Growing up in New York, you tend to turn a blind eye to much it has to offer. Native New Yorkers generally leave all that gawking, oohing, and ahhing to the tourists. Celebrities might get a nod...maybe. Museums get visited on school field trips. Broadway plays? Please. I only went to the World Trade Center on business, and, to this day, the closest I've come to the Statue of Liberty is the view from the Staten Island ferry as it cruises by. This was not done out of contempt for the things that have labeled New York the greatest city in the world. It's just that, at least to me, the places and activities that truly made New York great weren't often the center of attraction to your typical tourists. And I liked it that way.
There was one exception, though, and if it weren't for Ayn Rand's “The Fountainhead,” I believe even this feature of New York would have gone under-appreciated. That's in the area of architecture. After my first reading of her phenomenal novel, I never saw the structures of New York the same again. Thanks to Howard Rourke, the novel's protagonist, I began to see each skyscraper, apartment building, department store, even private home as an individual statement by its owner, speaking to the society and time period in which it was built, as well as a manifestation of its builder's vision.
So, by the time I arrived in Japan, the enthusiast that I'd become, I found the structures here to be a veritable feast for the senses. While New York's cityscape is home to architecture from around the globe, resulting in a hodgepodge of sensibilities, to encounter not simply a building but entire cities designed and built with the Japanese concept of architecture was astounding.
This time around, Black Eye has finally had the opportunity to kick it with one of the architects behind some of the structures seen here in Japan, an Ashiya-based gentleman named Nsenda Lukumwena, who was kind enough to share some of his insights.
Lukumwena is originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
“Not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo (RC),” he added. “We're neighbors. The RC was a French colony, and the DRC was a Belgian colony. I'm from the DRC.”
Lukumwena explained that this colonization lasted from 1876 to 1960. The Congo suffered severely under the Belgian King Leopold II, who, under the guise of humanitarianism, proceeded to bleed the country of its resources, primarily rubber, ivory, and precious metals. That during his regime, 20% of the population was killed, and the survivors were subject to a level of brutality and torture that would make a Nazi nauseous.
In 1960, the Belgian Congo (as it was known then) was finally freed from its Belgian yoke thanks to the heroic efforts of resistance leaders like Patrice Lumumba, who became the first democratically elected Prime Minister. However, interference from Belgium, England, and the US soon led to what's known as the Congo Crisis, followed shortly by a coup d'état and Lumumba's execution in 1961 (all three countries have since revealed their complicity). This crisis occurred in Lukumwena's childhood.
“I was born in the south, in Lubumbashi, a city of art and enterprise. But after independence, there was a civil war, and I'd see people being killed in front of me. They'd get shot in the head or decapitated with machetes, and their heads put on batons and displayed in the city, stuff like that. It was terrible.”
The country fell into the hands of despots backed by foreign governments, whose corruption and tyranny rivaled the Belgians. The most notorious of these was the Belgium-backed Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu seized power in 1965, and until 1997, he was the sole candidate in a one-party state he established, used the treasury of the country he'd renamed Zaire as his personal ATM machine, and eliminated anyone who he even imagined might challenge his rule. He'd also gotten America to tacitly condone his numerous human rights violations because the Congo was the US's best source of Uranium (including the Uranium used to make the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). By denouncing the spread of communism in the Congo, Mobutu essentially partnered with the CIA to keep that Uranium out of Russian clutches during this Cold War era.
During the Congo Crisis, for safety's sake, Lukumwena's parents relocated the family to Europe, where they temporarily lived in Belgium and then France. A few years later, they returned to the Congo, but not to their home in Lubumbashi, settling in the capital city of Kinshasa.
Lukumwena's childhood was a relatively privileged one. He lived among and was schooled alongside European ex-pats, having an intimate understanding of them that most of his fellow Congolese could only imagine.
“I grew up speaking French and English, as well as the other languages spoken in the DRC like Swahili, Kinkongo, Lingala, and Tshiluba. But I was essentially a minority in my own country,” says Lukumwena. “Not a racial minority but an economic one. My father was a teacher who got into business and eventually into politics, so we had certain advantages. Growing up in that environment kind of offset some of the complexes I might have developed. Due to the colonization my country had undergone, many Africans looked to white people as role models, and the society judged you according to those white standards.”
As a young man with the luxury of options, inordinately intelligent, and drawn to challenges, he initially contemplated going into law or medicine. But then, on a street in Kinshasa, he saw something that informed him what direction his life should take.
“One day, I saw a man driving a beautiful car,” Lukumwena says. “He had some lovely young ladies riding around with him. I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was an architect. That was the first time I ever thought about becoming an architect because these guys made out better than lawyers and doctors.
“But the decisive moment occurred one day when I had a chance to see some architectural drawings,” he says. There were a lot of lines and symbols, and they looked so complex and challenging. That was enough for me. I love a challenge.”
Lukumwena attended L'institut National du Bâtiment et des Travaux Publics (The National Institute of Buildings and Public Works), where he studied architecture for 6 years. He graduated in 1982 and two years later arrived in Japan with the intention of attending graduate school here. He'd chosen Japan as the place to receive his advanced degrees (he achieved a Master's and a PhD in Urban Design Community and Regional Planning and Development from Osaka University) after seeing a single picture of a building. He didn't know anything about the building. Where it was located, who built it, nothing. But it impressed him considerably. One of his professors eventually informed him that the building was in Japan. From there, he began reading into Japanese architecture, and what he learned once again stoked that fiery need to push himself.
“Here was architecture that would challenge me in a different language and within a different culture,” Lukumwena says. “Beyond that, Japan is a developed country, not a Western country, so I thought that I could gain some insight into how Africa could be developed without necessarily following the Western model.”
I was curious what he found to be distinctive about Japanese architecture.
"What you see in Japanese cities, you can see in Paris or Hong Kong or elsewhere," the 33-year resident of Japan says, "but when it comes to space utilization, Japan is very distinctive!
“To me, architecture is all about light and spaces. The picture I mentioned was taken from inside a home looking towards a garden. I found out that this was the thing. It's the light! How the light is brought into the building. There's plenty of light here in Japan, but it's filtered through the paper shoji and so on, so you get a really soft light inside. So, you wind up with this trilogy of light, shade, and shadow. You would not find this in many other countries.
And spaces! Spaces are all about the people and the culture,” Lukumwena says. “Let me illustrate. Whenever we talk about beauty, we compare ourselves without necessarily being aware that we are comparing ourselves. So if I ask you to name a beautiful person, whomever you choose, you will have chosen in comparison to other human beings. But when it comes to animals, like a cow, for instance, if I ask about the beauty of a cow, people get a little lost because they wouldn't know immediately how to compare.
“Our idea of beauty is an aggregation of images and ideas we absorb from the people we have known, the places we have lived, the culture we live within, and so on, over the course of our lives. These we use as references when it comes to beauty. It's similar when we talk about spaces. We are drawn to spaces that somehow fit us, and these spaces are inspired by the culture in which they're found. Architecture belongs to a culture. Japanese architecture belongs in this culture.”
After years of working for several Japanese architectural firms, Lukumwena started his own firm, Design Atelier Architects Planners & Associates, in 2010. Since then, he has built over 15 homes, numerous office buildings, retail shops, and a hospital.
In addition to his architectural endeavors, he's also a professor of urban planning at Kobe Institute of Computing, a lecturer at Kwansei Gakuin University, and the founder of an annual event called AFRIKA meets KANSAI, a social action group that brings African and Japanese business people together on equal footing for mutual benefit and cultural exchange.
“Africa has come to a point where it is no longer just a receiver. It can be a true partner. So, I thought it was time to ask what we can do for this country where we have been hosted for so many years. And one way to give back would be to create a platform. Culture would be the base, but business would be the goal. Because if we can recognize and respect one another's culture, our differences and similarities, without judgment, then business would perform well.”
Lukumwena still has strong ties to the DRC and travels there regularly. He has designed and built several homes and a hotel in his homeland. He's also involved in social activism there, helping alleviate the plight of street children. He has managed to get several Japanese companies to finance a truck that will act as a mobile power solution and provide energy to families in the DRC.
“The Congo is slowly recovering,” Lukumwena says. But it will take centuries to fully recover from colonization, regain our identity, and be truly independent. I think Africans need to be deprogrammed and then reprogrammed because hundreds of years of colonization and contact with White people killed almost everything that was culturally African. But there's a growing consciousness in the Congo among the younger generation today to embrace African culture, values, and virtues.”
Sometimes, I think that buildings created by humans are as beautiful as mountains and forests made by nature.
Fascinating article Baye, especially on DRC. I wonder if you're familiar with the work of filmmaker Adam Curtis? He makes documentaries tying odd pieces of history together, using footage from the BBC archives. Here's a short article of his about Kinshasa, involving Che Guevara, Diane Fossey and Mobutu Sese Seko: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/7759d0f2-a3ca-31f8-96df-6b71524f926e