Historian Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent.
She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting.
She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft.
Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.
To examine African architecture in museums is to raise many of the questions raised in other investigations of the subject: What is architecture? What constitutes ornament in relation to architecture? What is structure? How do materials and construction technologies function?
However, approaching the African architecture from this angle also offers unique insights: It bypasses purely ethnic, national, geographic and chronological surveys in lieu of a comparative approach that situates architecture firmly as a player in complex historical, political, economic and social developments.
