‘Indigenous’ is a term often used to distinguish a group on the outer limits of conventional thought from another larger, often over-represented group. In American and western society, this readiness to ‘other’ has not only been applied to aboriginal communities; the subscription holds rank in concepts, language, media, design, art and in Mariam Kamara’s chosen field – architecture.
In colonial-era Niger, administrators of the French imperial economy over-politicised the existence of groups of people by deeming them ‘tribes’ to announce their incivility. “Are the French grouped as tribes? How about Italians, Austrians or Swiss-Germans?” says Kamara, who was born in Saint-Étienne, France but moved with her parents to Niger at an early age. Architecture can reproduce such prejudices, representing traditional aesthetics as primitive
