The refurbished chapels in Rwanda or Kinshasa cityscapes are ironic spaces of the destruction wrought by civil wars or genocide in Africa. In the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital of Kinshasa, the walls depict popular art. Kinshasa offers no large museums or botanical gardens like some other African capitals, like say Tshwane in South Africa. But Kinshasa offers the cultures of the Congolese working-class people. There you find paintings and sculptures made by African peoples. The newcomers in Kinshasa who have forgotten their rural origins were caricatured in the 1990s by the ambivalent songs of the maestros, Papa Wemba and Koffi Olomide.

Gaston Bachelard some time ago opined that there is a poetics of space that defines habituated places. African spaces are the dimensions where history and inhabited places intersect. So, this is the place of contemporary Africa. Giza has pyramids, obelisks and sphinxes while the rest of Cairo has 21st-century skyscrapers. Clearly, place in modern Africa is the constellation of history, of time and place. Enclosures with open courtyards, vestibules, hypostyle halls and sanctuaries are found in many African spaces and architectures. There are clear cases of cultural diffusion in many of these spaces. Beyond the memory of the European exploration, ships, oceans, landscapes, forts, and castles that subsist after the end of Empire have inscribed names like the Vivaldi brothers or Bartholomew Diaz, as well as various missions of proselytisation to Islam or Christianity into African history and geography.

Portuguese architecture in 21st-century Africa can still be glimpsed in the Saõ Jorge Castle built in 1480. Imperial spaces can also be gazed at by the new globalisation generation in South Africa, in the Standard Bank Building in Adderley Street in the city of Cape Town with its Corinthian columns in the neoclassical style or in Saint George's Cathedral in Wale Street that was built in 1900. But if you enter the desert landscape of the Maghreb in the cities of Rabat, Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, at the city limits, the desert spaces are still inscribed.