Manthia Diawara’s engaging and thoughtful documentary explores the history of the maisons tropicales—tropical colonial houses—that were constructed in former colonial West Africa, while also exploring questions about art, politics, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial Africa. The documentary presents a history that is little known through its focus on the three houses designed by the famous French designer Jean Prouvé during the years following World War II. Prouvé’s work was funded by the colonial French government, which in 1951 envisioned the prototype houses as a means to address the shortage of housing in the French colonies of West Africa. The prefabricated aluminum structures were modular and made to be flat-packed, constructed, and dismantled with ease. As Judith Rodenbeck explained in a very interesting article featuring an interview with Diawara,

However, “Prouvé’s experiment turned out to be too costly, and the innovative designs too aesthetically challenging to relatively conservative French tastes, [so that] further production was abandoned” (108). For the most part, the prefabricated houses (two in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, and one in Niamey, Niger) were left untouched for almost the next fifty years in the wake of decolonization. When the French left both colonies in 1960, the houses remained, enduring war, famines, and the wrenching climates until “a Parisian furniture dealer named Eric Touchaleaume touched down in Africa, negotiated the purchase of all three buildings, and had them dismantled and shipped north, restored, and rendered into objets ” (108).

In order to delve into the obscure historic trajectory of the maison tropicale, Diawara embarks on a journey, along with the Portuguese artist Ângela Ferreira (whose own art installation, also titled “Maison Tropicale,” was displayed in the Portuguese Pavilion in Venice in 2007 and whose work, like Diawara’s, is funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture/Institute of the Arts). Their quest is to understand how the houses fit into the overarching “wealth drain” of art objects from Africa to Europe. Diawara’s documentary is a nuanced examination of this one-way flow, exploring how African art has been the victim not only of Western capitalism and consumerism, but also of civil war and the failure of nations to protect and foster the artistic culture of local communities. The documentary reveals interesting debates as the filmmaker seeks answers to the socioeconomic inequality in Africa that has led to the dire postcolonial condition of the present era. This condition is rooted in many factors, notably the failure of contemporary African political will, neocolonialism, and global capitalist structures that foster the continuance of Western domination and exploitation of Africa.

In the film Diawara and Ferreira interview West Africans, such as Mireille Ngatsé, who lived for several years in one of the Brazzaville houses. Her maison, Ngatsé explains, had no electricity or running water, but she found it comfortable and “loved the fresh air and the light coming in through the round blue windows.” However, one day four Frenchmen came from France, packed up the house, and took it away in containers. A similar scenario took place in Niamey. Diawara and Ferreira delve into the history of these houses as they have become works of art, exhibited around the world as precious objects of a bygone colonial era. One of them was recently displayed in “New York’s Summer 2007 design auctions . . . on Vernon Boulevard, under the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City, just a stone’s throw from Scandals, the local topless bar” (Rodenbeck, 106). This particular house from Brazzaville was sold in June 2007 for almost $5 million.

Diawara’s documentary is a postcolonial excavation of (lost) African identity and art. It is also a defense of a cultural patrimony in need of continuing investment, cultivation, and education as to its historical importance so that it will not face further spoliation in the future. The film engages with latent issues of inequality, poverty, racism, and corruption on the continent, all of which contribute to mindsets that prevent Africans from “knowing” their art and its significance. Not only neocolonialism and Western capitalist exploitation of African artwork can be blamed, as Diawara emphasizes. The “art drain” of Africa is also often due to Africans’ own apathy about the importance of art in and to their history. As one young man interviewed in the film explains, “Le blanc peut conserver les choses. . . . Nous non, nous n’avons pas de cette capacité. . . . On a oublié notre culture et notre histoire. . . . L’Afrique ne sait pas la valeur de son art, [la maison] serait mieux là-bas [en Europe] . . .” (The white man knows how to preserve things. . . . Us, no, we do not have this capacity. . . . We have forgotten our culture and our history. . . . Africa does not know the value of its art, the [maison tropicale] will be better off over there, in Europe).

As “icons of modernist and industrial design” the maisons tropicales offer a legacy of failed colonial endeavors and “fin-de-siècle neocolonial “repatriation,” and they remain, in general, as effigies for the “uneasy geography of the postcolony” (Rodenbeck, 108). Yet, as Diawara reveals in his film, although the houses represent a dark period of African history, they are still part of it and need to be integrated into the larger narrative of African identity.