Huda Tayob on how an apartheid-era film captures a lost neighbourhood: CCA x AR Bookshelf

In this episode, architectural historian, writer and educator Huda Tayob takes us to the now destroyed Sophiatown in Johannesburg, South Africa, through recordings of the neighbourhood found in the 1959 film Come Back Africa. This AR Bookshelf episode is part of a collaboration between The Architectural Review and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) around the book Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture, published following the CCA’s Centring Africa research project. In each episode of this short series, a researcher from the publication tells the story of a place based on sources traditionally overlooked by western archives. Forming a fugitive archive itself, the episodes study both the places themselves and the media – better suited to podcast than paper – that document and describe them. Fugitive Archives is edited by Claire Lubell and Rafico Ruiz, and co-published with Jap Sam Books (October 2023).