Africa clearly has not had the industrialization that has created the modern world that we see. From the story I was told by a dear friend, talks about the Renaissance in Europe happened from the fragments of the destruction of Rome. The architects and artist search for fragments, they did not have Rome, it was gone; and they look at fragments, reconstructed the body which became the Renaissance we know now and think of that - is the classical world that existed.
It is a reconstruction. And I think that is a clue to a generation of architecture searching for knowledge, that we have the fragments, we now have to let fragments teach us how to make that world again, and not to see fragments as ruins or not part of the world that is modern or can’t be relevant.
And, also at the same time we can’t just mimic the fragments, because the fragments are of a different time. We have to learn from the fragments and allow to see how they can allow us to go boldly into the future.
- David Adjaye Thabo Mbeki
As one travelled around the continent, one can see fragments of the past from which you’ve got to construct what is new. There is worth of history. I spent a quiet time in Sudan for AU missions and of the things I regret about this mission. We never have time to visit the north, Nubia in the north. That’s where you find the first pyramids, before the Egyptian pyramids. It is an extra ordinary story of that African civilization and at the end, some point they produced Pharaohs of Egypt, they came from Sudan. They have look at museum in Khartoum of that civilization, it tells you something and give you inspiration to do something that is new.
Not a matter of what happened yesterday but a matter of what do we do about today and tomorrow. Yesterday, is very important in term of answering the question about today and tomorrow.
- Thabo Mbeki
I am captured by the concept of fragments … the history that created fragments in us, as a people we then dwell on that history and forget that … as Han Suyin - the Chinese writer said in his book “We forget the waiting rain and we watch the chuff that rises”. I am of that view that the gathering of the fragments of our history over time is probably the only way forward for us, without us tearing in the gutter and worry about everybody else think of our heritage.
– Saki Macozoma
