Transformed city spaces can take abandoned areas and turn them into urban magnets--but gentrification has its flip side.

The Agostinho Neto Mausoleum is an obelisk-like concrete structure towering above the city of Luanda. It occupies the center of the Agostinho Neto Cultural Center, which takes up 4,633 square miles of…

The building that produced West Africa's Victorian-era graduates is being lost to Nature

The university became popular early in Al-Qarawiyyin’s history. Students sat at the feet of the scholar, answering questions about texts. Famous alumni include 13th/14th-century theologian Ibn al-Haj…

The University took possession of an estimated 13,000 acres of land north of the city center on Ibadan road, although less than half of the land is in active use. Renamed Obafemi Awolowo University…

The French found the climate of Dakar did not always suit their colonial vision of a Beaux-Arts colony, although its Neoclassical and Second Empire architectural styles were key to assimilation. That…

This building and its annexes house the Edo State High Court, as well as the offices of the state judiciary. Several parts of the facade bear relief work by Ben Osawe (1931-2007). His three-story…

The Public Works Department (PWD) played a major role in early and later Anglophone colonial architecture and utilities. Although operative in the Ghana's coastal area as early as 1850, the PWD's…

From Refuge to Elite Social Center

Once the site of the Aban, a stone royal fortress/museum built in the European mode, its destruction gave rise to a British colonial fortress, a forceful sign of occupation. Today it stands as…

Throughout the 19th century, the five-acre Adum Royal Palace Complex was the center of an Empire that held its own against British onslaughts. Its death knell occurred in the 1890s, and the 20th…

Current Asante narrative stresses that the Asante insisted on paying the British for the new royal palace in 1925, so their ruler need not be beholden to the colonialists. British records show their…

This busy center city thoroughfare has an ancient history that periodically resurrects when palace chiefs process through the roundabout.

The Oba Akenzua Cultural Centre, designed by Nigerian artist Demas Nwoko, is centrally located in Benin City near the palace. Benin's premier venue for plays, video debuts, and other performances, it…

Benin City's National Museum was, in 1944, the second museum to be established in the country, under the auspices of Oba Akenzua II. He first hosted a collection of antiquities in the palace, some of…

This prominently located colonial church stands near the ancient market site of Ekiokpagha, where Oba Ewedo faced off against Benin City's republican indigenes centuries ago.

The Oba's chief priest, educated in Canada, remodeled his traditional home in 1995. Stripped of his title in January, 2017 for offenses against the new monarch, Oba Ewuare II, parts of his house were…

The present dynasty built its palace on an earlier dynasty's cemetery, incorporating the ancestors who owned the land.

Four times as long as the Great Wall of China