These extraordinary images of adobe mosques, fortresses, houses, and sacred sites across Burkina Faso, Mali, and beyond are more than architecture: they embody ancestral knowledge, community, and continuity. Many of these structures are now endangered by climate change and rapid urbanization, making this project more urgent than ever.

Edited by Lesley Lokko, founder of the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana, the book pairs Morris’s luminous photography with newly commissioned texts from experts in the field and a younger generation of African and diasporic architectural thinkers including David Adjaye, Ewa Effiom, Lois Innes, Francis Kéré, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, and Izabela Wieczorek. Their contributions respond to the images with fresh critical insight, showing how traditional knowledge, material intelligence, and local practices speak directly to today’s questions of sustainability, identity, belonging, and cultural futures.