What do we mean when we speak about Africa’s modern heritage?
For many people, African heritage evokes ancient cities, archaeological sites, sacred landscapes, royal palaces, burstling marketplaces and long-standing cultural traditions. This is also an important layer of heritage which surrounds millions of Africans every day. It can be found in railway stations, universities, civic buildings, independence monuments, housing estates, industrial sites, public squares, planned neighbourhoods, and rapidly changing urban landscapes.
These places document colonialism and resistance, independence and nation building, technological transformation, urbanisation, and changing forms of African social life. Yet many remain poorly documented, insufficiently protected, and underrepresented within international heritage frameworks.
The Modern Heritage of Africa initiative, MoHoA, seeks to address this challenge.
From modernism to African modernities
In 2026, the Foundation for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Nature, FOPCHEN, in partnership with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre Africa Unit, convened a series of expert engagements to advance this conversation.
The process included a side event during the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee in Busan on 25 July, a technical session at the University of Lagos on 24 August, and an international Experts’ Consultation Workshop on 3 September. The consultation brought together about 100 heritage practitioners, scholars, Advisory Body representatives, and State Party delegates.
At Busan, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, closed the discussion by emphasizing the importance of embracing Modern Heritage of Africa and of documenting, protecting, and bringing international recognition to outstanding works associated with African architectural achievement. He stressed the connection between protecting such heritage and understanding the histories of the communities that created and inherited it.
His intervention raised a fundamental question. What exactly should be recognized as the Modern Heritage of Africa?
A central idea emerged across the subsequent discussions. Africa should not simply search for African examples that fit an established European narrative of architectural modernism.
Instead, we need to speak about African modernities in the plural.
Modernity did not occur everywhere in Africa at the same time or in the same way. Dakar is not Lagos. Asmara is not Nairobi. Zanzibar is not Johannesburg. Each city experienced different encounters with colonialism, independence, migration, technology, planning, environmental conditions, and local cultural practices.
Recognising these differences allows us to ask a more important question: What historical transformations produced modern African places, and which physical and cultural attributes allow those histories to remain visible today?
Building on a longer conversation
The current initiative forms part of a much longer international conversation.
The Africa Revisited initiative of the 1990s drew attention to African architectural and urban heritage within discussions about the representativity of the World Heritage List. In 2017, Asmara: A Modernist African City was inscribed on the World Heritage List, demonstrating the international significance of twentieth-century urban heritage on the continent.
In 2022, UNESCO convened an expert meeting specifically addressing Modern Heritage of Africa. That process advanced the Cape Town Document and encouraged a more distinctly African understanding of modern heritage.
At Busan, Dr. Mechtild Rössler, former Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, reflected on this longer journey:
“Today, we have a fresh look and renewed energy to recognize modern heritage and heritage on the African continent generally.”
Taken together, the interventions of Eloundou Assomo and Rössler capture both the continuity and urgency of the initiative. One reminds us that the conversation has a history. The other emphasizes the need to translate recognition into documentation and protection.
Beyond famous buildings
One of the strongest messages from the 2026 discussions was that modern heritage cannot be defined by famous architects or architectural style alone.
A civic building may represent the aspirations of independence. A university campus may embody a new nation’s investment in education. A railway may have transformed regional economies and migration. A housing estate may document experiments in social policy. A colonial building may acquire entirely new meanings through post-independence reuse.
Heritage significance can therefore reside not only in architectural form but also in use, memory, adaptation, political transformation, community meaning, and social experience.
This does not mean that every twentieth-century structure should become heritage. Nor does it mean lowering the standards of the World Heritage Convention.
The challenge is evidence.
Potential World Heritage properties must still demonstrate Outstanding Universal Value and meet requirements concerning authenticity, integrity, protection, and management. The task is to develop methods capable of expressing African historical experiences through these established mechanisms.
Expanding the archive
This requires reconsidering what counts as evidence.
Africa’s modern history cannot be reconstructed from official archives alone. Important records may be dispersed, inaccessible, incomplete, or shaped by colonial administrative priorities.
Experts therefore called for an expanded archive that includes oral histories, family photographs, local newspapers, film, music, place names, architectural drawings, community memories, and digital documentation.
Photogrammetry, three-dimensional scanning, digital repositories, and community-generated archives also offer new possibilities for documenting threatened heritage.
These approaches do not replace scholarly rigor. They require clear standards for provenance, consent, verification, and interpretation.
Heritage, climate, and African cities
The discussions also connected modern heritage to climate change and rapid urban transformation.
Across the continent, twentieth-century buildings are being demolished before their cultural or environmental significance has been assessed. Adaptive reuse can sometimes provide another path. Retaining existing structures can preserve cultural memory while retaining embodied carbon and reducing the environmental costs associated with demolition and replacement.
Modern heritage conservation should therefore not be understood as opposition to development.
The more productive question is how heritage can contribute to sustainable and climate-resilient African cities.
From conversation to action
The next phase of MoHoA must move from discussion to implementation.
Regional consultations can test the emerging case studies against different African historical and cultural contexts. National inventories and Tentative Lists need review. Selected case studies can test approaches to Outstanding Universal Value, authenticity, integrity, and comparative analysis. Universities can establish documentation programmes and train the next generation of African heritage professionals.
Most importantly, African institutions and communities must remain central to this process.
The goal is not simply to add more African buildings to an established global catalogue of modern architecture.
It is to recognize that Africa produced its own modernities through encounter, resistance, creativity, appropriation, independence, adaptation, and transformation.
Some of these histories are monumental. Others are embedded in ordinary buildings and everyday landscapes.
Both deserve our attention.
The discussions in Busan, Lagos, and the international expert consultation have created new momentum. The task now is to translate that momentum into research, inventories, protection, education, community participation, and credible pathways through the World Heritage system.
Africa’s modern heritage is already around us. The urgent question is whether we will recognize, document, and safeguard its significance before too much of it disappears.
Presentation on Modern Heritage at side event in Busan
