Abstrakt
In 1982, in a period of growing violence in apartheid South Africa, the Tanzanian authorities handed over a remote and undeveloped plot of land to the African National Congress (ANC). Here, the ANC established the Dakawa Development Centre, a residential and educational centre for South African refugees.
ANC architects and managers emphasized self-help and the ambition to build the place with their own workforce, yet they also sought foreign donations and construction expertise - and managed to gather architects and other specialists from both East and West. Among these was a group from socialist East Germany that introduced a lightweight, self-help, panel-housing construction system (wall panel column system, WPC).
While scholarship on East-South Cold War architectural cooperation has often focused on landmark buildings and other prestigious projects in the urban centres of developing countries, WPC was the opposite, a simple building technology setting functionality and costs above everything else and intended for rural or peri-urban sites. The relative simplicity of WPC thus allows a shifting of the research focus from architectural results to cooperation practices.
This article argues that rather than a mere East German technology export, the design and implementation of WPC in Dakawa was a mutual learning process specific to the late Cold War cooperation between a socialist state and a liberation movement. Based on archival materials from South Africa and Germany, the article investigates the drivers and results of this particular mode of cooperation.