A Fluid World: The African Futures Institute's Lesley Lokko on Belonging, Context, and Infrastructures for Change
Portrait by Debra Hurford-Brown.
By Julia Gamolina
Professor Lesley Lokko OBE is a Ghanaian–Scottish architect, educator and best-selling novelist. She is the Founder and Director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, an independent postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform. In December 2021, she was appointed Curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. In December 2022, she was awarded an OBE in the first New Year’s Honours List by King Charles III, for services to architecture and education. As a novelist, she has published thirteen bestsellers, starting with Sundowners (Orion, 2004), which have been translated into fifteen languages.
She is the recipient of the 2020 RIBA Annie Spink Award and is a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and a Visiting Full Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin. She is a Trustee of London-based Architecture Foundation and is currently a Founding Member of the Council on Urban Initiatives, co-founded by LSE Cities, UN-Habitat and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
She was the Founder and Director of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg (2014–2019) and the Dean of Architecture at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture (2019–2020), The City College of New York (CCNY).
She is the Editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), the Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, and UCL Press Series Guest Editor of Design Research in Architecture.
In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Professor Lokko discusses her transdisciplinary foundations, her time writing fiction, and her focus on building platforms to nurture new voices, advising those just starting their careers to seek out those platforms and to remain curious and optimistic.
JG: You’ve had a really significant few years, particularly with the Venice Biennale and establishing the African Futures Institute. What are you looking ahead to in 2024?
LL: In some ways, the Biennale came at the completely wrong moment. The African Futures Institute was only three months old when I was offered the position. At the time, it literally consisted of me, a driver and a cleaner and had no infrastructure at all. Trying to do both projects was impossible, so the AFI had to take a backseat and move away from its original aim of setting up an independent school of architecture to supporting the Biennale project with research and curatorial assistance.
With the Biennale now over, I’ve come to realise that the energy and effort it takes to build an institute is maybe not the thing to be doing at my age [laughs]. I’m sixty, and it’s not because I’ve personally run out of energy, but more that it takes an incredible amount of time to build the infrastructure for an institute — and that’s before you even get to vision and leadership, and all the ambitious things you want to do. Having seen first-hand how energy-sapping the administrative side can be, I’ve decided that the AFI’s pedagogic future lies in taking its ideas directly to students and by-passing the longer-term academic infrastructure of setting up degree programmes, applying for accreditation and professional validation, which is what’s required in a more traditional school of architecture. We’re very excited about the upcoming “Nomadic African Studio”, a series of month-long studios that will take place around the African continent in the next five years.
This is amazing. Congratulations! This touches on what I’d love to ask about your beginnings, specifically growing up between Scotland and Ghana. What was the foundation that you got from your exposure to multiple environments early on?
Although we moved quite frequently, my formative years were really spent in Ghana. I left when I was nearly eighteen, but in between, there were extended periods in Scotland as my father completed his medical training. I recognized almost instinctively that there was more to the world than was in front of me because we moved between worlds where things were very different. I didn’t quite trust my immediate environment because I somehow knew it could — and would — change, not just from hot to cold, or from a place (Scotland) that was governed by seasons to Ghana were there are only two seasons — rainy and dry. I think I realized quite early on that memory and intuition were also ways to navigate the world, and that there was more than one way to understand the environment because I knew that there was more than one environment to reckon with.
My parents had a difficult marriage, and in our house, language was often used as a weapon when one parent couldn’t understand the other and we (the children) were often called upon to arbitrate situations that we didn’t — and probably shouldn’t — understand. “Home” was often a site of conflict, and “belonging” was situational. I don’t know if I ever thought of those things as being key tools for an architect, but when I finally came to architecture, it was a bit of a relief to see finally that a lot of the things I had experienced growing up could be put to use in a professional sense.
Professor Lokko, introducing Dean Nisha Botchwey, speaking as part of the Public Health, Architecture and Urbanism Dialogues event series. Photograph by Festus Jackson-Davis, 2021.
I read that you first started studying Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, and then came to architecture. Could you tell me a little bit about this?
I started off doing languages and the madness at the time was the idea that somehow, I could solve the conflicts of the Middle East. I lasted one term — I didn’t enjoy Oxford.
I moved to the States and started studying sociology but without any clear idea what it was that I was going to do. For some time, I worked as an office manager for someone who ran a photocopying business for medical insurers, but he also had a side business doing dry cleaning and ran a chicken restaurant [laughs]. One day, I went with my boss to buy some material for countertops for his dry cleaners. My mother was an artist and one of the things she taught me before my parents divorced and she left the family home was how to draw perspective. So, there we were in the building suppliers and I remember sketching out his interior. He took a look at the drawings and said, “You should be an architect.” It was really quite arbitrary!
I know you then pursued a PhD. I feel like we don’t talk a lot about this path in our field — there’s a lot of talk about a professional degree, licensure, starting your own firm, and that’s the path that’s laid out for you. And this is why Madame Architect exists, to highlight all kinds of options. Tell me about your PhD, and for our readers who are considering it, what would you say?
I think it depends on where you are. The US has a much more formal and quite strict separation between academia and practice, so a PhD here is a requirement if you want to teach in a certain way. In the UK, and certainly in parts of Africa, it’s much looser. I did a PhD not because I wanted a career as an academic, but because I was deeply interested in the subject matter. Also, the cost of doing a PhD in the UK is a fraction, or at least was a fraction at the time, of doing it in the US. So finances, and the ability to pay for your schooling, takes on another dimension.
How did you then get into teaching?
Almost by accident. A person who taught me just asked me the night I graduated if I wanted to teach with him. Before that, I had never thought about teaching as a practice. Three months later, in September, I started teaching. I taught with him for three years and really enjoyed it — and then a chance encounter with Jennifer Bloomer led me to Iowa, and then to Chicago.
From there, I sort of fell into being an academic. In 2000, I came back to the UK and taught in a couple of schools and then just got really frustrated with the inability to talk about things like race, gender, identity, and belonging. Twenty years ago, it was much more difficult. So, I turned my back on architecture for about fifteen years, and became a full-time novelist.
“I think there is an understanding that the world is plural. The binaries of right and wrong, male and female, and black and white no longer hold anymore. And as architects, we can build that expression of a much more fluid world.”
Yes, please tell me about your time writing! I was fascinated to learn this about you.
Training as an architect is wonderful training for a writer. Conceptually, they’re very similar — you start with the kernel of an idea, then you flesh it out, test it, edit, refine, and so on. Practically, however, they’re quite different. As a writer, I craved solitude, and as an academic, it’s the one thing you rarely get. And writing is an amazing buffer — you experience the world haptically first, with all of its complexity, contradiction and challenges, then you reshape and recast it when you write.
As for getting published, I was ultimately just lucky, I think, being at the right place at the right time, which is a huge part of it. A two-book deal led to a three-book deal, which then led to a four-book deal, which eventually resulted in thirteen books. I found it much easier to talk about the things I was interested in, in fiction, which was much more fluid and more accepting of questions of race and identity than architecture. But eventually, I realized that I deeply missed architecture, and writing can be quite isolating too, despite loving the solitude. So, I went back eventually to architecture. Now, I find that flipping back and forth between writing and architecture is a really pleasurable endeavor.
For those that would like to read some of your work, what book should we start with? I’m ordering mine immediately [laughs].
[Laughs] I have to say that people are often very surprised by the fact that I write sex-and-shopping blockbusters. I love storytelling and my books are not literary by any stretch of the imagination.
There is a place and time for all of it [laughs].
And you know, I could never crack the US market. When my agent first approached American publishers, I think somebody who was racially ambiguous was very difficult to sell. We’re talking twenty years ago, though, and things have changed. By the time reading tastes in the States caught up, I had moved back into architecture. But one of my favorites is a book called An Absolute Deception — and please note that I don’t make up the titles, my publisher does! [laughs]. It’s about a fashion designer and there is quite a lot of the design process in the book, so I think architects would recognize something of themselves in that character and would enjoy reading it.
Thank you! Now, talk to me more about the evolution of your teaching. Tell me about the significant steps that then led to your time at the Spitzer School.
As I said briefly, I taught with somebody who very tragically passed away about two months ago. He was one of my closest friends, but also the closest intellectual mentor that I ever had. Teaching with him for three years was an absolute disaster because I think I thought that it was always going to be like that — he was just so generous, open, and imaginative. He really shielded me from the politics of academia, which we all know can be brutal. I think it was Kissinger who said that, in academia, “The stakes could not possibly be any lower!” It’s just unbelievable.
So when I did enter into full time academia again in South Africa, the politics was all quite a shock. But again, in some ways, I was lucky in that I went back into academia at the right moment. in 2015, South African had its own “Black Lives Matter” moment with the decolonization protests and the student fight for more equitable education. There was an appetite for something new and something different, and I was able to set up a school and have a leadership position in academia. The experience was great, but again, it was an incredible amount of work to build an institution from the ground up. In 2019, my sister died very suddenly, and then seven weeks later, my brother died.
I’m so sorry.
That was the worst year of my life. I was doing eighteen-hour days. Michael Sorkin reached out to me by coincidence in 2018 and persuaded me to take a pitch at the Deanship at Spitzer. I remember thinking to myself, “If I stay in South Africa working like this, I’m going to have a stroke as well.”
I landed in late November [2019], started my new job at Spitzer on 1 December but by March [2020], we were in full lockdown. Michael tragically died. I think he would have been one of the key supporters in trying to bring the rest of the faculty around. I just read the context wrong. I went in thinking I’d been hired to bring about change but found myself without the support or tools to make substantive change. I felt as well, and I’ve felt this subsequently, that there are a lot of institutions that pay an incredible amount of lip service towards diversity, but actually the infrastructure of changing things so that the environment does become equitable…no one wants to do that.
Makola Market, Accra. Photograph by Festus Jackson-Davis, 2022.
Kaneshi, Accra. Photograph by Festus Jackson-Davis, 2022.
Accra. Photograph by Festus Jackson-Davis, 2022.
Oh, tell me about it – people talk so much about wanting change, but to realize the work and the transitions that would need to take place for it, is such an uphill and, at times, an impossible battle.
If you’re someone who really wants change, for personal or historic reasons, the slippage between the appearance of change, and the reality of making it happen is very hard to navigate. The issue at Spitzer – and this has been written about many, many times – was not that anybody came out of their office and hurled a racial epitaph at me. That’s not what I meant when I said race played a factor in my resignation. It’s deeper and more structural than that. Wherever you have race, gender and labor, you always have a complex situation. I felt that my faculty would have quite happily seen me work myself to death, and after losing two siblings earlier less than a year after I left Spitzer, that was not on the cards.
I’m really sorry.
Thank you [laughs]. In some ways, though, it was also the best thing that happened because it forced me to think, “Well, where do you want to spend the next ten years?” I often say that academia is quite like the army. It’s not militaristic, but the structure, hierarchies, and protocols are very deeply entrenched. This is a time of great fluidity and great complexity, and I’m not sure that universities are the best equipped for that.
You also came in at a very high level in a new context…and I’ve noticed this tension between the new and fresh perspective, and tenure, not in a literal academic sense, but in the sense that someone has been somewhere for a very long time and then faces someone coming in fresh. How have you navigated this?
It’s an incredibly tricky one. Academia is in many ways the last bastion of a “job for life.” In my parents’ generation, you might start at a company like IBM and stay there until retirement. The academic tenure system is still like that. But to succeed — to get your “job for life” — as a young person, you have to prove your chops to the people who ultimately decide whether you get it or not, and part of proving your chops is to make yourself likeable, amenable, receptive, etc., to those above you. Academic politicking is not unlike political politicking — you’re lobbying, you’re trying to make friends, and you’re trying to make alliances, not rock the boat and so on. It’s often — not always, but often — inherently corrupt. Coming into that at a high, strategic level, and to interrupt that system, you interrupt so many things. And it’s not just to do with personalities, it’s to do with power structures. There’s such a double bind in that because you’re given the titular power, but you don’t have any physical power. You cannot make anyone do anything. I gave up on that idea a long time ago.
“I would say to young women in particular — don’t think for a second that your experiences, and your way of being in the world, and your way of seeing the world doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. The trick — or struggle — is to find a platform that will not only allow you to say it, but to explore what you want to say, safely.”
Thank you for sharing that. I see these days a lot of strategic hires for various organizations that are then not at all set up for success.
It’s personally quite devastating because, if you’re an immigrant particularly — and you don’t have to be a recent immigrant, but even descended from those who have moved country, culture, or language — you know that your position is somehow always conditional. It’s conditional on you being able to speak well, to do well in class, to behave better than anybody else, all of that kind of stuff. And then someone wants you to lead, but you’re not given the tools, infrastructure, or the context…it’s really hard not to take it personally, to see your failure as a personal failure, but actually you’re often set up from the get-go to fail.
I’m sure it takes a lot of professional experience, and distance from the situation, to see that. Let’s now talk about the Biennale. The Biennale has been written about so much, so I’d love to ask this: given that so many of our readers are young women and men all over the world, is there anything that you’d want to touch on about your experience curating it that speaks directly to them?
There are a lot of things, but one thing that stands out was one of the Curator’s Special Projects, a group of 22 emergent African and Diasporan practitioners who were absolutely fearless. If I think of myself at that age (between twenty-two and thirty-two), I was mostly seeking permission to say or make or do things in a different way. This cohort just did it, and it was such a privilege to be able to lay out a platform for them to show the fruits of “just doing it."
To make it happen, I have to give a shout out to Darren Walker, the President of the Ford Foundation. I certainly didn’t understand it when I accepted the role of curator at La Biennale di Venezia — and I’m pretty sure few architects understand it — but the architecture exhibition model is based on an art exhibition model. In an Art Biennale, however, generally speaking, the work already exists in the world – paintings, installations, sculptures. In an Architecture Biennale, you have to make representations of work, generally work that exists somewhere else. In the case of biennale that are funded by taxpayers, you can’t expect the taxpayer to fund the production of work. If you’re looking to bring in previously unheard voices, however, from places that don’t have the same access to resources — grants, institutions, state funding — you also need to come up with a resource infrastructure that allows them to make the work, and even to get them to Venice.
I remember at some point, having cashed in my last red cent, I called Darren Walker in desperation. I will never forget his words. He just said, “I got you” and made it happen. Ford Foundation came on board in a way that the Biennale would not have been possible without it. Having someone like Darren Walker believe so firmly in the place and the premise of these young people — that was such a powerful lesson. Pay it forward indeed. And their work is out in the world now! No matter what anybody says about it, no matter the criticism, the work is there. So, I would say to young women in particular — don’t think for a second that your experiences, and your way of being in the world, and your way of seeing the world doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. The trick — or struggle — is to find a platform that will not only allow you to say it, but to explore what you want to say, safely.
What I love about this moment, inasmuch as it’s also fraught and divisive, and the world can be vicious, is that I think there is an understanding that the world is plural. The binaries of right and wrong, male and female, and black and white no longer hold anymore. And as architects, we can build that expression of a much more fluid world.
Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau speak as part of Architecture in Africa’s International Relations. Photograph by Festus Jackson-Davis, 2022.
This can be a tough, unrelenting field, but so many of us keep and keep going. What is it for you, that keeps you going onto the next and next, and maintaining energy and enthusiasm?
A bit like you, I was a great reader as a child. We didn’t have many bookstores in Ghana – my siblings and I would just read whatever was brought back. It meant that we had incredibly wide reading tastes, and, as I said before, having that window onto the world made me inherently curious, because there was such a gap between what I was reading on the page — Thomas Hardy’s Dorset in midwinter, or Steinbeck’s California gold rush — and the crows in the yard and the people sweeping outside and the chickens running around. I couldn’t physically experience Dostoevsky and eighteenth-century Russia, but I could imagine it.
Somehow that position of constantly having to imagine the world I was reading about gave me a very active imagination, and I still have it. One of the things I love about teaching, and particularly teaching with younger people, is the opportunity to build a relationship, and to build an imaginative world of learning with someone else. Imagination is primarily a by-product of curiosity.
Who are you admiring right now? Who is doing work that you’d love everyone to know about?
There are so many people. There’s Sumayya Vally, there’s Mariam Issoufou, there are literally hundreds. The roll call of people in the Biennale was just amazing. There’s Ava Duvernay, who I spent time with in Venice — I took her around the exhibition fangirling away. I adore her!
There are a lot of really powerful women, people of color, non-binary, trans people who are making work about the richness and the complexity of being “other,” whatever that other is. That’s not to say that men aren’t also making work, but the addition of this canon is broadening their horizons, especially those that are exploring sides of themselves that have been previously locked out or suppressed. In spite of all of the horror, this is an optimistic time.
What would you say your mission is? What do you want your work to be known for?
It’s a great question, and I’ll answer it in two ways. The first is that I don’t have children, and although I don’t look at my work as a substitute for children, I am aware that for me, the term legacy has different connotations. And the second is that, when I first started writing fiction, my editor said to my agent who then said to me, “Don’t ever think about how your readers will read you. If you do that, you lose your voice.” In a strange way, I feel the same way now. I don’t want to pre-empt what will remain. The safest way to continue doing authentic work is to not think about it. I try to follow my nose.
Finally, for those starting a career in this field, what would you say to them?
I would say that there’s no better profession! I went into architecture wanting to know a lot about one thing. That was so seductive — the idea that I would know everything about a single discipline or profession, rather than knowing bits and pieces about lots of things. I graduated knowing less than when I started. I understand now that it’s impossible to know everything, and that there’s something endlessly wonderful about constantly questioning things. What the training of an architect does really well is to encourage you to put things together that don’t look as though they belong together.
That’s the definition of creativity for me.
Right, that’s how I would describe design. And we’re currently being exposed to things that don’t look as though they should belong together — whether that’s extraction and climate change; equity or injustice; race and violence — these are things that either shouldn’t be grouped together, or they’re things we don’t put together ourselves. Architects figure out how to do just that — bring things next to one another in order to resolve tension, or provide better solutions, better models for living, thinking, doing. So I would say, there’s probably never been a better time to study architecture but equally, there’s never been a better time to question what an architect is.