摘要：The colonial history of Portugal is particular in several ways. Not only was Portugal among the first European powers to create an empire; its colonial territories in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe) were among the last to become independent in the aftermath of the coup d’état of 1974 that brought an end to Salazar’s regime of the Estado Novo. The colonial wars that preceded this independence profoundly marked the collective memory of the country’s colonial past, to the extent that the topic remained taboo when Portugal sought to reinvent its national identity. It was indeed not until the mid-1990s that Portugal was ready to deal with its colonial past. This particular context helps explain why there existed “amnesia” about twentieth-century architecture in Portugal’s overseas territories, long after architectural historians had started to rediscover modern architecture in Africa in the late 1980s. 1 Indeed, the first substantial publication on the topic, José M. Fernandes’s book Geração Africana. Arquitectura e cidades em Angola e Moçambique, 1925–1975 , was published only in 2002. Over the last five years we have witnessed the production of important new scholarly work, notable examples being a series of articles on the topic by Ana Vaz Milheiro, compiled under the title Nos trópicos sem Le Corbusier: Arquitectura luso-africana no Estado Novo and Maria Manuela da Fonte’s PhD research Urbanismo et Arquitectura em Angola , both published in 2012. 2 Yet, as these publications are written in Portuguese and locally edited, they have had little impact on architectural historiography so far. As such, the book under review, Modern Architecture in Africa: Angola and Mozambique , edited by Ana Tostões, forms the first substantial account in English on the topic and has the potential to bring it to an international audience.
