Tea House Négritude

Kabage Karanja: In all of Venice, the British Pavilion is poised at the highest elevation above sea level. It is believed to be sitting on top of the ruined remains of a monastery that was demolished by Napoleon, a legacy of French rule in Venice. The municipality of Venice commissioned the architect Edwin Alfred Rickards to design the building that would eventually be gifted as the “Gran Bretagna” pavilion to Britain in 1909/10. It became recognized as a temporary tea house during World War I. This curatorial program celebrated a drink that showcased Britain’s colonial prowess in the trade of dried leaves from the Camellia sinensis tree species. This seemingly innocuous brew foreshadowed the latent imperial and colonial legacy of exhibitions which the Great Britain pavilion of Venice would still hold up until today. To curate the British pavilion is to unwittingly entangle oneself with Britain’s imperial and colonial heritage while being served a cup of tea. The 2025 exhibition, “GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair,” calls for Britain to face its reparative obligations through architectural earth practices within and outside the very walls of the pavilion. It is a literal and theoretical exposure of the building’s geologic context and fabric through what Kathryn Yusoff refers to as the “rift.”1 The exhibition invites practitioners from five former British colony countries that touch Africa’s Great Rift Valley to read and present reparations as a transformative earth practice across six gallery rooms. This conversation we are having is considered to be part of the seventh room, opening the pavilion to further participation and narratives surrounding this subject. When thinking of African numerology, and in many spiritual traditions on the continent, the number seven is often regarded as sacred, embodying completeness and connection to the divine forces.  You asked me why I invited you both, and I joked that I needed you to stand beside Stella and I complicit, as we face questions from our ancestors about the reasons for being here in the first place, in particular when tracing the brutality of Britain’s imperial and colonial governments exerted in Kenya and across many commonwealth countries over centuries. This history has been left open ended, without any meaningful moves towards justice and reparation.

Sechaba Maape: Picking up from our last conversation, one thing that stayed with me was the discomfort and complexity of being invited into a space like the British Pavilion. It led us down a difficult but necessary line of questioning about what our presence here really means, not just for us as individuals, but for the broader structures we’re stepping into. At some point in that conversation, the term “house nigger” came up. It is a heavy phrase, and I do not use it lightly. But it captured something sharp and unresolved about our situation. Historically, the term was used by Malcolm X to describe the way some enslaved people, those working inside the master’s house, were given a certain closeness to power, proximity that often came with a quiet expectation of loyalty, or at the very least, compliance. It’s not a term about individuals, but about roles and structures.2 And when I mentioned it, I wasn’t trying to be provocative for the sake of it. I was trying to name the uneasy space that opens up when Black and African people from the former colonies are welcomed into institutions that were never originally built with us in mind. So here we are, as part of the 2025 British Pavilion, an institution that has historically projected Britain’s identity to the world. Until very recently, that projection did not include people like us. Now that it does, we have to ask: what has really changed? Has the house itself shifted, or have we simply become the kind of guests who can be let in without too much disruption? Are we invited because our voices and practices genuinely reflect a transformation in how Britain sees itself? Or because we are seen as palatable, professional, the right kind of Black? It’s a hard question, but one worth sitting with. Asking this isn’t about self-pity or undermining the invitation. It’s about being honest with the stakes. If the British Pavilion is a space where national culture is made and shared, then it matters who is allowed to shape that culture, and on what terms. Naming the risk of being the symbolic insider, the “house nigger” role, forces us to look at the structures behind the gesture of inclusion. I am not here to reject the invitation. I’m here to stretch it. To test whether this space can hold a more honest kind of presence, one that doesn’t just decorate the house, but helps rethink its foundations.

Cave_bureau, Subreality Map of the World, 2025.

Bonolo Masango: When I think about the British Pavilion and the idea of curatorship, it reminds me of museums, museumification, and archives. That is, a country putting something together that is in most part static, which is supposed to tell a story. Even the word “curator” comes from the Latin word “curare,” which means “to care for,” or concern and attention. You might be curating the narrative, but at the core, whose story is being told and being cared for? And whose story is being silenced, disenfranchised, and uncared for? Historically, at least not until a couple of years ago, the British Pavilion has only told a story that ignored the African continent and its history of exploitation. But you don’t need us to be complicit in what you are doing. You can do it proudly and in a provocative way. Even if it means to offend, which brings me back to the house nigger conversation; maybe you and Stella were chosen as the house niggers to comply. But once inside, you can do the opposite; challenge and shake things up by surfacing the conversations of the African continent, of exploitation, of marginalization, and how Britain is still complicit in all of this. This cannot be hidden, and as Africans and people from the global majority, you cannot come to the pavilion and not talk about what we are directly facing.

KK: In one of the rooms in the pavilion we have invited PART (Palestine Regeneration Team), who are showcasing a series of works that they call Objects of Repair. They describe Palestine as lying near the northernmost point of the Great Rift Valley, which in 1920, in the aftermath of World War I, became a British Mandate and was governed under de facto British colonial rule until 1948. These years set the course for subsequent widespread geographical misappropriation and geological extraction by the nation of Israel, which continues today. This is all taking place right now, under what the ICJ (International Court of Justice) regards as a plausible case that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. Both of you are from South Africa, the first country in the world to have started this process of taking Israel to the ICJ, and pushing the world to recognize what we see on our screens each day. The present depth of complicity by the United Kingdom in supporting Israel’s military complex cannot be understated. The present neocolonial apartheid-induced genocide in Palestine, co-financed by Britain and many other Western countries, makes this conversation all the more urgent and present. For decades, South Africa has been a beacon in promoting the rights for all people, while of course recognizing the challenges it faces internally.

BM: I had a friend from Angola who used to say to me that you South Africans are so obsessed with talking about race. Like everywhere you go you talk about race, and I said that I really don't know what you mean. In retrospect, that is maybe our asset as a nation, and our thing. We call it out as we see it. We are not afraid to have racial conversations and bring them to the table. So yes, that is what’s great about South Africa. As people who have experienced a recent history of apartheid and colonization, it is important that we call out injustices as we see them happening. This then brings us back to care, so while I think curating the pavilion is problematic, we can still use it for our own benefit, to speak about care and decolonial repair.

KK: There exists a disturbing dynamic where we have been invited to fill in the role of being critical and provocative, yet remaining within the same structural and exploitative framework that is not entirely open to critique. Room seven hopefully sits outside this structure, especially away from the artificial reality of redacted texts when calling out Israel in the British Pavilion interpretation texts, all intended to resist the promotion of a politically polarizing position. This also touches on a recent article written by the Nigerian writer Joshua Segun-Lean, titled “The trouble with Art Biennials Today.”3 He calls out this structural framework from the early gestations in the 1893 Chicago World Fair, the 1851 Great exhibition in London, that all broadly set universalist claims of the Atlantic West over other people around the world. He frames the problematic contradictions of the system of biennales, not just Venice, as having an unecological and overly self-referential basis and foundation. He suggests that it is not enough to be in that space and be critical, but instead that it is about the moves to dismember and dismantle it entirely. Room seven is about setting this afro-anarchism in a generative motion.

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SM: I wonder what the role of words and text is here. It reminds me of when I gave a lecture in Portugal and after the talk an African American woman said she really wanted to understand what I meant when I spoke about ritual. I said to her that ritual is really about change, about reframing the consciousness of an individual or a community, and when you go through the processes of ritual you use certain tools to take someone out of their normative environment and state so that they may be susceptible to reframing. While the medium that is done varies, the ritual targets the mind in a certain way. You see these things with initiation like in the cave, where initiation happens in our home countries and a young person is reframed from a young boy to a man. For the twentieth-century Négritude Poets, text itself was a way of reframing and restructuring.

KK: I like the way you speak about ritual and text as this unstable and free radical formwork of revolution that shifts discourses and acts as a substrate to determine new forms of societal structure and modes of being and existence. In this sense, we can think about architectural education as a form of dissemination on the continent of Africa. You were both positive and critical about the unit system of architectural education that Lesley Lokko brought to South Africa, as a Western formwork of education that is productive in educating architects, or non-architects to operate in a way that it is plural, allowing a diverse range of ideas and curricula to be underwritten. Considering that you are both educators, and Sechaba with your previous role as a curator of the South African Pavilion and currently as an editor of the Architecture of South Africa journal, what are these projective futures you imagine?

SM: I often think about how we disseminate information. If I am writing something on social media, relative to something in an academic journal, what is the difference between those two things, and what are the outcomes and intentions? I was telling my wife this morning that I'm going to change my entire curriculum from what I have been teaching in the first year for architectural history and theory. I have been teaching a kind of canonical history of precolonial architecture, to tell students that there was something happening on the continent prior to colonization, and that what was happening here was something much closer to an ecological way of living. Yes, this can sound romantic and rich, but I felt like it was a disservice to these students. I have seen through my practice that there are ways to learn from Indigenous knowledge systems and reframe reality without beating drums or going into caves, while some of us still do. But I have also observed how social media can be used to intervene into and leverage discussion. Why am I not teaching that to my students? Is writing a pristine academic text the only thing I am preparing my students for? Is it an honest mechanism to achieve certain ends? There are ways in which revolution can occur through different modes of communication. So the question becomes: is text still allowing us to achieve our ends, or is something else happening today that we need to jump on as thinkers and intellectuals? Imagine if the climate justice movement had the same reality-crafting tools that Kanye West and Donald Trump have developed to mobilize society in a certain direction, to frame the Anthropocene and pivot away from a destructive end.

BM: Speaking from the same context, Sechaba, I like the way you have managed to leverage social media and AI in your practice. That's exciting, but at the same time I don't think you should completely change the way you teach your histories and theories of architecture, which in present-day South Africa is completely silenced, crowded by great European structures. It is easy to underestimate how impactful this is and will be over time. I wish I had a lecturer like you when I was a student to tell me that we had architecture! I never thought I fit into academia, but I was always drawn back to the idea of what we were taught, and what we teach ourselves. I also like what you were saying about ritual, which means something different to Africans than to Europeans. Yet the ways and means we are taught has been homogenized, which is why your critique Kabage about systems and structures becomes so critical. So we still need to be in the pavilion, and in journals and in academia. Add to your curriculum rather than discarding it. Lesley Lokko once said that the practice of architecture is not completely wrong, it’s just not complete. By adding Indigenous knowledge systems through new technologies, we continue to build on this.

Jessica Ntale questions bronze statues as a form of memorialization, stating that “the statues designed resemble that of the oppressor and hence its’ own people are unable to interact or engage with it.” Left: Jessica Ntale, Principles of Statue Design as Memorials, 2023. Right: Jessica Ntale, Statue as a Template, 2023. Source: Jessica Ntale, “Bronze Heroes and Plastic Memories,” unpublished master’s dissertation. Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 2023.

KK: I recall that the unit you ran at the University of Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture was about memory, monuments, and archives, both dark and celebratory. How did you navigate these topics with your students?

BM: Everything we do, from our systems of law, governance, and religion was inflicted on us, and what we do is use these systems in the African context by centering African stories. We take our students to these rural and urban contexts across Africa to deal directly with the issues affecting communities that were inflicted by architecture. Architects have big heads, acting like gods, and architecture as a discipline was complicit in creating the apartheid system in South Africa, in drawing the lines and divisions to segregate, colonize, and inflict harm on the Africans. So, as architects, part of our work is to reveal and heal. In that regard, the idea of memory in the landscape became important, and what memories lie in the buildings and cities that were created for us. What stories does our apartheid architecture tell, and how does it still affect people today, through trauma and triumph? When considering architecture as a spatial practice, what do people want to live in? Can we design spaces that accommodate contemporary African rituals? Architecture inflicts damage when houses are not designed to accommodate our rituals and practices. What we do in our teaching is to make students aware and consider how to accommodate this in the most exciting ways possible. Understanding how we live as Africans changes what architecture becomes.

KK: It is clear that ritual is fundamentally about initiating change, especially when talking about our works on the continent as well as the opportunities and limitations of and at the Biennale. While Bonolo you provoked us with the question on whether we are too nostalgic, which for me questions where the starting point is, and whether we place the future forward or backwards.

Edward Pitja observes how the local community found its own way to memorialize a historical event, disregarding the established western memorial site. He proposed a way to unify the commemoration by incorporating an existing cultural event called “Mbaola.” He used this event to envision a new commemoration that incorporates this existing tradition. Left: Edward Pitja, Mbaola Storytelling at the memorial precinct. 2022. Right: Edward Pitja, The Creation of Sacred Space, 2022. Source: Edward Pitja, “Exploring Ephemeral Memorial Landscapes in Sharpeville,” unpublished master’s dissertation. Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 2022.

SM: Don’t get me wrong, it is not about changing the curriculum because there isn’t value in teaching students about precolonial architecture. What I am talking about is no less than the battle for a reality, a kind of world view. The reason I am talking about people who are leveraging certain tools is because those people are crafting realities. We have been drawn away from a constructivist paradigm, where realities are socially constructed, and we fail to use the tools that are required to construct realities. When Paul J. Crutzen coined the term the “Anthropocene,” he opened a portal or domain of reality for us to witness or engage with. This was also the case with the Black Lives Matter movement, where identity politics began to merge with social media, and those who were able to control this medium began to act at the level of constructing reality, and meanings. So, what does it mean to engage my students about architecture, while getting them to appreciate that this thing we call architecture today is actually a contested notion? If we go about it in a normative way, we are basically perpetuating whatever systems that have caused problems in the past. But critically, what are the tools we are using to undermine its solidity as a reality? It’s about leveraging more frameworks but how does one break out of normative frameworks in the first place. I’m sure that our ancestors on the African continent, at least in South Africa, understood that human consciousness is susceptible to being drawn into an infinite number of realities. When some people believe the climate crisis is real and some don’t, for instance, you have to shock or break the concretized form of reality. School, in that sense, is a place of ritual. It can draw students out of normative state, like in the traditional setting where you are taken to a mountain, isolating someone and suspending their normative thinking. You can see them resisting and fighting as it threatens their sense of reality and identity.

KK: So when we drill down into it, there appears to be a strategy to embed tools, and actions of rituals through earth practices that remove us from any normative paradigm. Be it climate change denial, genocide denial, even Black social death denial. All because of fear and ambivalence. There is clearly a need to generate tools that recalibrate what it means to be human, or for that matter other-than-human in an afro-pessimist sense,4 but even more so to read what Achille Mbembe calls the earthly community.5 To quote Mbembe: “If we examine the arts and technologies of ancient African societies, we are struck by the importance that the theme of the remaking of the world as a permanent activity held. The quality of exchanges with the environment was one of the conditions for growth, reproduction, and fertility.”6 We need to think of these tools as a way to generatively move forwards or backwards as our ancestors once did using flint, obsidian, paint, and dance, among other practices. They are objects and rituals that altered and continue to alter our conditions of existence on Earth. The Négritude movement observed this through the reading of African art and cultural practices that were not meant to represent a particular static reality, but a sub-reality. It brought to light something that was beyond the bounds of the observable, and that spoke to the life forces of a constantly changing Earth system. The conversations within and outside the tea house are about exploring the earthly bounds of ritual to repair our reading and building of this geo-reality.