Is Africa the laboratory of the future?

esley Lokko is a woman of many hats. She is an architect, having practised both in other studios and her own. She is an academic, having experienced the teaching, research and management side of the sector in a range of higher education institutions worldwide, notably at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), which she established in 2015; at the City College of New York, where she was dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture until leaving seemingly abruptly during the pandemic (more on this later); and now at Accra’s African Futures Institute, a new architecture research institute and school, which is currently being set up from scratch. She is also an accomplished fiction writer, with 12 novels under her belt, all of them having not much to do with architecture. ‘Many people are surprised when they read my books,’ she says. ‘They say it’s