Celestial Resistance: Norwegian World Bank Education Project in Zambia
Essay for Footprint Journal [35]
“Engaging Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism,”
August 2023 [forthcoming 2024].
“Engaging Cosmotechnical Difference in Architecture and Urbanism,”
August 2023 [forthcoming 2024].
“There have been many occasions during the past six months, and there will undoubtedly be more during the next six when I have wished—and will wish for a Point of Aries to which to relate and charter our way through the problems of this project!”—begins the uncanny quarterly report for April-September 1977 of Norman Taylor, an architect-in-charge of the infamous World Bank Educational Project in Zambia. Referring to Geoffrey Moorhouse’s discovery of the Point of Aires that assisted in navigation and regulated relationships in space and time in its physical absence, Taylor longed for a similar celestial body to provide a moment of respite in the never-ending dragged-beyond-any-reasonable-deadline building project that grew increasingly out of hand. What started with good intentions—a $30 million four-year loan from the World Bank to upgrade the existing and build new educational facilities to alleviate widespread illiteracy and prepare a new generation of the workforce—ended in madness. The Bank’s loan was matched by a similar amount from the Zambian state, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation proposed to cover the costs of all technical consultants, architects and engineers.
To complete 65 schools in under four years and with limited budgets, Norwegian consultants proposed an industrial building system based on standardised room units. Envisioning the lack of skilled labour, prefabrication was suggested to get several schools off the ground quickly. In the best fashion of post-war European modernism, all structural components, including partitions, doors, windows, cladding, and furniture, were dimensionally coordinated. Fixtures and fittings were to be ordered in bulk, coded and incorporated into an elaborate accounting system that was supposed to facilitate the production of bills of quantities with the help of a computer. The “Co-ordinated Building Communication”—or CBC for short—set the project's cosmology and theology. A programming specialist was seconded from Denmark to code the project’s magnetic tapes at Lusaka Data Centre, to be sent for processing on computers in Oslo and Copenhagen.
Given that most of the schools were located in remote rural areas, hardly accessible via dirt roads, the outcome of this technological cosmology was not hard to predict. A luta continua of problems, conflicts, delays and imprecisions unravelled as the project dragged ten years over the deadline and ten times over the budget. This essay proposes to look at this conflict of cosmologies as envisioned (and imposed) by the European technical consultants and the lived reality of post-independence Zambia. For Europeans, constantly failing elements of the project became acts of nearly divine resistance to which only celestial bodies could provide a solution. For Zambians, the imposed technological cosmology was, from the onset, foreign and external, to which the project’s resistance was only an obvious scenario.
Based on original archival documents, I interrogate these cosmotechnical resistances to universalist ideas of technology and ontological assumptions embedded in Western modernity and perpetuated through the architecture of such post-colonial “development” projects. This study affords insight into how new technologies could be negotiated and challenged for a more pluralistic paradigm.