This article discusses the use of the classical language of architecture in the early colonial urban landscape in East Africa and assesses the stylistic choices by British colonial architects in Zanzibar and Nairobi. It focuses upon the buildings of John Sinclair, administrator-architect in Zanzibar from the early 1900s to 1923 and his later work in Nairobi. It highlights the various competing factors which informed decisions made by architects in the colonial world.

[extract…] Zanzibar was a British Protectorate for over seventy years, during which time many largescale building projects were completed yet only rarely was a wholly classical style used. This is in some respects surprising: classical elements have long been recognised internationally as symbolic of state power. A rich and burgeoning body of scholarship explores the diverse ways in which colonial governments and architects employed the classical style across the British Empire, paying careful attention to local and imperial influences upon building design. The use of the classical is of course not limited to imperial governments: as Carla Bocchetti has noted, neoclassicism is “a global product” that can offer “a legitimizing language to construct identity based on ideas of progress and cosmopolitanism.”1 Yet in early colonial Zanzibar (1890–1925 for the purposes of this essay), its use was the exception rather than the rule—the Post Office building (completed 1907) most explicitly using classical forms.

The overall preference for an eclectic style of building reflects the nature of British colonial rule in Zanzibar. With reference to precedents in India and elsewhere in Africa, this essay will discuss the use of the classical in the early colonial urban landscape. Architecture in East Africa is a vital source through which to understand the particular nature of colonial entanglement in the region. As Demissie writes, “colonial architecture and urbanism played pivotal roles in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”2

This article will discuss how the use of particular forms and styles, or indeed the rejection of them, offers new perspectives of global connections in the British East African territories. Buildings constructed within the British Empire need to be understood within the longer history of British architecture from which they have often been excluded.3 But they are also important material evidence for historians when tracing imperial networks and influences. Chronologically, East Africa’s incorporation into empire and its rapid development, influenced by political and architectural models from earlier imperial expansion, make this region particularly significant.

  • 1. Carla Bocchetti, “Neoclassical Pompai in Early Twentieth-Century Cartagena de Indias Colombia.” In Paul B. Niell & Stacie G. Widdifield (eds), Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910 (University of New Mexico Press, 2013), p. 72. See also Carla Bocchetti, “Antiquity and Global History.” Unpublished paper, IFRA, Nairobi, 2015.
  • 2. Fassil Demissie, “Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Predicaments: An Introduction.” In Fassil Demissie (ed.), Postcolonial African Cities: Imperial Legacies and Postcolonial Predicaments (Routledge, 2007), p. 1.
  • 3. Alex G. Bremner, “Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of Mid-Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered.” The Historical Journal 48, n° 3 (2005): 703–42.

My thanks to Carla Bocchetti, the anonymous readers and colleagues at IFRA for their constructive comments in developing this article. It draws on archival research undertaken in 2009–12 supported by a small grant from the British Institute of East Africa and a doctoral studentship from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.