Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Feb 3, 2026

Itohan I. Osayimwese, a Brown professor of architectural and urban history focused on African built environments, recounts how colonial agents dismantled African buildings and rebranded architectural parts as art. She traces violent 'dismemberment' across the continent. The conversation covers museum mislabeling, restitution debates, case studies like Benin and Great Zimbabwe, and how repatriation could restore cultural memory.

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INSIGHT

Missing Buildings, Present Fragments

Itohan Osayimwese found museum image databases held mostly fragments, not whole African buildings.
She concluded large numbers of architectural fragments from Africa reside in Western museums, obscuring architectural histories.

INSIGHT

Dismemberment Reveals Collection Violence

She adopts the term "dismemberment" found in a 19th-century source to describe violent fragmentation of buildings.
The word makes visible the often intentional violence involved in removing architectural parts to Western collections.

ANECDOTE

MCN's Pan-African Museum Origins

Osayimwese contrasts Dakar's MCN and Nigeria's MOA as responses to restitution debates since 2018.
She traces MCN's roots to Senghor's negritude and its aim to reject colonial museum models and welcome returned objects.

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Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.
Dr. Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Dr. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.
Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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