being commissioned for the city,

beginning with the British Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie’s. In 1946, only two years after he

submitted his Greater London Plan, at Britain’s insistence that the planner would be British, the

1205 Ibid, 200.

1206 Similarly in Gondar, the Italians emphasized the Portuguese craftsmanship in the building of the Fasil Ghebbi, a castle complex built in the seventeen century under the rule of Fasilidas, the son of the city’s founder, Susenios. According to David Rifkind, Fasilidas employed Indian and possibly Turkish craftsmen who worked under Portuguese supervision. See Rifkind, 494.

1207 Tageldin, 10.

395 Ethiopian government approached Abercrombie for a plan.1208 Characteristically un-monumental,

this consisted of neighborhood units (supposedly corresponding to the existing safar system), green

parkways, a green belt, satellite towns, a hierarchical street system which retained the existing

governmental sector, and a network of radial and ring roads.1209 Despite the fact that it did not

conform to Haile Selassie’s tastes and ambitions – as he made clear by defying the plan with the

extension of the governmental axis to the south – the commission for the plan was renewed in 1954

in preparation for the celebrations to accompany the town-planning exhibition held at the

municipality and the publishing of the First Five Year Plan in 1957.1210 According to Gulema, the

plan’s recommendations to deflect the monumentality and overhaul the grid matrix – inherited

from Italian colonial urbanism - as well as the addition of satellite towns, were not accepted due to

the massive resources that would be needed for such transformations.1211

Yet at stake was much more than public funds, as is evident by the opposition of the landed

aristocracy and real estate developers.1212 Even if there was a genuine desire on the part of

municipality to implement the plan or others that followed,1213 the existing land tenure system, in

1208 Gulema, 400.

1209 Gulema, 431-432. See also Sylvia Pankhurst, “Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Town Plan,” Ethiopia Observer 1 no. 2 (1957): 34-44.

1210 Gulema, 393, 429.

1211 Ibid, 436.

1212 Ibid, 438.

1213 Other plans commissioned during Haile Selassie’s regime include: a 1959 plan by the British office Bolton Hennessy and Partners that revised Abercrombie’s plan, and the monumental plan by the French Mission d’Urbanisme et d’Habitat under the leadership of Luis de Mariene, which was drafted in 1965 and resulted in the construction of high rise buildings, apartment structures, and low cost single storey houses in several parts of the city. For a genealogy of the capital’s master plans see Gulema, 400-443; See also: Techeste Ahderom, “Basic Principles and Objectives taken in the Preparation of the Addis Ababa Master Plan: Past and Present,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Centenary of Addis Ababa, November 24-25, 1986, eds. Ahmed Zekaria, Bahru Zewde and Taddese Beyene (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa City Council, 1987), 247-269.

396 which around ninety per cent of urban land was controlled by less than ten per cent of the

population (the aristocracy and monarchy), precluded such attempts. The emerging middle class,

consisting of bureaucrats, military personnel, and merchants, did not present an alternative either,

since it was absorbed into the imperial system through land grants allocated from 1942 through the

1960s.1214 As a system that undergirded the monarchy’s legitimacy and its elected parliament, any

land reform would have therefore pulled the rug out from under the imperial regime.1215 Thus,

maintaining political stability by keeping the landed aristocracy at bay also meant that the

government and the municipality did not have statutory power to implement the plan. When

combined with financial shortages, technical deficiencies, and a crippled bureaucracy, the chances

of implementing any of the plans were close to nil.

Ethiopian Modernity

The main objective of urban planning in Addis Ababa, to increase city revenue by taxation and

private investment,1216 had not died out with the inability to implement master plans. Rather, this

objective continued via the sphere of immediate action, through scattered projects around the city.

Just as in the case of the Classroom Building at the university campus, which served as a stop-gap

1214 Gulema, 394-399. For example, as a token of appreciation and faith in his investment in the city, Shalom Shelemay received land on which he built his apartment building. Shelemay, interview. Similarly Tedros received land, probably as part of the perks for returnees, on which he built a house that he rented out to an Israeli police officer. Tedros, interview.

1215 Following acute tenancy problems in the rural areas, and external pressure the government was forced to consider land reform. It first set up a committee on land reform in 1961, and in 1965 it consolidated into the Land Reform and Development Authority, which was reconstituted as the Ministry of Land Reform and Administration in 1966. See Zewde, Modern Ethiopia, 195.

1216 Gulema, 394.

397 while master plans were being drafted and reworked for over a decade,1217 the governmental and

commercial-cultural centers developed ad-hoc with little or no regard to the city’s master plans. In

a context in which there was no statuary and political power for the implementation of projects,

modernity could be accelerated through fragmented interventions within the cityscape, in

government actions equivalent to public domain. Setting the tone for private investments,

government projects encouraged investment in the land, whose skyrocketing value was passively

exploited by simply dividing it.1218

Addressing also a domestic audience in addition to international visitors, Haile Selassie’s

construction undertakings attempted to spur the dormant land owning class into more dynamic and

risk-taking economic behavior. ”Use your savings where it will pay you the most. The hoarding of

money does not yield dividends!” Haile Selassie preached his nation the principles of Anglo-

American economics.1219 His words were accompanied by action, demonstrating how

entrepreneurship turns into development. In a conversation with architect Mezzedimi, the emperor

laid out his urban economic agenda:

It is necessary to show people that it is possible to construct grand buildings here too, by erecting a couple of high-profile structures. It is not their complexity or size that matter, but the maximum possible use of home-produced materials, in order to shake our wealthy middle class (which keeps its money under the mattress) from the inactivity that also binds it in the field of construction, and

1217 See chapter 5.

1218 Zewde, Modern Ethiopia, 192.

1219 Cited in McVety, 147. In addition, the government employed a highly attractive investment policy: an income-tax proclamation of 1949 stated that no profit tax would be levied for a period of five years on an initial capital of $Eth. 200,000 invested in mining, industry and transport, and tax on business enterprises was not to exceed fifteen percent of the net profit. Additional inducements for foreign capital investment were a general remittance policy, high tariffs on competitive imports, and co-operation in fixing high prices for commodities produced locally. See Zewde, Modern Ethiopia, 199.

398 stimulate it to invest its assets also in building to make this “great village” a city a true great capital.1220

These capitalist minded people would not only be found on the fourth floor of the Classroom

Building, at the American run College of Business Administration, but also in department stores

that instilled new patterns of production, spending and consumption, such as Mosvold’s New

Department Store on Haile Selassie I Avenue, where eighty per cent of its luxury furniture was

locally produced.1221 Thus the “maximum possible use of home-produced materials” did not mean

the traditional use of materials as systemized by the Ethio-Swedish Building College, but their

modern industrialized application. The construction of modern buildings would make such use of

the three cement factories in Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa and Massawa that produced 180,000 tons of

cement a year, and the seven cement pipe and tile factories around the country.1222

By taking the lead on this construction boom with various governmental projects and educating

speeches,1223 the emperor continued the traditional role of the monarch of providing the people

with sacred guidance, even in matters of modernization. As Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis explains,

already in the 1920s,

The fashioning of the Ethiopian monarchy’s public image not only presented itself as the official emblem of the nation but also as a modern, civilized, and civilizing institution that responded to

1220 Mezzedimi.

1221 “Progress in Production and Trade,” Ethiopia Mirror 3, no. 2 (April-June 1964): 22-3; “Another Philips’ Stride in the Ethiopian Economy,” Ethiopia Mirror 4, no. 1-2 (Jan-June 1965): 30-1.

1222 Development in Ethiopia 1941-1964 (Addis Ababa: The Imperial Ethiopian Government, Ministry of Information, 1964), 179-180, IES.

1223 The royal family partook in these acts of demonstrative investment. For example, the Empress owned a mixed use rental apartment building, designed by Enav and Tedros.

399 modern ideas and practices. So deeply implicated were the categories of modern thought with Imperial ideology and the sacred nation that the newspaper [Berhanea Selam: a weekly intellectual newspaper established by Haile Selassie before he was crowned] gave significance to the progress of the West as it questioned the adequacy of the West’s ideology for the life of the nation without the moral quest and activism of a divine monarch who was responsible for leading the masses. Modernity was hence part of a transcendent kingly moral insight that shaped the vision of the ideal society that had to be realized.1224

In order to cultivate this image of an enlightened visionary of Ethiopian modernity, while

precluding any political reform, the emperor dissociated himself from the government, which took

the blame for its political stagnation.

Mezzedimi’s defense of Haile Selassie against his retrospective demonization in the chilling

documentary novel “The Emperor,”1225 demonstrates how the emperor managed to convey this

illusive schism to his foreign confidants, who were, more often than not, interested parties such as

Mezzedimi himself. Reporting on a meeting between the emperor, the Minister of Finance and the

Minister of Public Works, Mezzedimi attempted to convey the emperor’s frustration with his

subordinates, whose pettiness and lack of vision stood in the way of his forward thinking

modernization schemes:

Following a brief introduction in the local language, the Emperor, visibly satisfied, placed the bundle of papers in front of the Minister of Finance. After a few brief words, the Minister of Finance placed it in front of the Minister of Public Works, who passed it back again to him with a few words. More words accompanied further movements of the paper: (the debate concerned who should sign them first as the contracting authority, whilst the other would have signed as guarantor, for both the

1224 Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, ”Charting Out Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism,” Callaloo 22, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 90-91.

1225 Kapuscinski.

400 technical aspect and financial surety. However they were obviously more serious reasons.) The emperor, although quivering, had not yet said a word, but suddenly turned to me and gestured with his hands as he pronounced the cutting words: “Voyez, voyez ce qu’ils me font!”. He then leapt up and left the room. Two days later he summoned me with evident embarrassment (it was the only time that he used an interpreter) and excused himself for the mishap, aware of how much work the venture had cost up until that time, saying that he “couldn’t turn it into a political affair.”1226

From the perspective of the architect, the emperor managed to implement his vision despite the

government. Supra-class and supra-politics, “the good was invariably attributed to him, whereas

the bad was blamed on his subordinates.”1227 More often, it did not have to come down to a

“political affair,” as the emperor could impose his final say with a single blow, while dismissing

everybody else’s contribution in the process. On the occasion of placing marble plaques in

Mezzedimi’s Africa Hall, the emperor ordered the removal of the inscription “listing the names of

the minister and chief officials of the Ministry of Public Works responsible for the bureaucratic

aspects of the project, with the phrase ‘Qu’est-ce qu’ils ont fait?’”1228 leaving the names of the

architect and the contracting company, graced by His Majesty’s benevolence, as its sole creators.

Haile Selassie, who often took a keen interest in the design of buildings,1229 had a final say on these

matters as well. This became particularly fortuitous for Enav and Tedros on the occasion of their

designing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was not in line with the wishes of the Minister of

Finance, who had requested that its design be along the lines of the United Nations building in New

1226 Mezzedimi.

1227 Zewde, 202.

1228 Mezzedimi.

1229 Ibid.

401 York.1230 Although we can only speculate what the minister had in mind when he made this request,

it seems he was more attracted to the corporate monumentality of the secretariat building of the

New York headquarters than to its low auditorium. Expressing what was probably a popular view

at that time, a writer for the Addis Reporter stressed that the way to achieve “a modern capital of a

3,000-year-old country,” is by punctuating Addis Ababa’s sky-line with “as many skyscrapers as

possible.”1231 Perhaps the Minister of Finance had in mind Chomette’s Commercial Bank

contemporaneous project, which consisted of an eleven story building – the highest building to be

constructed in Addis Ababa at that time – and an adjacent domed round structure, following the

volumetric divide of the UN complex between the Secretariat tower and the horizontal General

Assembly (illustration 17). Yet Enav, who wished to design “an Ethiopian building” for the most

representational public building he and Tedros had so far received, had something completely

different in mind. After having presented their idea of a diamond shaped four-story courtyard

building faced with a hexagonal lattice façade to the emperor, who gave them his blessing, Enav

and Tedros no longer had to deal with the intrusive gaze of the minister.1232

Patterning Ethiopia

The emperor must have been thrilled by Enav’s desire to design an “Ethiopian building.” While

high-rises could convey accelerated growth and modernization, they lacked a sense of cultural

identity, a matter of considerable pride for Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Early on in his reign Haile

1230 Enav, interview.

1231 Cited in Gulema, 388-9, n. 836.

1232 Enav, interview. In an interview with Haim Yacobi Enav gave a slightly different version: “The Prime Minister asked me to design a building similar to the UN building in New York…. I told him that it was out of the question, since I wanted to design an ‘Ethiopian’ building. But he insisted, telling me, ‘we want to be Modern’… I finally designed a large model and I took it to the Cesar who asked me: ‘why is it not built with glass?’ I answered him: ‘don’t you see? The façade is made of units that resemble the star of Solomon, the Ethiopian symbol….’ Only then was he convinced by my idea.” Yacobi, “The Architecture of Foreign Policy,” 49.

402 Selassie compared Ethiopia to a sleeping beauty who is waking up from her deep slumber. “In

order not to overwhelm her with changes, we should be full of care now,”1233 he warned. If

accelerated modernization was the order of the day in the 1950s, the 1960 abortive coup brought

him back to this gradualist approach. It is as if he were warning the Ethiopians not to be fooled by

the appearance of modernization sweeping the capital, since they were not ready to take full control

over its progress: Yes- you are being modernized, but no – this does not mean you have become

modern.

A 1962 review of the First Five Year Development Plan (1957-1961) stressed that although it was

determined to accelerate the socio-economic development process, it was considered a transitional

period – modernization is not complete after a few factories and institutions were set up – and

urged patience. Since Ethiopia “comprises its own traditional patterns of economic and social life,

as well as new ones,” “the path of development and the planning approach and techniques

employed should reflect Ethiopian traits which link together national traditions and scientific,

cultural, and technological achievements of the modern world.”1234 This was exactly the crux of

Halie Selassie’s regime: modernization, including social progress, could occur only on the basis of

Ethiopian traditional social and political structures. “We believe in a progress that builds on a

sound foundation and not on shifting sands,” the emperor explained in 1962 following the

publication of the Second Five Year Development Plan. “We believe in the adaptation of modern

economic and social theories to local conditions and customs rather than in the imposition on

1233 Cited in Milkias, 26.

1234 Second Five Year Development Plan (Addis Ababa: Imperial Ethiopian Government, October 1962), 33-4.

403 Ethiopia’s social and economic structure of systems which are largely alien to it and which [it] is

not equipped to absorb or cope with.”1235

While calling for an adaptation of modernization to local conditions and customs, Haile Selassie

did not mean that the latter would remain static and unchangeable in the process. In an address

introducing TV services into the country in November 1964, the emperor explained that its purpose

is to “move the Ethiopian people progressively on their road to their maximum cultural

development.”1236 This was not simply a process of westernization, as the suspect conjunction of

cultural development with TV may imply. In addition to changing the economic habits of the

people, the emperor called for a fundamental psychological and mental change. The question was

one of constituting a dynamic culture with a sound enough traditional basis to absorb technological

shock. With such a basis, technology would not only serve the traditional system, but would be the

means of its sustained development. If in the pre-war years both Menelik and Haile Selassie drew

inspiration from Japanese modernization as a model for keeping culture intact while utilizing

western technology,1237 it became clear to Haile Selassie, especially after the attempted coup, that

such separation was no longer viable.

The problem was one of conflicting temporalities between the desire of accelerating history and

maintaining the traditional patterns of Ethiopian life. While high-rises conveyed the first, they had

1235 Cited in McVety, 176.

1236 Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 16 (Nov-Dec 1964): 24.

1237 For an analysis of the debates on the relationship between culture and technology in Ethiopian intellectual tradition see Giorgis. On the analogy to Japan see Massay Kebede, “Japan and Ethiopia: An Appraisal of Similarities and Divergent Courses,” Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers of the XIIIth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Kyoto, 12-17 December 1997, eds. Katsuyoshi Fukui, Eisei Kurimoto, Masayoshi Shigeta (Kyoto, Japan : Shokado Book Sellers, 1997), 639-651.

404 little to offer in terms of the latter. Moreover, they could endanger the delicate balance between the

two by presenting a discrepancy too radical between technology and the mental attitudes of the

people. In an essay in the first issue of Zede, the journal of the Ethiopian Association of Architects

and Engineers, of which Tedros was the first president when it was established in 1963, Enav

criticized what he perceived as false modernity in Addis Ababa’s contemporary architecture:

Aesthetically many of the commercial buildings one sees around suffer from a basic fault. They are what is supposed to be modern without being so in the true sense. The true sense of modern buildings I have in mind are buildings which convey, with contemporary methods and materials, a country’s cultural heritage. They should be designed to be at the service of the people and to conform with the country’s economic and social progress and capacity.1238

By defining modern architecture in Ethiopia as a dialectic zeitgeist between contemporary methods

and materials and the country’s cultural heritage, Enav sought to create a language that would bring

the two into a harmonized whole, where they would be synchronized and the tensions between

them sublimated. Enav was certainly not the only one who tried to achieve such a symbiosis

between technology and cultural identity. Chomette’s contemporary bank complex tackled this

problem by juxtaposing an eleven story rectangular block and a lower round hall that evoked

traditional Ethiopian structures such as the mud tukul and eighteenth century churches.1239 While

the first is a standard corporate modernism concrete block, the latter bears the symbolic function

with its concrete double openings blind-arcade, covering a glass curtain wall, and a cut-out dome.

In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the other hand, this duality is fused into one representational

building. Maintaining the elongated gridded homogenous façade of the Classroom Building, the

1238 Zalman Enav, “Architecture in Ethiopia Today,” Zede 1, no.1 (November 1965): 23.

1239 Chomette’s extensive work in Africa and his incorporation of African artistic traditions is documented in Touré.

405 building seems at first glance like a modernist horizontal rectangular block (fig. 72). Yet a closer

look reveals that its symmetrical wings recede slightly from the entrance plaza to form an

elongated diamond shaped courtyard building (fig. 74). While the façade’s hexagonal concrete grid

is somewhat suggestive of the building’s plan, it also serves to conceal it as its repetitiveness

directs attention away from this recession. Like Mezzedimi’s City Hall and Africa Hall, the

building draws on classical monumentality with its symmetrical wings.

When lit at night -- a favorite photographic trope in media representation of Addis Ababa’s public

buildings in the 1960s that highlighted their electric modernity -- the pentagon pattern transformed

into the cross within the Ethiopian monarchy’s symbol of the Star of Solomon (fig. 73). Similarly,

the glass curtain-wall of the bank dematerialized when lit at night so that the arcade seemed to

hover over the ground majestically like a crown. At the bank, daylight was also utilized to create

ornamental effects, as it was fractured through the petal-like dome cut-outs and reflected on the

floor.1240 Both of the designs for the ministry and the bank abstracted symbolic forms into

geometric patterns. Yet the symbolism which each drew from referred to a different metaphoric

field. Chomette’s bank referred to Addis Ababa’s name, which means “new flower.” With this

secular yet local reference, it drew attention to Addis Ababa’s modern origins as the last site

chosen for the capital at the end of the nineteenth century. The choice of a hexagonal motif in the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the other hand, denoted the ancient and Christian origins of the

monarchy. In choosing the Star of Solomon as the dominant motif, Enav followed the choice of its

Jewish equivalent, the Star of David, for the Israeli flag.1241 Similarly to the Star of David, which

1240 “The New Building of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia,” Ethiopia Mirror 4, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 1965): 20-29.

1241 A hexagram based on this symbol was adopted for Ethiopia’s flag after the fall of the Derg regime. From 1897 to 1974, the emblem of Ethiopia’s national flag was the Lion of Judah.

406 had no specific religious meaning despite its long association with Judaism, Enav rendered the

cross-bearing Star of Solomon a national secular motif. Compared to Chomette’s more literal and

immediate connotation to the city, Enav’s specific choice of emblem to denote an Ethiopian

national community exceeding territorial boundaries most likely appealed both to the emperor’s

ambitions of becoming an international symbol of African liberation and uninterrupted tradition,

and to his imperial claims that comprised an extensive Muslim population and other ethnic and

religious minority groups, including Jewish. Perhaps this is the kind of cultural understanding

Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion meant when he said that “the English and American cultures are

too far from them, and they [the Ethiopians] would have liked to learn from us.”1242

It was of prime significance for Enav that the hexagon he used to represent the Star of Solomon

was structurally the most viable of forms.1243 This structural potency served to differentiate it from

other ornaments such as those found excessively at the Hilton (fig. 81), that would be built across

the avenue from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the late 1960s. In this building, designed by the

American firm Warner, Burns, Toan, and Lunde, the ancient obelisks of Axum (a town in the north

of the country dating back to 400 BC) were copied and carved into the façades. Together with a

1242 Cited in Erlich, Brit va-Shever, 73. My translation. Similarly to Enav, albeit on official capacity, other Israelis were involved in creating a modern base for the study and developing of Ethiopian culture. Zvi Yavetz, the Israeli Dean of the Arts Faculty at the Haile Selassie I University, established the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES), the most important institution in the country for the study of the national history and culture. See ibid, 141-2. For the list of cultural institutions established in the period, see Memorandum, Ministry of Education and Fine Arts: Culture – A National Problem, August 1967, IES. A “cultural clash” between Israeli and Anglo-Saxon experts regarding the modernization of Amharic script sheds some light on Enav’s approach in his attempt to forge a symbol that would reconcile modernity and tradition. Mr. Ze’ev Ras, an Israeli expert leading the Extra-Curricular Department in the Ministry of Education introduced cursive fast-hand letters parallel to the existing printed system. While this project was generally approved, the English IES librarian and Ethiopia specialist Mr. Stephen Wright commented that “the Ethiopian script is attractive and beautiful as it is,”1242 preferring to fixate the script to safeguard it from changes over its adaptation to Ethiopian society’s growing literacy. For Enav, similarly to Mr. Ras, tradition had no intrinsic value if it could not be communicated and disseminated on a national level. See Ethiopia Information Bulletin no. 10 (April 1964): 23.

1243 Enav, interview.

407 pool in the shape of St. George church in Lalibela, the Hilton’s ornamental program simulated

Ethiopia’s touristic ancient attractions, and compensated for Addis Ababa’s modern origins.1244 In

the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the abstract hexagonal pattern is neither modern nor traditional,

and even if at first it seemed unfamiliar (as it did to Haile Selassie, who was convinced only after

Enav’s explanation), its grammar was meant to speak to Ethiopians. Relating the hexagonal form to

an “unconscious canons of choice that develop within the culture,”1245 Enav clearly based his

theory of form on anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. For Benedict,

A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action (…) the form that these acts take we can understand only by understanding first the emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society (…) If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.1246

Using almost the exact same terminology, Enav argued that for architecture to be expressive of

society, the architect should study man’s “intellectual, emotional and physical pattern of behavior”

– as “an essential background for design.”1247 Benedict’s emphasis on “cultural processes” rather

than on fixed cultural traits opened the possibility for Enav to form the dynamic approach to

cultural expression mentioned above. Rather than being autochthonous and fixed, the notion of

1244 “Hilton Hotels by Warner Burns Toan Lunde,” Contract Interiors 1232, no. 3 (1972): 102-109. Known for university buildings in Canada and the States, following the Addis Ababa Hilton, the firm designed also the Ramses Hilton in Cairo, Egypt. For the role of Hilton hotels in the Cold War ideological battle see Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2001).

1245 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005 [1934]), 48.

1246 Ibid, 46, 49.

1247 Enav, 17-18.

408 pattern opened the possibility of change and growth.1248 If cultural expression is part of the process

of cultural formation, together with needs and scale, patterns formed the elements whose interplay

changed and rejuvenated through time. 1249

If the hexagon embodied an irreducible kernel of Ethiopian culture, then it opened up the

possibility for further experimentation and elaboration of form. From merely decorating the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs façade, it grew into the dominant spatial element in the design of

Filoha Baths. Conceived as a series of domed hexagonal pavilions connected by covered walkways,

the complex formed a semi-enclosed compound similar to indigenous settlements Enav found in

Ethiopia (figs. 75-6, 79).1250 It was probably due to the truly public nature of the baths – giving

access to the urbanite poor to enjoy the city’s mineral springs – that Enav and Tedros took the

liberty to experiment with what they perceived as vernacular Ethiopian forms. Yet these domed

hexagonal pavilions with their pierced skylights resembled Turkish baths more than any Ethiopian

vernacular reference (figs. 77-8), perhaps inspired by Louis Kahn’s reference to Turkish baths in

his study for Trenton Bath House, which he was working on around the time Tedros was studying

at the University of Pennsylvania as part of American educational aid in the country (see previous

chapter). Benedict’s theory allowed such borrowing from other cultures as long as it served the

culture’s “own purpose”: “this purpose selects from among the possible traits in the surrounding

regions those which it can use, and discards those which it cannot.”1251 Comparing it to the

1248 See chapter 2 for discussion on Margaret Mead’s (Ruth Benedict’s student) influence on planning in the Third World.

1249 Enav, 17-18.

1250 Enav incorporated an aerial view of these settlements patterns in his article in Zede. Typically to this structuralist approach, there is no mention of the names of the village, its geographical region, or the date in which the photo was taken. 1251 Benedict, 47.

409 formation of style in art, Benedict extrapolated Alois Riegl’s kunstwollen into a general cultural

motivating force.

Enav’s exposure to Ruth Benedict’s writings must have been mediated via Team 10 member Aldo

van Eyck, who was very influenced by her work.1252 During the time Enav studied at the

Architectural Association in London, Team 10’s influence was so dominant that it must have

permeated also to students of the Tropical Architecture department.1253 Enav’s proclaimed

preference for “close-knit groups” and “cellular or cluster development” attests to that

influence.1254 Yet although Enav flirted with Team 10’s ideas, which also promoted the borrowing

of forms and patterns across cultures, he did not share their fundamental rejection of zoning and

their emphasis on mobility and communications.1255 Despite that, Enav found Team 10’s approach

particularly useful to the conditions of Addis Ababa. The main problem, according to Enav, was

the frustrated planning of the capital:

Addis Ababa is planned, and as a matter of fact it was planned several times; yet its plan has lagged behind the economic and political growth of the town and therefore, one notices here some incoherences [sic] and unclear directions of its growth. This affects zoning, traffic, commerce, industry, culture and all other aspects of the town as a living organism.1256

1252 Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity (Amsterdam: Architectura and Natura, 1998), 380, 449-52.

1253 See previous chapter for a discussion on Enav’s education at the Tropical Architecture Department at the AA. Enav referred to Peter Smithson as his most influential educator there. Enav felt this influence particularly since Maxwell Fry stepped down from teaching the year Enav spent there.

1254 Enav, 24.

1255 He adhered to the “neighborhood unit” concept, as was practiced in Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s.

1256 Enav, 22.

410 Downplaying the political reasons for the inability to implement planning in the city, Enav

highlights “economic and political growth” as positive elements, despite the fact they create

“incoherences.” Disillusioned by his work for planning institutions in Israel, first as a planner in

the Lakhish Region and later as the municipal architect of the city of Beersheba,1257 Enav may have

equated Addis Ababa’s municipality’s crippled bureaucracy with what he had experienced as the

narrow mindedness and overpowering wheels of bureaucracy in Israel.1258 Having faith in planning

from the disciplinary perspective, but full of contempt for the bureaucracy responsible for its

implementation, the architect-as-planner offered by Team 10’s approach must have had a special

appeal for Enav, as it bypassed planning procedures. If we recall Haile Selassie’s entrepreneur-like

paradigm of construction in the city, it seems that this would be exactly the approach he would

expect from his architects.

It is thus not surprising that the Filhoa Baths complex draws inspiration from Van Eyck’s

Amsterdam Orphanage to suggest continuity between the scale of the unit and the city at large.

While commissioned to design “the city’s better fragments,” to use Gulema’s apt phrase,1259 Enav

and Tedros strove instead against the facadist emphasis of imperial modernity. In his article Enav

warned against the building of public structures as “isolated statements” in the cityscape.1260

Patterning, even if performed through isolated urban fragments, provided the second best solution

to Enav’s desired planning method from the “mud brick to the city,” as expressed in his favorite

1257 See chapter 2 for a discussion on the planning of the Lakhish region.

1258 Enav, interview.

1259 Gulema, 389.

1260 Enav, 23.

411 studio project at the AA for the city of Basra.1261 The horizontality continuity of most of Enav and

Tedros’ projects lent itself to such potential expansion and connectivity at an urban scale. While in

Israel this logic served national territorial claims and in postwar Europe the expansion of American

capitalism,1262 in Ethiopia it served to convey the ability of the emperor to direct the otherwise

chaotic development of the city despite the handicapped planning institutions. At the Filoha Baths,

although the grouping of the pavilions forms an enclosure, the linking between the hexagonal units

varies and suggests the possibility of adding further units, following a beehive structure. This open-

endedness repeats in other buildings as well, albeit sometimes only suggestively, as in the case of

the Ministry of Foreign Affair’s unraveled edges (fig. 74). This connectivity continues also at the

level of details, such as railings and tiles, that occasionally repeat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

the 82 Apartment Building, and the Mapping and Geography Institute – all on Menelik II Avenue –

despite the different functions and audiences they served.

The strategy of patterning enabled the architects to subvert the imperial emphasis on facades. Since

the Filoha Baths were away from any representative avenue, the relationship between the complex

and the street was not a consideration. As for the buildings facing Menelik II Avenue (dubbed

“Parade Street” in Enav and Tedros’ plans), what was only suggested in the slight receding angle

of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was to be fully articulated in the 82 Apartment Building. As the

building’s original plan suggests, the constructed block was supposed to be one of a series of

blocks connected linearly in parallel to the avenue (fig. 70). A commercial center broke their

1261 Enav, interview.

1262 For a discussion on territoriality in Israeli architecture and urbanism see Efrat, 237-242. In the European context I refer to projects such as Alison and Peter Smithson’s entry for the 1957 Hauptstadt Berlin competition, or the Freie Universität campus in West Berlin by Candilis, Josic and Woods, deigned in 1963.

412 continuity and redirected the buildings away from the avenue. This redirection through the

commercial center created a more angular, dynamic relationship between the continuous strip of

buildings and the monumental avenue. Importantly, it also implied that this pattern could be

repeated indefinitely, not in conformity with the formal street layout that consisted only a tiny

portion of the city’s geography, but in the less regulated area to the east (fig. 71). Despite the high

visibility of this area surrounding the Old Ghebi, it was traditionally crowded with shacks housing

the palace’s servants.1263 Thus contrary to the “Potemkin village” play of appearances for which

Addis Ababa’s modernization under Haile Selassie has been criticized, Enav and Tedros’

intervention in this monumental avenue both conforms to the facadist approach by designing the

city’s “better fragments” on the highly visible monumental avenue and at the same time, offers a

break from it by rejecting the avenue as the sole orientation for architectural expansion.

In this quasi-religious monarchical symbolism, Enav conformed to the symbols of imperial power

while suggesting a new method of ordering based on pattern and repetition. Growth and change,

therefore, became a subject of holistic patterning rather than centralized planning, carving a

symbolic whole from disparate fragments within the city rather than superimposing it from without.

Although un-monumental, the open-ended horizontal patterning imbued the city with symbolism

that connected the imperial lineage supposedly derived from King Solomon with the modern state

and its electrified future, based on a logic of strategic extension of fragments, modernization and

change that were not hindered by the crippled bureaucracy of the authoritarian regime, but instead

subject to individual initiative and entrepreneurships of figures like Enav, who took matters into his

1263 Zewde, “The City Centre,” 125.

413 “own hands” only to mirror the entrepreneurship of the emperor himself, seen as the benevolent

paternal figure of Ethiopia’s modernization.

However, the double bind between entrepreneurship and imperial benevolence was not long lasting.

Enav may have sensed that when he decided to leave the same year that students protests took on a

decisive turn.1264 The once shrewd emperor must have become senile, so argue historians, to be in

such denial over the winds of change preparing the grounds for the 1974 revolution. However, it

seems that in 1966 the emperor was still very lucid when he ominously warned that revolutionary

forces should be contained and sublimated by means of the imperial state:

The physical changes have been impressive. But even more impressive - and equally if not more important – have been the changes wrought in the mentality and psychology of the Ethiopian people. The physical face of Ethiopia shall continue to change in the years ahead. Ethiopia’s cities and towns shall continue to grow. Agriculture shall be modernised. Communications shall weld the nation ever closer. So, too, shall the future witness the introduction of ever more drastic and revolutionary changes into the mental attitudes and outlooks of the people. New questions shall be posed to our ancient and traditional and customary habits of thoughts. Long-held conceptions and beliefs shall come under ever closer critical scrutiny and examination. Our response to these challenges will decide the future.1265

1264 For the history of demonstrations and escalation of students’ protests from 1965 leading to the 1974 revolution see Milkias, 111-133. Although Enav left Ethiopia in 1966, his Addis Ababa office continued to operate until 1971.

1265 “The Emperor Haile Selassie Fs Throne Speech for 1965 (Delivered on the Opening of the Parliament in November 1965)” Ethiopia Observer 9, no. 4 (1965): 242-3. (My emphasis.)

414 Conclusion

This dissertation raises a simple question: what can architectural aid teach us about processes of modernization in the Third World. More specifically, by focusing on exchange between Israel and three African countries, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, it introduces a third category between the global north and the global south that complicates existing narratives of development, and directs attention to the diverse social and political stakes that undergirded north-south exchanges. Lastly, ”Exporting Zionism” challenges current debates over alternative modernities or global modernism as they have been articulated in the fields of literature and visual arts, since the mere scale of architectural production necessitated the import of foreign technology, funds, and skills, regardless of whether these projects were initiated by local elites. Moreover, as a means to mobilize resources domestically and internationally, these imports served the interests of the latter no less then those of foreign aid donors.

The debate over global modernism, I argue, cannot be complete without accounting for this interactional model of exchange, and the institutional and professional agencies that facilitated it. To reiterate a claim made in the introduction, it was not “Israeli architecture” that was exported to Africa; nor was it a particular “African modernity” that was imagined in these architectural designs. Israeli architects reformulated their professional knowledge and their experience applying it in Palestine/Israel to the specific conditions and expectations they met in the African states, while keeping attuned to the international disciplinary discourse on development and modernization in the Third World, in which they hoped to gain a privileged position via their work in the Middle East and Africa. Looking at

415 architectural aid through a magnifying glass at this moment of post-colonial independence contributes to a more nuanced history of decolonization and modernization and avoids the pitfalls of narratives based on predetermined power relations, or alternatively, on naïve descriptions of cultural exchange and transculturation, ostensibly free from the political stakes that not only enabled these relations in the first place, but were also embedded in the very architectural practices at the heart of this exchange.

This type of historical analysis comes with its own challenges: the archive is uneven and fragmentary, and is subjected to various contingencies. These uneven relationships (not only between Israel and the African states, but also between African elites and the masses) and the contingencies of their archive affect interpretation and the construction of historical narratives. For these reasons, each chapter derives from different archival sources, according to availability, and these in turn necessitated the evocation of different theories and modes of interpretation. In other words, the process of assembling the archive for each chapter informed the theories employed, rather than the other way around. In the process of animating this fragmentary archive, the center of gravity kept fluctuating between the history of the architecture profession in Israel and what can be learnt about it from the architects’ encounters in Africa, and the transformations different African societies experienced as a result of this exchange. With this double aim in mind, this dissertation knowingly errs on the side of schizophrenia in an attempt to reconstruct a largely forgotten history of African independence through international involvement.

416 Despite these challenges of narration, and notwithstanding the differences between each of the African countries discussed, some recurrent themes arise throughout the chapters. In terms of aesthetics, there is a shared emphasis on surface-depth relationship that produce a multifaceted and at times disjointed temporality in most of the projects discussed. In the

Sierra Leone parliament, the evidentiary status of the crushed laterite stone attached to the surface served to signify an autochthonous identity that ostensibly transcended ethnic differences. However, it could not transcend the socio-cultural historical schism between the

Krio population and the former protectorate population. Furthermore, while the laterite stone presented a pseudo-empirical evidence of primordial belonging, the fact that it only gradually gained its unified corroded color and became one with the ground surface mirrors the incompletion of the parliament building in time of independence. In both the architects’ design decisions and the contractor’s construction methods, the building represented the

Sierra Leone nation not as a fait accompli, but as subject to a gradual process of becoming.

Similarly, at Ife University campus in Nigeria, the wall gained a cultural meaning beyond issues of climate that dominated the discourse in British late colonial architecture. While designing micro-climatic environments remained a concern, instead of adding layers of architectural skin as protection against the climate, Arieh Sharon and his team created a volumetric skin akin more to the traditional verandah, where the boundary between indoors and outdoors blurred. Moreover, the architects emphasized this “thickening” of the architectural skin by referering to its significance as a substrate for cultural inscription in

African traditions. The relationship between surface and depth reached its peak in Zalman

Enav’s transformation of the hexagon ornament in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Addis

417 Ababa into a structural and spatial principal in the Filhoa Baths. Conceived as a method of three-dimensional patterning in the spirit of anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of

Culture, the continuity between surface and structure imbued the architectural form with cultural significance not only as an agent of social transformation, but also of cultural preservation.

In the first two cases, the surface also bears evidence of the human hand that took part in its making, either in the form of the unskilled labor that crushed manually the laterite stone and embedded it in concrete, or the craftsmanship employed in the grooving of the wall surfaces at Ife University. Even in the case of Enav’s Foreign Ministry and Filoha Baths, where the building parts were prefabricated, their scale corresponded to the workers’ body so that they could be assembled on-site without the use of heavy machinery. As these cases show, a special emphasis was put on connecting the surface to the structure and to the human agency that took part both in its production.

In all these cases, the local, traditional, or autochthonic attributes were rendered modern and abstract not only through form, but also through the practices employed. While the crushing of laterite stone in the Sierra Leone parliament and the discovery of the hexagon as the structural basis for an “Ethiopian building” addressed the unskilled workforce and thus

“invented” a local tradition that fits industrial construction methods, the displacement of the

Yoruba heads’ grooving to the surface of the architectural wall employed local craftsmanship to resemble the most up-to-date concrete-grooving methods as were practiced contemporaneously in Europe and North America. While this ambiguity derives from Israeli

418 society’s anxieties regarding its own autochthonous ties to the national territory-- manifested also in the lack of continuity in Jewish local material culture -- this contradiction can be generalized to characterize most cases of third world modernism.

This procedure of divestment and unification through abstraction was an essential part of the process of national becoming which is at the heart of the contradiction between the a- historic claims of the nation and its historical modernity. Architecture in this regard did not simply dress the decolonizing society with a modernist garb, but served as a means through which this society was transformed, reconfigured, and given an old-new identity, to paraphrase Zionist leader Theodor Hertzl’s famous book title. The employment of labor- intensive practices, especially in Sierra Leone, involved a spectacle of national becoming that divested workers from their ethnic loyalties and traditional hierarchies. This was not a planned effect. Although stone crushing and rapid construction were reminiscent of

“pioneering” practices in Palestine, their enactment in the context of Sierra Leone independence surprised the Israeli architects themselves in its scale and spectacular force.

The resulting spectacle cannot be interpreted as an external imposition, since the local media coverage had an equal hand in its production. Furthermore, that the construction workers covered the parliament’s bare walls with flags attests to the fact that they gradually grew responsible for the building as their own creation. Through this mutual Israeli-African interpellation, Israeli architectural aid served to transform the masses into human material

(understood both physically and culturally) in the process of becoming of (new-) man and nation.

419 Architecture not only provided the site for performing national production, but also the ideal environment for the cultivation of the future potentiality of national subjects. Drawing from kibbutz planning and Land Grant Universities, the Ife University campus’ salubrious environment catered not only for the fertility and cultivation of soil, but also for the body and minds of the students. Unlike the British colonial tropical architecture approach where the goal of architecture was to conserve the students’ productive capacity through their shielding from the tropical climate, the Israeli architects in collaboration with American consultants encouraged a dynamic relationship where “human resources” were developed in tandem, and co-dependently, with the natural ones.

This shift in attitude toward the environment, where it was perceived as a resource rather an impediment for production, is linked to a broader trend in postcolonial governance to advance and modernize agricultural production. A significant component of the national economy, both in terms of domestic consumption and export, the agricultural sector was nonetheless associated with backwardness and the constrains of tribal life. Similarly to the

Ife University campus’ endeavor to elevate the status of the farmer and the standard of life in the countryside, the Sierra Leone Urbanization Plan sought to mitigate emigration from the countryside to the port-city Freetown by creating regional urban centers throughout the country’s hinterland. In both cases, attempts to modernize the agricultural sector were not introduced as a radical reform of traditional hierarchies and land tenure as they were formalized by British colonial indirect rule. Quite the opposite: through these projects the government could harness the chiefs’ support, and in return buttress the chiefs’ authority in a period when it was increasingly undermined.

420

This attempt to modernize land use while adhering to traditional land tenure systems extended also to urban centers such as in the case of Haile Selassie’s Addis Ababa. In this case, the work of architects such as Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros supplanted and bypassed the city’s handicapped planning institutions. Furthermore, similarly to the role architecture partook as a means to elevate the status of agriculture at the University of Ife, architecture served to elevate the status of engineering at the College of Engineering at Haile

Selassie I University. While in the first case it was through campus design, in the latter it was through the introduction of architectural education within the engineering school to boost the latter’s image as a white-collar profession.

In all cases discussed, architecture had a performative role both as a stage and as the site of the production of national subjects as skilled and unskilled human capital, and as a means to mobilize resources such as education, land, and international funds and expertise. The local media that covered these processes did not portray them as foreign or top-down impositions, but used them to engage the literate masses and create a nationally or regionally shared public sphere. Unlike the colonial “not yet,” whose tantalizing targets kept moving away with every step taken in their direction, these objects acted as tangible agents of becoming and change. By mobilizing actors and resources, they anchored the future they heralded in concrete and tangible forms of the present.

Accelerating modernity against the stalling mechanisms of the colonial “not yet” entailed a series of temporal disjunctions and a-synchronicities. Modernization theory, as conceived

421 and practiced by western technocrats, did not and could not account for the multiple and contradictory temporalities experienced by postcolonial societies. Israeli diplomacy, construction managers, and architects responded to these societies’ high expectations of rapid modernization and acted within the limits imposed by the political pressures imposed from within and without these societies. Acting as a stop-gap mechanism rather than offering long-term solutions, these projects not only attempted to build a future, but also, primarily to secure a precarious present, amidst the urgencies and anxieties that characterized the ambiguous transitional period of decolonization.

422 Postscript

By the end of 1973, following the Israeli-Arab War and just before a revolution ravaged

Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, most African states had terminated their diplomatic relationship with Israel.1266 One of this shift’s best known manifestations was the IDF’s raid on Entebbe

Airport in 1976, for which Solel Boneh provided the plans. Built during the “golden age” of

Israeli-African relations, the airport now became the site of a military operation against members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Red Army Faction, who were invited by Idi Amin, not long before an IDF protégé, to land their hijacked plane, which had been en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, in Uganda.1267

This and other more covert military involvement in the continent, as well as Israel’s tightening relations with apartheid South Africa beginning in 1973, did not mark the end of all contact. This continued informally through the private sector, with trading in both civilian and military products comprised of both concrete commodities and expertise.1268

Political scientist Neve Gordon coined the term “Israel’s experience economy” to define

Israel’s homeland security industry.1269 As I have demonstrated, this concept can be extended also to the fields of planning and construction, as well as to agriculture, which together with security is Israel’s most dominant field of export.1270 Although private

1266 By mid-November 1973, twenty-one states had broken off relations with Israel, leaving only four countries that continued relations: Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho and Mauritius. Peters, 38.

1267 On Israel’s relationship with Idi Amin see Bar-Yosef, 215-32.

1268 Naomi Chazan, “Israel and Africa: Dynamics of Relationships in the Seventies,” Kidma: Israel Journal of Development no. 2 (l973): 7-12.

1269 Gordon.

1270 Yacobi, Kan Lo Afrika, 131.

423 entrepreneurship had been growing in parallel with aid since the 1960s, with figures like

Zalman Enav or with semi-public companies such as Solel Boneh shifting to commercial activities (long before it was privatized in the mid 1990s), by the 1980s the emphasis had completely changed to the pragmatic logic of the free market.1271

This shift of emphasis entailed also a shift in discourse from development to humanitarian aid, which in Israel began in 1967 with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and in foreign policy with its unequivocal alignment with the US. Paradoxically, aid became “just business” at the time when development turned into humanitarianism, since any pretense of solidarity was obliterated.1273 With this shift of discourse, the imbalanced relations between developed and developing nations became fixated as an ahistoric fact. The discursive effect of this change of terminology was the locking of the binary between the two types of nations as a new difference between developed and never-to-be-developed nations, serving to conceal the continuous process, now even intensified, of the latter’s underdevelopment. In the shift from development aid to humanitarian aid, the trade in hope turned into a provisionary dealing with present crises – a system that keeps feeding itself with the cyclical production of crises, famously defined by Naomi Klein as “disaster capitalism”1274 – where

1271 Ibid, 132-3, 142-3.

1273 See for example the current discourse of IsraAID, the Israeli forum for international humanitarian aid that consists of Israeli and American Jewish organizations, in Yacobi, 133-4. An American Histdrut publication following the 1967 war demonstrates that this change of discourse was not smooth: see “Histadrut in East Jerusalem,” Shalom 1-5 (June 1969). For a while, the discourse of development continued in the occupied territories. Writing in 1974, Shimeon Amir could move seamlessly from discussing Israeli aid in Africa to its “administration” in the occupied territories, and back to Africa. Shimeon Amir, “Traditional Leadership and Modern Administration in Developing Countries,” in Israel in the Third World, eds. Michael Curtis and Susan Aurelia Gitelson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1976), 39-41. For another example see Bar-Yosef, 181. 1274 Klein.

424 there is no trace left of the belief that “developing countries” will ever “catch up” with the west.

Literary scholar Eitan Bar-Yosef has dubbed the moment of severance of diplomatic relations between Israel and the African states as the dropping of masks and “the end of innocence.”1275 Denoting the exposure of bare truth and the end of pretension, this metaphor seems at first too simplistic to encompass the complex subject-positions performed by either

Israeli and African players who were never completely innocent or naïve.1276 However, as

Bar-Yosef’s study poignantly shows focusing on the Israeli side of this relationship, each dropping of a mask revealed another in a narcissistic game of mirroring, which I referred to as identification and (mis)recognition. Thus even if there ever was such innocence and naïveté in the establishment of these relations, they were part of a vertiginous self-reflection that attested more to Israeli anxieties than its agendas regarding African societies, just as much as African leaders’ conception of Israeli society and what they hoped to gain from its aid remained ambiguous.1278

1275 Epitomized in the demise of Labor Zionism pioneering; now turned into messianic zeal in the occupied territories. Bar-Yosef, 184. See also Gurevitch and Aran, 22-73.

1276 Diplomacy is never devoid of interests and “cover up,” especially not when it involved a plethora of civilian and military institutions, each with its own interests in the African continent. Israeli diplomacy’s aim was to contain the “disruptions” that potentially undermined its efforts, often after the fact in a kind of “damage control.” While Israeli diplomacy had little power to confront Israeli military actions in Africa (the first were not always informed of the latter, see Bar-Yosef, 221, n. 47), it at least tried to control its own experts. This tension existed on a day-to-day basis, with diplomats lamenting the domestic life style of Solel Boneh house-wives that got used too quickly to living in luxury estates and ordering around their “boys.” But the most threatening of all was the rise of the Israeli private businessman or middleman, out of the experts sent as representatives of the state. Resorting to the most radical measures they had at their disposal, some diplomats in Nigeria even considered not renewing these businessmen’s passports or stamp them with an “except for Nigeria” or any country in which they had served as representatives of the state. ISA MFA 3569/22.

1278 Far from the positivist attitude of international relations scholars that cite African leaders’ impressions as spontaneous statements, I argue that it is reasonable to assume that African leaders were attentive to what Israelis wanted to hear and repeated that in media. On performance as a means to achieve ends in unequal

425

Despite its true-false premise, I find the dropping of masks metaphor compelling for the loss that it captures. The dropping of masks is the dropping of ideological pretense (to be differentiated from pretending), insofar as all ideology is pretense, whether in the post-

Marxist interpretation of false consciousness, reworked by theorist Slavoj Zizek as the tension between “knowing” and “acting” (acting despite knowing the fact of masking),1279 or in the more colloquial use of the term as a set of beliefs either of individuals or states’ foreign policies. I interpret the dropping of masks in this context not as the unveiling of the plain harsh truth of a global market that hid behind lofty ideals of solidarity, but as the dropping of an ideological mission, and therefore of a meaningful projec(tion), despite its multifold contradictions.1280

In cultural terms, with the emergence of postmodernism, the modernist crisis of representation that entailed its own hurdles in the African contexts, turned into a crisis of projecting any future, utopian or other.1281 I am using here the term “projection” following architectural historian Reinhold Martin’s definition of the term as concrete historical and discursive practices where representation and production intersect, to be distinguished from

relations see Bayart; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1990).

1279 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 2008 [1989]).

1280 In this respect my project is similar to Lukasz Stanek’s attempt to find alternative or more nuanced terms than “globalization” to describe the processes that took place in this period. However, I am not convinced that his proposition to substitute “globalization” with the French term mondalization (which he borrows from Henri Lefebvre) contributes to a more fine-tuned historical and theoretical understanding of the period. See Stanek, “Architects from Socialist Countries.”

1281 Martin, 149; Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” Public Culture, no. 7 (1995): 323-52.

426 “project,” as an ideological phantasm.1282 Martin’s emphasis on restoring utopian

“projection” by identifying and “living with” utopia’s ghosts provides a particularly useful scenario to deal with the loss that this crisis of projection entailed in societies where the

“incompletion” of modernity is felt most strongly.1283 In these societies, the “ontology of the-not-yet” embodied in their modernist projects turned into a “hauntology,” as the specter of the promises of modernity got trapped in their premature ruins.1284

After the 1967 occupation, Israel found it harder and harder to self-fashion itself as moral and just internationally and even domestically, where the Palestinian subjects crossing the border daily replaced the now too contended (or “degenerated,” to reiterate Labor Zionism’s greatest fear) Hebrew laborers as construction workers. By the end of the decade the Israeli expert had become more reluctant to face pioneering sacrifice, and expected better incentives for working in Africa.1285 A study conducted in the early 1970s (and concealed by the government that commissioned it) shows no correlation between ideological zeal and the satisfaction of aid experts in their experience abroad.1286 Just as pioneering was normalized

1282 Martin, 149.

1283 Ibid, 150.

1284 See Levin, “Ruins of Modernity.”

1285 Bar-Yosef, 174-7. In a letter to a friend Ephraim Spira, the first Israeli dean at the Ethiopian Technical College (later College of Engineering), ridiculed the Foreign Ministry’s emphasis on “pioneering.” “Who in Israel nowadays,” he asked rhetorically “believe in that any more?” Ephraim Spira to Prof. D. Yitzkhaki, October 29, 1959, ISA MFA 2031/10. Similarly, an Israeli head of the surgical department at a hospital in Kumasi, Ghana, complained to the embassy about his living arrangements, and was furious to get in response “nationalist lectures about pioneering.” He wrote: “Never in my life I heard so much about pioneering. If I wished to be a pioneer, I would have had travelled to the Negev or to Eilat.” Dr. Pe’er to Ysaskhar Ben- Ya’acov, January 30, 1961, ISA MFA 2029/14.

1286 Naomi Chazan, Tafkidey Hahadrakha Hamukdemet Betahalikhei Hasiyua Hayisraeli: Ha’arakha Vetakhazit (Jerusalem: The Truman Institute, The Hebrew University, 1972). According to Chazan, the study was concealed upon completion.

427 and lost its appeal in Israel, the African experience likewise became no more than a paying job. While it was hoped that Africa would rejuvenate Israelis’ pioneering spirit off “the beaten paths” of the limiting territory and pioneering opportunities in Israel,1287 the reenactment of pioneering could only go so far even in Africa’s vast territories with their plentiful possibilities for development. When pioneering turned into business enterprises, so did opportunities for exploitation become more apparent, and with them came cynicism and greed.1289

The turn to private economic activities did not end the state’s involvement. As geographer

Haim Yacobi explains, especially with the revival of relations in the last two decades, Israel has been benefitting from private entrepreneurships that help boost its economy and undergird reviving diplomatic relations. These business transactions often transition seamlessly from military training and arms’ dealing, often paid for with natural resources such as oil and diamonds, to civil enterprises such as communications, agriculture and construction. Unlike during the 1960s, when every Israeli working in Africa was perceived as an “emissary” of the state and the men who turned to private business as a potential liability, now the private character of these transactions serve to shield the state, which can deny its involvement and refuse responsibility.1290 Employing this “plausible deniability” tactic, Israel continues the growth of its hyper-militaristic and neo-liberalistic economy while maintaining an image of a democratic regime operating according to an ethical

1287 Malkhin and Goldberg, 50-1.

1289 Bar-Yosef, 238-9. 1290 Yacobi, Kan Lo Africa, 141.

428 code.1291 Thus the space left by the Histadrut as the force behind Israel’s diplomatic relations in the Third World is now filled by the private sector that expands Israel’s diplomatic reach.

One such company, the LR Group, known in Angola as a construction company,1292 was established by three IDF air force veterans in the late 1980s and specialized initially in security technology. A vast project for securing the Portuguese coast led to a similar project in Portugal’s former colony Angola before Israel renewed its ties with the country in 1993.

Since then, the group has constructed six airports in the country, followed by another contract to refurbish an international airport in the Congo. The Angolan Civil War, which lasted for almost three decades from its independence in 1975 to 2002, served as a backdrop for these transactions that also included arms dealing.

Other Israeli companies got involved in the planning and reconstruction of the country, such as Tahal Group, a former governmental water engineering company that began its operations on the continent in parallel to Solel Boneh in the 1960s, and similarly to Solel Boneh became privatized in the mid 1990s. In 2010, Tahal got involved in the drafting of a new master plan for Angola’s entire coastal area, which since the civil war had been densely populated with a migrant population from the hinterland. Without planning institutions, and with no real desire to set up any of its own, the Angolan state needed the services of a

1291 Ibid, ibid.

1292 “Israeli Group Proposes to Build 100,000 Houses in Angola,” MachauHub, March 24, 2010 http://www.macauhub.com.mo/en/2010/03/24/8802/, accessed January 5, 2015.

429 foreign company to draft a comprehensive plan that would “order” the coast.1294 Tahal’s planning involvement followed a thirty-four million euro agreement it signed in 2008 to supply water to seven neighborhoods in the capital Luanda.1295 This unfolding is similar to the case of Israeli aid in Sierra Leone in the 1960s, where pointed construction and infrastructure projects led to comprehensive planning.1297 However, unlike earlier projects, the current ones do not involve the passing of professional knowledge and skills to local personnel.

Like Tahal, peacetime reconstruction also presented the LR Group with new opportunities.

In 2010, the company announced its plan to construct “100,000 social houses” as part of the

Angolan government’s plan to build one million homes by 2012.1298 After securing the coastal territory, which was the only territory the government could control during the civil war, the LR Group ventured into an ambitious experimental agricultural project 70 kilometers inland east of Luanda. Named Aldeia Nova (“new villages”), the project included the construction of six villages, housing 600 villagers in the first stage.1299 In Kimina, a similar 208 million dollars veteran resettlement project funded by the Angolan government and executed by Tahal, includes 310 houses with 30 dunam farmland (7.4 acres) and is provided with irrigation systems and agricultural training, a logistical center for processing,

1294 Ester Zandberg, “Akhrey Hasakhar Beneshek, Ha-Yisraelim Mokhrim gam Le-Angola Tikhnun Leumi,” Akhbar ha-Ir, March 25, 2010 http://www.mouse.co.il/CM.articles_item,1042,209,47524,.aspx, accessed January 5, 2015.

1295 While providing water engineering works for over twenty countries. See Yoram Gabizon, “Tahal Heshlima Sgira Finansit shel Proyekt Be-200 Milliyon Dollar Be-Angola,” The Marker, August 29, 2011.

1297 See chapters 1 and 2.

1298 Their relatively large size makes it doubtful that they were indeed offered to low income population (100 sq. meters for 3 bedroom apartments and 120 sq. meter for 4 bedroom apartments). 1299 Yacobi, 145.

430 conserving and marketing, and a 10,000 dunam (2,471 acres) shared agricultural land.1300

The provision of the same starting point for each household, regardless of its size, of a standard brick house, basic furnishings, and husbandry and poultry, as well as cooperative training and facilities for processing and marketing, are reminiscent of the Lakhish project, discussed in chapter 2.1301 However, while it is the same model in outlook, it does not adhere to the same premises: “In the fifties, they sold people an ideology of mutual guarantee; that the system will solve all of their problems. In practice, the sooner they realized the system does not solve their problems, and can become parasitic, so did the moshav [cooperative village] become more successful. In this project we exposed the family to this economic logic right from the start.”1302 The social ethics that once undergirded the project are now supplanted by a new focus on environmental global concerns.1303

But perhaps the differences are not so big after all. The Angolan veterans, who must go through interviews in order to be selected for the settlements, are required to sign a contract in which they agree not to have more than one wife, to refrain from alcohol consumption, to sell their produce only through the co-op, to send their children to school, and not to beat their wives.1304 This neo-liberal contract replaces the welfare supervision of the state,1305

1300 Gabizon, The Marker, August 29, 2011.

1301 See chapter 2.

1302 Yotam Feldman, “Esek Shakhor: Hakhaim Hameshuga’im shel Sokhrey Haneshek Be-Angola,” The Marker, December 26, 2008, http://www.themarker.com/law/1.501267, accessed January 5, 2015. (My translation-AL).

1303 Pelleg Architects, the firm in charge of the Kimina village planning, describes the project in ecological terms. Similarly, “green architecture,” became a branding-name in China. See Bosker, 125.

1304 Feldman, “Esek Shakhor.”

431 which was especially heavy-handed in the case of Arab-Jewish immigrants in Israel.1306 At the same time, however, it is reminiscent of the contracts some of the Moroccan Jewish immigrants had to sign, before embarking their journey to Israel in the 1950s, which stated they had agreed to settle the Lakhish region.1307 Similarly to the immigrants settled in

Lakhish, the Angolan families too are subject to supervision and are evaluated as “good” or

“bad” families. In the present case, however, it is only their work ethic and productivity that are considered as criteria, not their degree of cooperation and self-management as was the case in Lakhish. In fact, there is no real expectation that the Angolans will ever take over the management, since as one manager remarked haughtily, “they don’t want us to leave.”1308

This “turn key” project epitomizes what David Hacohen, Israel’s first diplomatic representative in a Third World country and a graduate of the London School of Economics, had already figured out in the early 1960s:

In our economic attempts we should not take the conventional direct business approach. We cannot, for example, sell fertilizers unless we establish farms on thousands of dunams, and improve them with our fertilizers, build an on-site research station, and prove that fertilizing is desirable (…) if our economic activity would run according to the norm of world trade diplomacy, we would be weak, compare to our experienced and wealthier competitors.1309

1305 On this form of contractualism see Kanishka Jayasuriya, “The New Contractualism: Neo-Liberal or Democratic?” The Political Quarterly 73, no. 3 (July 2002), 309-320.

1306 See, for example, Orit Rozin, “Tna’im shel Slida: Higiyena Vehorut shel Olim Me’artsot Hayislam Be’eyney Vatikim Beshnot Hakhamishim,” Iyunim Bitkumat Yisrael 12 (2002): 195-238.

1307 Sharon, “Lo Mityashvim,” 125. On the Lakhish settlers’ selection process, economic and social management, and resistance, see ibid, 121-54.

1308 Feldman, “Esek Shakhor.”

1309 Malkhin and Goldberg, 40-41. (My translation-AL).

432 But if in the 1960s it was the best Israeli experts and equipment that were deployed (even better than the ones used in Israel) to Africa, now it is cheap construction and often reused equipment.1310

The Aldeia Nova and Kimina projects thus give a socialist-cooperative cloak to an otherwise government-sponsored, yet privately managed, entrepreneurial endeavors. An important component of such “turn key” projects is the aura of social ideology that once justified their logic.1311 To add to Hacohen’s economic formula, in the 1960s it was not just the fertilizers, sprinklers, and agricultural training that were transported from Israel to an African farmland.

As we saw in the case of the University of Ife (chapter 4), agriculture was promoted as part of a new way of life, and therefore such demonstration farms as Hacohen described exhibited, in addition to agricultural production, the system of living that facilitated it. The importance given to sending the “best people,” in other words the “right people” in terms of their socialization and party affiliation,1312 was to show not only that fertilization works, but that the entire system that sustained it does. Hacohen even entertained this idea: “if only we could transfer 1,000 Africans with their families and children to moshavim and kibbutzim for two years, to learn and be compelled by our exemplary life, this would have drawn the entire world’s attention.”1313 It seems that Israeli expertise and products could not be dissociated from the Labor Zionist project, and depended on it. Even today, in neo-liberal

1310 Zandberg.

1311 Yacobi, Kan Lo Afrika, 145.

1312 Ibid, 36; Bar-Yosef, 170-1.

1313 Malkhin and Goldberg, 40. (My translation-AL).

433 ventures such as Aldeia Nova, this past aura of Labor Zionist social ideology continues to haunt the project and be exploited cynically.

Similarly, the modernist aesthetics of public housing in Israel constructed rapidly in the

1950s and 1960s continues to inform such projects as the Dolphin housing estate in Ikoyi,

Lagos. Constructed in the 1990s by the Israeli-owned company HFP,1314 the vast project addressed the acute shortage of housing in Lagos for its growing middle class. In order to lower costs and expedite construction, the company used prefabricated frames and left most of the filling to local contractors. As a result of the cheap materials used, the estate is currently in very poor condition. The exposed prefabricated frame that still dominates its image, together no doubt with its overall ruinous condition, have led a couple of architects currently studying the city to mistakenly date the project back to the 1950s-60s and thus to rewrite it into the city’s modernist heritage.1315

As objects of difference that are almost the same, but not quite, to paraphrase postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, in what sense are they different from previous projects that produced such mirror images that even Israeli experts found disorienting?1316 As Bar-Yosef argues in relation to the Israeli youth frontier settlements that were reproduced in Africa, the failure to sustain these replicas served to reaffirm Israeli difference, and superiority over

1314 Established in Nigeria in 1979 and specializes in housing and shopping mall construction, the company has since expanded its operations to the East European market under the name Globe International Holding.

1315 Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber “Project Global Prayers Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Beirut” (January 2011), http://globalprayers.info/uploads/media/Bitter_Weber_Project_02.pdf, accessed December 12, 2014.

1316 Bar-Yosef, 132, 144.

434 their African counterparts.1317 However, the Aldeia Nova, Kimina and Dolphin Estate projects acknowledge the failure of their Israeli models, while they continue to capitalize on their historical image. If, for Martin, the modernist utopia’s ghosts reside in the “survival of old rules and the old techniques in the shell or the skin of the new,” then in the Aldeia Nova,

Kimina and the Dolphin Estate projects the old shell is retained, only to house new rules.1318

In its cynical exploitation of earlier models, the projects function as empty shells that are not only drained of, but occlude the promise they once entailed.

While Aldeia Nova, Kimina and the Dolphin Estate are haunted by and capitalize on the specter of Labor Zionism’s social project, the last project I would like to discuss completely departs from it. In another “turn key” project, now for a private client, (reminiscent of

Enav’s commissions for the Ethiopian royal family; see chapter 5) two Israeli architects known for luxury housing in Israel were invited in 2006 to submit a proposal for a Nigerian oil tycoon’s palace in his native village in the Delta region, adding to his residencies in

Lagos, Abuja, the Persian Gulf and Europe.1319 Following the client’s instructions, the palace – the largest house ever planned by Israelis – was to be designed in a neoclassical style, inspired by luxury hotels the tycoon and his wife frequented in their travels. The architects, who had never worked with a non-modern design vocabulary before, created a lavish fantasy made of reproductions and rescaled antiques for their 3-D proposal: “we took models of small carpets and made out of them large patterns, we took elements we found in

1317 Ibid, 123-84.

1318 Martin, 150.

1319 Noam Dvir, “Mihem Hayisraelim Shehetsivu Armon Belev Nigerya?” Ha’aretz, August 10, 2012, http://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/architecture/1.1797981, accessed January 5, 2015.

435 a variety of magazines of ancient couches and reproduced them.”1320 The impressed client said he wanted “the same as in the movie,” by which he meant the entire spectacle, from the water purification and security systems down to the antique chandeliers, curtains, and armchairs. “Now, where can we possibly find these carpets and curtains? Fortunately we located a factory in Italy that agreed to take the simulations and copy them into reality. It is like assembling a 5,000 piece puzzle.”1321

In 2012, six years after the commencement of the project, the Italian manufacturer was still laboring on their expansive execution that was based at least partially on intricate handcraft.

Despite this inverted outsourcing of labor to the first world by a Third World client, the architects rationalized the project ethically by arguing that it provided jobs for the village. In this and other aspects the project presents a radical contrast to the Sierra Leone parliament project discussed in chapter 1. In both cases, there was a certain cockiness and belief in the

Israeli ability to create something ex-nihilo as “miracle makers,” whether, as in the first, it was the construction of a parliament in six months, or as in the latter a recreation of an

Italian palazzo fantasy. However, while in the first, construction lagged behind the interior assembly hall, in the latter it is the production of a luxurious interior design that lags behind construction. As of 2012, the architects were hoping to complete furnishing one part of the gigantic complex, so it could be at least partially inhabited.

1320 Ibid. (My translation-AL).

1321 Ibid. (My translation-AL). This move can be described in terms of a scalar displacement, similarly to what Martin describes as “the fractal logic of ‘scaling’” that supplants Renaissance humanism and Le Corbusier’s modular “measure of man.” See Martin, 164.

436 Moreover, while both projects involved a spectacle, they generated a completely different performance. In the building of the parliament the emphasis was on the laboring workers, while the British-style wigs of the parliament members seemed out of place in the bare modern structure. In the current project, the spectacle conveys a fantasy of respectability, which recalls British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s satirical portrayal of himself as a

Victorian dandy. Moreover, unlike the Sierra Leone parliament building, which promoted the mobilization of the physical and manpower infrastructure of the country, the Italian palazzo “landed into” a Nigerian rural area, as the architect described it, does not attempt to transform it, but to simulate village life within the confines of its highly secured structure

(even an outdoor pool was eliminated from the plan for security reasons):

The lady of the house objected [to] a stain-steel modern kitchen, claiming that when she is back at home, she wants to feel she is in her village, not in a factory. So we planned a kitchen of a private house, only on a gigantic scale, with seven refrigerators and seven stoves because she likes cooking with her lady-friends from the village. Adjacent to the kitchen there is a refrigerating room where the chickens and goats are slaughtered because there is no supermarket to bring the meat from.1322

Creating a world within a world in this protected enclave, the project conveys not only a desire to an imagined and remote European nobility, but also nostalgia to a communitarian life of a Nigerian village. By absorbing the village, it also renders it redundant, and in this logic of exclusion it reproduces the fixation of difference between the developed and underdeveloped world within African societies. The efforts invested in sustaining this simulacrum with the giant refrigerator rooms, generator, purifying water system in the basement, and heavy security have brought the architects to a matter-of-fact conclusion:

1322 Ibid.

437 “When you get into such details, you realize that although you plan a palace, you are still in

Africa.”1323 Unlike Ram Karmi, who fled before “he’d be asked to design a brothel,”1324 these architects had no noble causes to adhere to. It is just a matter of time before their newly acquired expertise in constructing Palladian enclaves will inform their next “villas in the jungle,” this time back in Israel.1325

What differentiates this Palladian enclave from the Aldeia Nova, Kimina and the Dolphin

Estate projects? Are they merely different manifestations of “speech in a dead language,”1326 where the modernist idiom is just as dead (or alive, from the point of view of the client), as the neoclassical one? Yet even if the modernist idiom functions nowadays as just one style in a repertoire of styles to choose from,1327 the Aldeia Nova, Kimina, and the

Dolphin Estate retain something of the practices that were associated with it. Contrary to the rescaling and repetition of fragments that fabricate a phantasmagoric whole in the Nigerian

Italian palazzo, these projects, even in their most cynical self, present a mirror-image through which the failed promises of African modernity continue to be refracted as fragments of other, undreamt of futures yet to come.

1323 Ibid.

1324 See chapter 1.

1325 The architects explained that thanks to this commission they went back to study Palladio, and are now appreciative of what they considered before as kitsch. The education of taste therefore travels in multiple unexpected directions, just as Third World entrepreneurs venture into first world markets. Similarly Israeli built luxury apartments in Iran informed luxury housing in Israel in the 1970s. See Neta Feniger and Rachel Kallus, “Israeli Planning in the Shah’s Iran: A Forgotten Episode,” Planning Perspectives (July 2014), http://dx.doi.org./10.1080/02665433.2014.933677.

1326 Frederic Jameson cited in Martin, 165.

1327 As in current Chinese “simulacrascapes.” See Bosker, 124.

438 List of Sources

Archives Consulted and their Abbreviations NAN: National Archive Nigeria, Ibadan ISA: Israel State Archives, Jerusalem SLNA: Sierra Leone National Archives, University of Freetown, Freetown LA: Labour Movement Archives, Lavon Institute for Labour Research, Tel Aviv IES: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa OAU PDA: Obafemi Awolowo University, Planning Department Archive BL: British Library AAA: Architectural Association Archives, London. AAAC ASE: Azrieli Architectural Archive Collection, Arieh Sharon Estate, Tel Aviv Museum of Art . SSJFA: Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Interviews Zvi Meltzer, interview by Ayala Levin, Rishon LeZion, Israel, August 16, 2011. Ram Karmi, interview by Ayala Levin, Herztliya Pituach, Israel, August 4, 2011. Harold Rubin, interview by Ayala Levin, Jaffa, Israel, July 31, 2011. Peter J. Kulagbanda, Principal Clerk of Committees at Sierra Leone’s House of Representatives, interview by Ayala Levin, February 20, 2013, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Mr. Joseph Mouna, former Town Planning Director at Freetown City Council from 1971- 2011, interview by Ayala Levin, Freetown, Sierra Leone, February 20, 2013. L.B.N. Ogbogbo, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Ibadan, interview by Ayala Levin, Ibadam, Nigeria, January 14, 2013. Harold Rubin and Miriam Keini, interview by Ayala Levin, Jaffa, Israel, June 27, 2012 Amos Spitz, interviews by Ayala Levin, Ramat Hasharon, Israel, December 20, 2012; Lagos, Nigeria, January 17-8, 2013. Zvi Szkolnik, interview by Ayala Levin, Haifa, Israel, August 3, 2011 Jack Shelemay, interview by Ayala Levin, Cambridge, MA, December 16, 2011 Michael Tedros, interview by Ayala Levin, Burke, VA, October 20, 2011.

439

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