Asmara, the capital of Eritrea — a country often associated with repression and the exodus of refugees to Europe — has acquired a more positive image by becoming the world’s first modernist city to be designated in its entirety as a Unesco World Heritage site.
Known as “La Piccola Roma”, or Little Rome, the Eritrean city of 800,000 people became an artistic playground in the 1930s for Italian futurists who were able to play out their architectural fantasies in the Italian colony in the Horn of Africa.
Among the 400 buildings that have survived the decades, as well as a protracted war of liberation against Ethiopia, is a petrol station, completed in 1937.
Shaped like an aeroplane with seemingly gossamer-thin outstretched wings, it looks more like a bird in flight than a building rendered in concrete.
There is also an art deco bowling alley with stained-glass windows and the still-functioning Cinema Impero replete with Roman pillars topped with stone lion heads and paintings of antelopes, pineapples and dancing girls.
Partly because Eritrea’s economy has fallen behind, Asmara has been spared the brutal lunge to development that has scarred so many other African cities with their cacophony, pollution, shopping malls and cratered building sites.
Old men sit at pavement cafés sipping espressos made by vintage Italian machines and, if critics of the regime are to be believed, occasionally spying on their neighbours. Unesco called Asmara “an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism”. Eritreans call it “The City of Dreams”.
Along with Asmara, the Khomani ancestral lands in South Africa and M’banza Kongo, a city founded by the Portuguese in Angola in the 15th century, were also named World Heritage sites. That brings to 48 the total number of Unesco protected sites in Africa, out of 814 cultural sites worldwide.
The Financial Times
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