Africa has some of the oldest continuous building traditions on Earth, yet most people outside the continent could name only the pyramids of Giza. That gap is what a Twitter user posting as Igbo Excellence (@1ncognito___) set out to close on 31 August 2019. His opening tweet, "I noticed African Architecture isn’t really showcased compared to Asian, European, Middle Eastern and Indian," introduced a thread that moved region by region, from Nubian domes to Afro-modernist concrete. The first tweet alone collected more than 400,000 likes.
The short answer to "what is African architecture?" is that there is no single style. A continent of more than fifty countries holds earth mosques plastered by whole towns, coral-stone port cities, painted homesteads, royal palaces of wood and stone, colonial-era hybrids and bold post-independence monuments. Climate, local materials, trade routes and belief shaped each one.
Below, every picture from the thread appears with a caption explaining what it shows and why it matters. Where a building could be identified with confidence, it is named; where a photo carried no location, the caption says so rather than guessing. The opening image above shows the BCEAO tower in Bamako, Mali, the regional office of the Central Bank of West African States, whose ribbed facade borrows from the earth mosques of the Sahel.
The thread’s first tweet, which framed the whole project and announced its starting point: Nubian architecture.
Nubian building traditions on the Nile
Nubia is the stretch of the Nile valley between southern Egypt and northern Sudan, home to kingdoms such as Kush that once ruled Egypt itself. Nubian builders worked with mud brick and developed vaults and domes that could be raised without timber formwork, a vital skill in a region with little wood. In the twentieth century the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989) championed these techniques as cheap, cool and locally made, most famously at the village of New Gourna near Luxor, and he later described the experiment in his book Architecture for the Poor.
A modern house in the Nubian revival manner, with shallow domes, arched openings and a shaded roof terrace. The earth-pink render and small windows keep interiors cool, the same logic Hassan Fathy argued for when he rejected imported concrete for rural Egypt.
A white, multi-domed building with pierced screens along its walls. The lattice panels, a feature Fathy borrowed from Nubian and Islamic buildings, let breezes through while blocking direct sun; the exact location of this photo was not given in the thread.
This low, stepped sandstone complex appears to be the Nubian Museum in Aswan, designed by Egyptian architect Mahmoud El-Hakim and opened in 1997. It was built to house artefacts rescued when the Aswan High Dam flooded much of Nubia, and it won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2001.
Brightly painted houses of the kind found in Nubian villages around Aswan, such as Gharb Soheil on the Nile’s west bank. Families who were resettled after the dam kept the custom of decorating facades with colour, geometric bands and painted motifs, and these villages are now popular with visitors.
Ndebele painted homes in South Africa
The second chapter of the thread turned to southern Africa, where the most recognisable tradition is the painted homestead of the Ndebele people.
Ndebele house painting is women’s work and is passed from mothers to daughters, partly during initiation. Painters work freehand, planning the design in advance but achieving straight edges without rulers. Older walls used earth pigments, ochres, clays and lime whitewash, which had to be renewed each season; commercial paints later brought in the strong blues, reds and greens seen today. The artist Esther Mahlangu, from Mpumalanga, carried the style onto canvases, cars and international exhibitions.
A gateway and wall covered in classic Ndebele geometry: stepped shapes, black outlines and blocks of primary colour. The most elaborate designs traditionally go on the front walls and entrances, where visitors see them first.
A thatched cottage with stone lower walls and painted panels under the eaves. It shows how the style adapts to different building forms, from round huts to rectangular houses with conventional windows.
A church facade decorated in the Ndebele manner, its arches framed by painted bands and a cross on the gable. Using the motifs on a public religious building shows how the tradition moved beyond the family homestead into shared community spaces.
Sudano-Sahelian earth architecture, old and new
The third chapter covered the Sahel, the belt of semi-arid land south of the Sahara, where builders have long worked with sun-dried mud brick, known as banco, finished with earth plaster.
A mud-brick mosque with tapering towers and rows of projecting wooden stakes. Those stakes, called toron, act as permanent scaffolding: every year or two, volunteers climb them to replaster walls eroded by the rains. The photo’s exact location was not given.
The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, the best-known building of the style and often described as the largest mud-brick building in the world. The present structure was completed in 1907 on a site used for a mosque since roughly the 13th or 14th century, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site with the old town of Djenné in 1988. Each year the whole town joins a festival to replaster it, directed by the masons’ guild.
The header for "Modern Sudano-Sahelian Architecture", a reminder that the style is still evolving.
The BCEAO tower in Bamako again, shown from a lower angle. Its vertical ribs and crenellated crown translate the buttresses and pinnacles of Sahelian mosques into a concrete high-rise, and it dominates the city’s skyline.
A multi-storey house in the neo-Sudanese manner, with rust-red walls, pilasters and a stepped parapet, set among acacia trees. Colonial-era architects popularised this symmetrical "neo-Sudanese" version of the tradition, and many later public buildings and villas across the Sahel follow it.
A contemporary mosque or civic building in sand-coloured render, with a tall, slender minaret and sharp geometric volumes. It keeps the earth palette and monumental mass of the older mosques while dropping the toron and organic outlines.
A newer building decorated with relief patterns and painted motifs in the Sahelian style. Ornament like this links modern structures to the carved and moulded earth facades of older towns such as Djenné and Timbuktu.
Afro-futurist monuments and bold modern forms
The thread’s "Afro Futurist" chapter grouped together landmarks that look forward rather than back, several of them political monuments from the decades after independence.
The spire is the memorial to António Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president, on the waterfront of Luanda. Soviet designers began the project after Neto’s death in 1979; the first stones were laid in 1982, and work stalled during the civil war before being completed decades later, with the memorial inaugurated in 2012. Its concrete tower rises about 120 metres, and the site holds Neto’s sarcophagus, a museum and a library.
A note on a claim often repeated with this photo: Angola’s flag, adopted at independence on 11 November 1975, shows a machete and a half cogwheel beneath a star, standing for peasants, workers and international solidarity. The vexillologist Whitney Smith noted its resemblance to the Soviet hammer and sickle, but it is a distinct emblem rather than a copy.
Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, which opened in September 2017. Heatherwick Studio carved galleries and a cathedral-like atrium out of a grain silo built in 1921–1924, whose 42 concrete tubes were partly cut away. The building is about 57 metres tall, with roughly 9,500 square metres over nine floors.
A tiered tower in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which appears to be the city’s national heroes monument. Its stacked rings and spreading base make it one of the most photographed modern landmarks in the capital.
A massive stone-clad building with lotus-like columns that appears to be the Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo. Its design deliberately echoes ancient Egyptian temples, showing how modern states use older styles to project permanence.
Coral-stone coasts: Somali and Swahili traditions
The Somali chapter moved to the Horn of Africa, whose port cities traded with Arabia, Persia and India for centuries.
Somali builders produced stone towns, mosques, forts, towers and pillar tombs. Early buildings used dressed and dry stone; after Islam arrived, coral stone, sun-dried brick and lime became common. Mogadishu’s Fakr ad-Din mosque and Merca’s Arba’a Rukun both date to 1269, and travellers such as Ibn Battuta and Vasco da Gama remarked on multi-storey houses in Mogadishu.
A sky-blue public building with a row of arches and a decorated parapet, typical of Somali coastal architecture of the late colonial period. Its exact location was not identified in the thread.
A whitewashed two-storey house with arched verandas and patterned stone panels. Deep verandas and white surfaces are practical choices on a hot coast, keeping walls shaded and reflecting the sun.
Flat-roofed white houses with crenellated parapets stepping down towards the sea. The cubic forms and small openings are a coastal type shared across the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia.
The header for Swahili architecture, the building culture of the East African coast from southern Somalia to Mozambique.
Swahili towns were built from coral limestone, coral rag, lime and mangrove poles, and their most famous feature is the carved wooden door, whose lintels often carry Arabic inscriptions and signalled the owner’s status. Lamu in Kenya, the oldest living town on the Kenyan coast, and the Stone Town of Zanzibar are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites; Mombasa, Kilwa Kisiwani and the ruins of Gedi are other key places to see the style.
A tall corner house wrapped in carved, painted wooden balconies. This kind of ornate timber facade is a hallmark of Zanzibar’s Stone Town, where Indian merchants and craftsmen added their own decorative tradition in the late 1800s.
A white house with a conical turret, arched windows and a makuti-style roof among palms, in the manner of villas on Kenya’s Lamu coast. The soft, sculpted forms come from building with coral lime plaster rather than sharp-edged blocks.
A smaller Swahili-style house with pointed arches, latticed parapet and steps up to a raised veranda. Raised floors and verandas catch the sea breeze, a simple form of climate control.
Palaces, state buildings and contemporary design
The Madagascar chapter showed how the island’s highland kingdom mixed local timber building with imported techniques in the nineteenth century.
The Manjakamiadana palace in the Rova of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Queen Ranavalona I had a wooden palace built here in 1839–1840; from 1867, under Ranavalona II, the Scottish missionary James Cameron encased it in the stone shell seen today. A fire on 6 November 1995 gutted the interior, and the building has been undergoing restoration since.
The header for "Afro Federal" architecture, the thread’s label for grand government and civic buildings.
A symmetrical government building with a tall arched entrance flanked by rounded towers, flying a national flag. Buildings like this, mixing Art Deco lines with Islamic-style arches, were common across West and North Africa in the late colonial and early independence years; the thread did not name this one.
The National Museum of Cameroon in Yaoundé, as the bilingual sign "Musée National Museum" shows. The white neoclassical building was an official residence, including a period as the presidential palace, before it was turned into a museum.
A white palace-like building with green shutters, domed pavilions and a formal stair. The thread did not say where it stands, but its style blends European classicism with North African decoration.
The "Contemporary African Architecture" chapter, focused on recent buildings by architects working on the continent today.
A bright orange building with large circular openings and timber screens across its upper floors. Screens and deep openings like these are a modern answer to sun and heat, letting air move through without air conditioning.
A design for a vaulted pavilion clad in loose stone, with a bulbous chimney-like tower, set against rocky hills. Projects like this, many still on paper, explore how local stone and earth can produce new forms instead of imported glass boxes.
A brick-domed amphitheatre opening onto wooden steps, among trees. Compressed earth and fired brick vaults are a growing strand of contemporary African architecture because they use local labour and materials and stay cool.
Afro-modernism and regional traditions in Nigeria, Ghana and Ethiopia
The "Afro Modernist" chapter covered the 1960s and 1970s, when newly independent states commissioned daring concrete buildings as symbols of a new era.
La Pyramide in the Plateau business district of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, designed by the Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri and built between 1968 and 1973. Its stepped concrete terraces were meant to hold gardens; the building fell into decline from the 1990s, and plans to renovate it announced in 2011 have been slow to move.
A low white building with a zigzag roofline in front of high-rise towers, in what appears to be Abidjan’s Plateau district. The folded concrete roof is a signature move of tropical modernism, which used shape and shade instead of mechanical cooling.
An aerial view over a green, hilly African capital that appears to be Yaoundé, Cameroon, with patterned civic buildings in the foreground. It captures how modernist government quarters were inserted into older urban landscapes.
A concrete building with an external stair wrapped in decorative breeze-block screens. Pierced concrete blocks were one of the most common features of African modernism because they were cheap, shaded walkways and let air circulate.
The Nigerian chapter of the thread, home to some of the continent’s most inventive modern and traditional work.
A sculptural concrete facade covered with swirling relief panels. It reflects the approach of Nigerian modernists such as the artist-architect Demas Nwoko, who blended carved, ornamental surfaces with modern construction; the thread did not name the building.
A brick and stone house with a carved screen panel and a prominent, overhanging roof. The mix of local materials with modern massing marks the work of Nigerian architects who looked for a style rooted in their own surroundings.
A tall gate with a pointed, lobed arch and crenellated top in red earth tones. Hausa palace gateways in northern Nigeria, such as those in Kano and Zaria, use this kind of arch and parapet.
A Hausa-style building with rounded pinnacles and pilasters decorated in raised patterns. In Hausa architecture these relief designs, often in white or contrasting colours, signal the status of the owner, and the eastern Sahelian style is closely linked to the city of Kano.
The Ghanaian chapter, focused on the Asante (Ashanti) region around Kumasi.
The Asante Traditional Buildings near Kumasi were inscribed by UNESCO in 1980. They are built of timber, bamboo and mud plaster using wattle-and-daub, arranged as four rooms around a courtyard, and decorated with spirals, animals, plants and Adinkra symbols. Ten survive; most other Asante buildings of the period were destroyed during the British conquest.
An Asante courtyard building with steep thatched roofs and walls painted red below and white above. The two-colour scheme and raised platforms are typical of the surviving shrine houses.
A close view of an Asante wall with pierced openwork panels under the thatch. Builders shaped these screens in wet clay, a technique that gives the shrines their lace-like appearance.
An archival black-and-white photograph of an Asante building with a high thatched roof. Old photos like this are important records because so many of these structures were lost in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A veranda lined with red-and-white pillars and recessed relief panels. The moulded symbols on the walls carried meanings tied to Asante belief, which is why the buildings were described as homes of people and gods.
The Ethiopian chapter, which turned to the Christian highland kingdom and its distinctive castles.
A stone castle in the royal enclosure of Fasil Ghebbi in Gondar, Ethiopia. Emperor Fasilides began the complex in the mid-17th century, and successive emperors added castles, churches and baths; UNESCO lists it as a World Heritage Site since 1979.
A merchant’s house with richly carved wooden galleries and painted glass, which appears to be the house in Harar known as the Rimbaud House. It reflects the Indian craftsmen and traders who worked in Harar in the early twentieth century, despite being named after the French poet who once lived in the city.
Towers and battlements at Gondar again, with round corner turrets. The castles blend local building with Portuguese, Indian and Arab influences, later touched by Baroque ideas brought by Jesuit missionaries.
Replies to the thread and where to start exploring
The author ended by hoping that African governments would take more inspiration from native architectural styles, a debate that continues among architects today.
A reply from Marc Zayat added Sierra Leone, with photos of traditional Krio (Creole) board houses and modern versions. These timber houses with steep roofs and verandas, still standing in Freetown, came from the city’s founding community of formerly enslaved people from the Americas and Britain.
Another reply pointed to Great Zimbabwe, the stone city that gave the modern country its name. Built mainly between the 11th and 15th centuries, its Great Enclosure has dry-stone walls about 11 metres high and 250 metres long, made without mortar; UNESCO lists it since 1986. Describing it as the largest stone structure in precolonial southern Africa is accurate, while broader "after the pyramids" comparisons are harder to support.
One reply joked that the University of Tampa also has lovely Moroccan style. Its Plant Hall, built in 1888–1891 as Henry B. Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel in Florida, is a Moorish Revival building, a good example of how North African and Islamic forms travelled far beyond the continent.
Common myths the thread helps correct
One myth is that Africa had no monumental architecture before colonial rule. Djenné, Great Zimbabwe, Gondar, Kilwa and the stone towns of the Somali coast all predate European colonisation. A second is that earth buildings are primitive: mud brick, when maintained, lasts for centuries, stays cool, and is now studied as a low-carbon material. A third is that African architecture is one style. The captions above jump from Nubian domes to coral-stone ports and concrete towers within a few hundred words.
For anyone planning to see these places, start with the UNESCO-listed sites: Djenné and Timbuktu in Mali, Lamu and Zanzibar’s Stone Town on the Swahili coast, Fasil Ghebbi in Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe. Check current travel advice first, because conditions in parts of the Sahel change quickly.
Sources: Thread and image credits: Igbo Excellence (@1ncognito___) on Twitter, 31 August 2019, as compiled by Bored Panda; Wikipedia: Great Mosque of Djenné; Wikipedia: Sudano-Sahelian architecture; Wikipedia: Hassan Fathy; Wikipedia: Nubian Museum; Wikipedia: Southern Ndebele people; Wikipedia: Mausoleum of António Agostinho Neto; Ver Angola: Dr. Agostinho Neto Memorial; Wikipedia: Flag of Angola; Wikipedia: Zeitz MOCAA; Wikipedia: Somali architecture; Wikipedia: Swahili architecture; Wikipedia: Rova of Antananarivo; Wikipedia: La Pyramide (Abidjan); Wikipedia: Asante Traditional Buildings; Wikipedia: Fasil Ghebbi; Wikipedia: Great Zimbabwe; Wikipedia: Central Bank of West African States.
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