Ekibaaju is curious about the world. He has spent his working life in the scientific enterprise, and keeps returning to traditional African culture and traditional Christianity for what they know about living well.
For a century, Portuguese navigators produced the most precise coastal survey in the world and named the shoreline after whatever could be carried onto a ship. The map they drew had no inside, and the shape of that map is still visible in the continent's ports, railways and reputation.
Between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Arabic writers produced the most accurate account of Africa that anyone outside it had ever managed. It was accurate because it was an inventory, and the habit of reading the continent as an inventory has never quite been broken.
For seven centuries Greek and Roman writers could not find where the great river began. What they wrote in place of an answer hardened into a way of describing Africa, and that way of thinking outlasted the writers who created it.
When the remains could not be identified, families were given earth from the crash site to bury. Six years later, Ethiopian architects built a memorial on that same ground, in the oldest architectural language the country has.
In the Waterberg, the oldest art was painted with pigments drawn from the ground. Thousands of years later, a school on the same land was raised from the soil dug out of its own foundation trenches.
A geometric art form made by Rwandan women nearly vanished in 1994. Women revived it. Now it has been built at full scale, into a center for young women, by a workforce that was 40 percent women.
Through Worofila, the Dakar practice she co-founded, Nzinga B. Mboup is raising walls of compressed earth in a city ruled by concrete and insulating them with an invasive reed. The most radical thing about it is how obvious it all is.
In a village on the Sahel's edge, pots shaped by local women became a ceiling, the ceiling became a cooling machine, and the construction site became a school. This is where the future of African building was first drafted.
Africa's film heritage is scattered in archives far from the continent. In the hills north of Accra, a cinema built from the earth itself is being designed to bring it home.
For 75 years, Germany's cultural institute borrowed old European buildings. When it finally built a home of its own, it asked an African architect, and he answered in African earth.
A revolutionary preached self-reliance and died for it. Nearly four decades later, Africa's most celebrated architect answered him in laterite brick, wind, and sunlight.
Long before architects spoke of biomimicry, African builders were reading the landscape. A thatched villa in the Namib Desert shows what happens when we start reading it again.
