Design Advice for the African Home: Translating "Colonial Style," 1945-1962

This article examines design advice for Ugandan homes in the late British Empire. Examining a set of advice books written by European women for Ugandans after the Second World War, it shows the development of a local "colonial style" resulting from the intersection of European ideals and African materials and traditions. This style was influenced by a global trend toward education in domesticity for colonial subjects developed largely by missionaries. It also drew on an established corpus of design advice written for Britons settling or sojourning overseas. The design of the "ideal African home" was one reflecting values of simplicity, inventiveness, practicality, cleanliness, and order Interiors were to include certain material signs of "civilization" and use color and art to express particular social messages. Neither an exact replica of British or European styles nor a completely indigenous product, the proposed mid-century rural Ugandan home can be read as a marker of tensions between local tradition and global modernity, between empowering African women and limiting their influence, and between the ideals of a "civilizing mission" and an awareness of the impending end of empire.