Lesley Lokko is a UK-trained, Scottish-Ghanaian architect, academic and best-selling novelist. She is Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. She was formerly director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, a school she set up in 2015.
Graduate School of Architecture Summer Show, November 2017. Photo: Tristan McLaren. I began writing this essay weeks before I left South Africa in November 2019 for good; picked it up again a week after my arrival in New York City and finished it in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the…