Can the stories of states be told through their buildings? What can a former apartheid prison now constitutional court, the world's largest Catholic church, an imperial palace now theme park, and the football stadium that staged the Rumble in the Jungle reveal about state consolidation and the cultural roots of politics?


This book looks at an array of public buildings, from hospitals to police stations to parliaments, in five capital cities in western, eastern, central and southern Africa, exploring their aesthetics, their role in public life, how they came to be built, who uses them and - most importantly - what citizens think about them, to explain how states are made and why they matter. Drawing on group discussions with more than 600 citizens in South Africa, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, it uses citizens' descriptions and stories of state buildings to understand how people see, feel and 'make sense' of the state. From this empirical base, supplemented by examples from art and fiction and by aesthetic theory, the book builds a theoretical argument to show how states are like buildings, marked by a tension between an orderly exterior and disorderly interior that shapes how authority is built between citizens and the state. By telling the state-stories of five African countries through some of the continent's most important architecture, the book shows how history, political culture and aesthetics shape the state in widely different ways.