The great variety of architecture in question – mainly indigenous, European, and in-between creations in terms of structure and form – is limited in space and time due to our use of the term “French West Africa.” As an invented politico-administrative unit, French West Africa (AOF for Afrique Occidentale Française) was a federation established by the Ministry of the Colonies in Paris (1895–1956). Created alongside the neighboring federation of French Equatorial Africa (AEF, 1910–1956), the aim of the AOF was to facilitate the centralist decision-making process in the home country and the economic exploitation of this vast territory. It consisted of 4,633, 985 km2 with the government general’s headquarters, from 1902, in Dakar. The federation included eight colonies: Senegal, French Sudan (today’s Mali), French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Dahomey (Benin), Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Niger, and Mauritania (Conklin, 1997; Suret-Canale, 1971) (see Fig. 1).
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ArchiAfrika Foundation/Accra. http://www.archiafrika.org/
EU COST Action IS0904: Architecture beyond. http://www.architecturebeyond.eu/
Institut de Recherche pour le développment (IRD), France. http://www.orstom.fr/
The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project. http://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org/
UN-Habitat for a better urban future. http://mirror.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=9
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Bigon, L. (2016). Architecture in French West Africa. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7747-7_10202
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