REVIEWED BY KOFI BOONE, ASLA
FROM THE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
 
With more than 15 million views, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie?s groundbreaking TED Talk ?The Danger of a Single Story? is likely the most viewed treatise on the consequences of making one story the story of the African continent. With surgical precision, Adichie reveals the lasting consequences of perpetuating Africa and Africans as only victims suffering from famine and war, or only the exotic backdrop for experiencing ?charismatic nature.? But in the end, her most devastating criticism of the single story is embodied in her quote of the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, ?If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with ?secondly.?? Illustrating her point, Adichie asks facetiously what we would think if the story began with a ?failed? African state instead of with European colonialism. The issue of starting with ?secondly? is present in cultural landscape study of the continent of Africa. The spirit of Adichie?s and Barghouti?s arguments resonates in the pages of Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by John Beardsley. The volume collects essays delivered at a symposium held at Dumbarton Oaks in 2013 and reflects an important first step in laying the foundation for future exploration. Through a wide array of disciplinary lenses, geographic locations, and time periods, Beardsley?s work esc...