Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve decolonisation for his country, Ghana, recognised that the struggle for the continent's emancipation was just beginning in 1957. He theorised that while the emergence of newly decolonised states in the 1960s was removing ‘open control’ of African countries by European powers, the former colonisers were also developing a neocolonialism by using financial capital to wield power in these new nations. However, in 2020 new cultural iconoclasm movements arose, with citizens broadly implicated in memorials not only of their communities but also the world.

Nkrumah's Independence Arch, with its plaque declaring ‘AD 1957’ alongside the motto ‘Freedom and Justice’, could be standing in any European city, given its neoclassical visual language. How could Ghanaians be rejecting colonial rule while at the same time celebrating freedom with European monumental architecture? The Independence Arch signals ambiguous visual messages to Ghanaians and Africans at large. It fails to signify that what independence achieved was merely a stage in the long struggle for economic and political emancipation. It is noteworthy that poet and former president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor, and his Pan-Africanist peers, were already interrogating ways of representing African cultures prior to independence in the 1960s. In 1996, Amado Sidibe and V. Galioutine designed and completed the Independence Monument in Bamako, Mali. This time, the visual language of the monument referenced the well-known Sudanese style of architecture in West Africa, and it showed that the pioneering cultural decolonisation project by Senghor and his peers was beginning to take root.

These monuments recall projects undertaken in South Africa after the first democratic election in 1994. Several structures were built to commemorate the end of apartheid: Freedom Park in Pretoria; Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth; the Provincial Legislature Complex of the Northern Cape in Kimberley; the Provincial Legislature Complex, Mpumalanga, in Mbombela (formerly Nelspruit); and the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. Archaeological understandings from cave paintings, history, landscapes, earthenware, wall art and even body art were the tools for rejuvenating arts that indicated the diverse cultural identity of South Africans. While acknowledging that the majority of the new monuments were designed by ‘white architects’, architectural historian Jonathan Alfred Noble makes the salient point that it takes a long time to formulate tectonic identity.