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An Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture Labelle Prussin The An Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture Labelle Prussin The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Oct., 1974), pp. 182-205. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197410%2933%3A3%3C182%3AAITIAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians is currently published by Society of Architectural Historians. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/sah.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Tue Sep 11 15:41:59 2007 Fig. I. A recently constructed Bozo saho or boys' age-set house at Kolenze, Mali (photo: author). defines African architecture in terms of the primitive or in The study of the visual arts in the Western world has terms of building technology per re also leads logically to a traditionally been divided into sculpture, drawing, paint- limited perspective which can only speak of shelter. That ing, and architecture. Consequently, when the arts of this attitude still prevails is evident from a recent collection Africa began- to attract world attention at the turn of the of essays entitled Shelter in Afri~a.~ century, not only was the architecture of Africa further These approaches have severely restricted the develop- divorced from the other visual arts, but it was in turn ment of a true understanding of the African architectural robbed of its meaningful elements. The feverishly increas- phenomenon. They account, in great measure, for the ing pace of colonial expansion in West Africa coincided failure of the Western world to admit its very existence. with a search for new forms of expression in the art world. But more than mere oversight and ignorance, they are the It was hardly coincidence that the fauvist movement which progeny of a marriage between conceptual fallacy and initiated twentieth-century Primitivism was born in France, Western ethno- and egocentrism.- Traditionally, the West- since at the turn of the century France was more actively ern world circumscribed architecture in terms of perma- involved in African colonization than any other Western nent, monumental, public structures which could be docu- nation, and by 1900 she was in control of the major sculp- mented in time and space. Courses in architectural history ture-producing regions of the African continent. Increasing were (and still are) divided by subject matter into a chro- numbers of "artifacts" and curios pilfered and pillaged nology which began with the written word. Preliterate or during the decades of colonial expansion appeared in Euro- nonliterate societies were, until recently, not considered pean museums and bistros, inspiring Picasso, Modigliani, respectable residents on the typological plateau of "civiliza- and others.* But, while one might carry off sculpture and tion" established by Western thought, because the written decorative art for display to the Western world, architec- word was used as a critical measure. During the second tural elements are more difficult to transport. Early in the half of the nineteenth century the Western world, in- nineteenth century, the museum-piece collecting, archaeo- spired by Darwinian theories of evolution, engaged in logical mania, focussing on the classical world, successfully numerous attempts to establish an evolutionary model for carried off such segments. Despite their weight, Egyptian the range of disciplines which comprise world knowledge. obelisks, Greek architraves, and Roman columns, severed The various efforts to classify the races and cultures of from their sites, could be transported. In an architecture mankind and its achievements into an evolutionary model composed primarily of vegetal or earthern materials, as was were paralleled by typologies which classified architectural the case in Africa, only wooden elements were removable: efforts into an evolutionary sequence. Viollet le Duc's carved wooden columns, plaques in wood or metal, dec- The Habitation ofMan Through the Ages and the Paris Ex- orative roof pinnacles, doors, doorposts, doorframes, and position Universelle of 1889 became the models for Sir locks, all architectural components, were removed from Banister Fletcher's "Tree of Architecture" and Bemis and their contextual surroundings and reclassified as sculpture. Burchard's The Evolving House.' The absence of transportation facilities on the African continent further contributed to misinformation and mis- interpretation. Although wooden, metal, terra-cotta, and 6. Paul Oliver, ed., Shelter in Africa (New York, 1971), is a collec- even stone elements might be carried down from the inland tion of essays on the architecture of various African peoples. The irony of the term "shelter" is most striking on the dustjacket of the savannahs to the Guinea Coast and shipped by boat to book, where the title is superimposed on a color photograph of one Europe, their size was limited to what could be carried by of the most spectacular examples of West African architecture: the man since transport, until well into this century, still de- intricate arabesque bas-relief fagades bursting with symbol and meaning on Hausa building fagades in northern Nigeria. pended upon human portage. In fact, until the turn of the 7. Eugene E. Viollet le Duc, The Habitation of Man in A11 Ages, century, few Europeans had even penetrated beyond the trans. by Benjamin Buckall (Boston, 1876); Sir Banister Fletcher, coastal rain forests. The European image of West African A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, 14th ed. (New York, 1948), p. iii; A. F. Bemis and John Burchard, The Evolving architecture was thus heavily conditioned by observation of House, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1933). Fletcher's classic text on archi- only a narrow strip of tropical coastline. The savannah city tectural history on which every aspiring architect of the first half of the twentieth century was weaned, condescendingly accorded three pages in a thousand to the whole field of vernacular architecture, and hardly many more to the entire non-Western, nonclassical world. exotic societies, presumably affording a contrasting diorama to the The Exposition Universelle of 1889, while better known for its glorious achievements of Western civilization and technology which Tour Erffel, also boasted a large-scale exhibition on the bank of the the Eiffel Tower symbolized. Seine River, entitled "The Evolution of Architecture and Habita- 8. See Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, rev. ed. (New tion." Its subject matter included examples of the "primitive" level York, 1967), for a detailed exposition on the development of of earlier stages in evolution from the newly colonized, far-flung Primitivism. of Djennk in Mali for instance, a mediaeval entrepat on place in the universal framework, and to discard the nar- one of the tributaries to the Niger River equal in import to row, denigrating boundaries which previous typologies Timbucktu, was not accurately located on a European map have imposed upon us.ll Indeed, it is no coincidence that until 1893 when the French conquered the city. When the authors cited above, almost without exception, have earlier explorers such as Renk CailliC, Heinrich Barth, and illustrated their theoretical position not only with examples Anne Raffenel did traverse the interior, their interpretive from the field of vernacular architecture in general, but drawings and renderings could only convey egocentric from the African world in particular. impressions, since photography as an accurate reporting An understanding of African architecture requires spe- tool was still in its infancy, and the use of photographs in cific examination of the physical, technological, socio- publication was a late nineteenth-century de~elopment.~ cultural, and politico-economic environments which con- In the early twentieth century, interest in African arts stitute concrete reality. But it is also essential that one con- went hand in hand with the European art world's search sider the process whereby man, as a thinking, symbol- for a new theory and new forms of artistic expression. The making animal, abstracts those realities into a meaningful increasing interest in African architecture today can also be and ultimately religious or symbolic schemata of architec- explained in part by a revolution in architectural theory and tural philosophy. Phrased another way, the physical en- the current reevaluation of concepts and definitions for the vironment provides the raw material of concrete space, the discipline. In contrast to the traditional classical stance technological environment provides man with the tool kit which severely restricted the field to singular, monumental to manipulate available material resources, and the socio- edifices, recent architectural thinking has begun to reflect cultural, politico-economic environments provide the the broader frame of man-built environments generated by framework for restructuring the natural environment into current concern with the total spectrum of man's relation- a man-made one. The distinction between shelter and archi- ship to the world around him.
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