Cementing Modernity: GDR Technopolitics and the Governance of Concrete in Ghana and Zanzibar, 1950s–70s

This paper examines the materiality of East German (GDR) development aid in West and East Africa during the 1960s by investigating the use of concrete as a tool of technopolitics. Through a comparative analysis of building manuals and practices in newly independence Ghana and Zanzibar, I argue that concrete served as a medium through which the socialist state sought to standardize postcolonial governance, functioning as both “soft infrastructure” (technical codes) and “hard infrastructure” (prefabricated slabs).

In Ghana, the research traces the legacy and transition of “technical authority” by analyzing construction manuals and archives. Drawing on archival records, I examine how the GDR sought to recalibrate or replace late-colonial British building codes with a socialist logic of “rational construction,” mobilizing the standardized use of concrete to the prerequisite for national progress. Conversely, in Zanzibar, the GDR’s intervention was characterized by the export of “total” industrialized environment. Using the Michenzani housing project in Zanzibar as a primary case study, I investigated how the introduction of large-panel prefabrication (Plattenbau) functioned as a rigid instrument of governance. These slabs were intended to bypass local construction traditions and import a new, socialist urban order, which ultimately became and arena of friction between GDR internationalism, local political agenda, tropical climates, and everyday postcolonial life.

By situating these cases within a wider history of “architectural diplomacy,” this paper interrogates how concrete and its standardization functioned as geopolitical agency. Whether through the circulation of technical codes in Accra or the assembly of concrete slabs in Zanzibar, the GDR’s export of concrete technology sought to “cement” ideological alliances and modern state structures. And built upon these analyses, this research inquiries on the African actors’ reconfiguration of these “hard” materials and standards to suit local political realities, complicating the narrative of one-directional socialist modernization.