10 July 2025
This publication project called the cohort to each write a letter to another and to write this letter through their work. The outcome is a chain of letters demonstrating how the cohort has affected and have affected one another by creating and holding space together.
Dearest Yishak,
Where to begin?
Let me start by quoting, rather begrudgingly, Shawn Carter, in my own Pan-African breath, where he quotes the Wu-Tang Clan in the line, “My seed marry your seed, that’s how we keep Carter money all in the family.” In short, it is my dream that our children combine to form next of kins who are subjects of no land or nation. Whether or not you agree with it, this is my dream.
Anyway, my friend. The memory that first springs to mind when thinking of you or us has to be those late night, meandering walks we took in Amsterdam. The most profound moment must have been our last day together in Dakar. The last to arrive is our first ever in-person encounter on your home turf, at the Addis airport. Our memories follow in that sequence, always. So many memories resurface when I think of these three tangential conversations. It's safe to say that I found most value in our productive “differences.” I’m reminded of these differences when I talk to you; when I say 1 p.m. it is not your 1 p.m., because Ethiopia has developed its own construct of time. In this moment, I refer to a different time orientation, and in the act of reaching for that other orientation I am able to think/respond differently. I enjoy this.
As well as your country’s register of time, I’ve enjoyed learning about the Ethiopian custom of naming, that you carry your grandfather’s first name as your last. These two examples made possible yet another way of reorienting myself towards different ways of doing across the continent.
One of the allures of (these) difference(s), is how they offer new if not more ways of dismantling our shared “enemy.” We come from different traditions yet our cultures are very akin. I’m drawn to this common cultural space that we inhabit in ways different. To be more precise, we come from a long history that has taken different forms, yet here we are trying to contend with a common future, one that I think is rather precarious, if not outright beastly. I don’t want to trade in the currency of doom that futurism studies often depicts, but I think architectural imagination has also fallen victim to this hyper-inflated sense of doom.
It seems that our brain power is not powerful enough to reach beyond the dramatisation and overstatement of the catastrophe, especially in a moment when we are in desperate need of some pragmatic imagination, that is both aesthetic and critical.
This is a quality that I am earnestly trying to cultivate, to such an extent that I feel my practice is futile if it is devoid of a tangible resolve or solution in a context where excessive theory with no action will do very little for the material conditions of African people.
Just above, I spoke about a common enemy, to which I referred as the future, and I called this future precarious if not outright beastly. Allow me to build on this.
Coffee brewing and urgencies of other kinds
Addis is clearly difficult to tame, man, and there is a particular kind of havoc that speed and time wreaks on our locales. The beast seems to change form so quickly that by the time we figure out its nature, it has already taken another form.
It functions like malware, invisibly eroding a longstanding tradition. And just like that, a century-long tradition vanishes, as if it never existed. Then it takes a new form as a myth. One example of this, as you narrated, is the coffee making and drinking tradition in Ethiopia. I think I remember you saying there was an entire elaborate sequence of gestures, patience, communion, and sharing…….. A process of about 40 minutes with multi-layered significance has now been reduced to a transaction of under two minutes in the city. The “loss” here is not time, of course, but everything else that happens over the course of those 40 minutes. If we look at this as an equation: 2 minutes of tradition + 38 minutes of myth = the answer is up for grabs.
So, against the aggressive tide of time, speed, and change, we (as practitioners and theorists) are responding with theory upon theory, with little urgency for application.
Before I close off on this point, I wish to stress the importance of theory, and the world-making that is made possible through it. My concern is when we respond to problems with theory upon theory that have little potential for application against the aggressive tide of time, speed, and change. With that said, your commitment to thinking and making remains inspirational to me.
Narrating the enemy
Could it be that time and speed is the enemy? Or is time and speed the tools of the enemy? If so, who is the enemy? Does the enemy have a face? Either which way, this common enemy is what binds us. In the way that I've characterised the enemy, we could call it the future. We are bound by this common enemy that we call the future, and we are bound too, to the future. I must admit, deep down inside me, I am reluctant to cast the future as an enemy. Perhaps my vocabulary is all wrong. I need neologisms to narrate the e_n_my, I need neologisms to think with and through solutions. Perhaps, we, my friend, need a new language that is in equal parts alien and familiar. In essence I think our work is trying to produce such a language. Hopefully soon enough we can give it form and let it inhabit our world, or at best, let us inhabit a world which was produced by our language.
In one of our collective moments, you spoke movingly about how architecture has been weaponised through its imagery of an “urban future.” The alluring images mesmerise those who aspire to, yet will never reap the benefits of such mega-scaled projects. This made me think of architecture as a form hypnosis, or the hypnosis of form. Architecture as an elixir for the masses, a gateway drug to a new form.
Let me depart from the metropolis of Addis and return home to Durban, a little strip that I call Little Addis.
Leaving Addis in Ethiopia and arriving at Addis in Durban
South Africa has a massive migrant community of peoples from across the continent, and more recently an explosion of Ethiopian and Eritrean peoples. As with many places, there are often tensions between migrant bodies and local bodies; harassment from corrupt cops and other microaggressions on most days. I’ve been curious for a few years now about how the children of Ethiopian and Eritrean migrant folks who are born in South Africa will develop a critique of South Africa’s treatment of their parents’ generation. They will be speaking as subjects of South Africa, who are both in tension with, but also (hopefully) secure in South Africa. I think this will bring a whole new texture to South Africanness.
I will close this section with two points. Recently, I was shown a debate from 1957 between high school students from South Africa, Ethiopia, the former Gold Coast, and Nigeria. These students were responding to the question: Are Americans prejudiced in their opinions about Africa? At some point in the debate, the Ethiopian student raises the thorny point that he is not a Negro, but rather a people of the lost tribe. It was as humorous as it was tragic –– and vice versa.
It did, however, signal how far we have come, and the situation of Little Addis shows how far we have yet to go. But more importantly, I wonder how this generation of South African children with Ethiopian parents would engage with this point raised by the Ethiopian figure?
OK, let me move on and close this letter with a topic we’re both interested in: the rural.
The Poetics of Rural Form
We do not accept the city as it is given to us, nor are we clear on the conditions on which we want the city.
One day, I wish to read a book that narrates the landscape and spatial orientation of rural households in relation to mountains, escarpment, human and animal life.
I’m endlessly searching for a way to bring words to how space is inhabited, arranged, and constituted in rural settings.
Across most of rural South Africa, there exists breathing spaces between dwellings and between one homestead and the next. I am trying to understand how and where I might get the knowledge and interpretation from which to understand the rationale behind these breathing spaces.
To look at the cranium of mountains where goats roam, to the chest of the mountain which is as far as cows venture away from the valley, where we find human settlements at the lap of the mountain.
I am unsatisfied with my inability to narrate the poetics of rural form and being. Till next time.
