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Labelle Prussin
The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Oct., 1974), pp. 182-205.
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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 A f r i ~ 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 o f M a n 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-
tion of essays on the architecture of various African peoples. The even stone elements might be carried down from the inland
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, T h e 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. The essence of recent in- tecture rests precisely on differentiating between real, con-
terpretations, pioneered by architectural critics, historians, crete space and philosophic, existential space. Ultimately, it
and practitioners such as Allsop, Rudofsky, Rapoport, is the changing pattern of their interrelationship over time
Alexander, Jencks, Baird, and Norberg-Schulz, rests on the which constitutes the fabric of architectural history.
basic assumption that architecture includes the total man-
built environment and its quality derives from "man's
T h e Concrete Environment
identifying himself with what he builds, using it as a means
of self-expression. . . ."lo Sub-Saharan Africa encompasses the widest diversity and
By considering a universal frame in which man's de- range of physical settings. By extension, the architectural
limitation and enclosure of space not only defines his phys- forms created on its landscape are equally diverse and
ical needs butjustifies his raison d'e"tre as well, then all aspects complex. Imagine for the moment a longitudinal axis
of the man-built environment may be viewed in the con- following the Greenwich meridian from Accra, Ghana,
text of aesthetic expression and the boundaries of archi- through Timbucktu, Mali, in West Africa. The trace
tectural definition can be extended and redefined. Such an would cut across a series of horizontal climatic belts: humid
approach permits us to view the African materials in true rain forest near the coast, a derived woodland savannah
and accurate perspective, to accord them a recognized inland gradually becoming a grassland savannah and finally
turning into a semiarid desert (Fig. 2 ) .
The climate of the humid coastal rain forest belt, where
9. RenC Cailli6, Journal d'un voyage d Tembouctou et d Jenne, 1824-
1828, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965); Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in there is little temperature change between day and night or
North and Central Africa, 1849-1855, 3 vols. (New York, 1857); even between wet and dry seasons, calls for a shelter with a
Anne Raffenel, Nouveau Voyage dans lepays des Negres, 2 vols. (Paris, maximum of cross ventilation to ensure bodily comfort.
1856). A more poignant example of overt racist bias toward African
subject matter appeared in the interpretive renderings of Riou, a
To achieve such a design, the indigenous coastal builder
French caricaturist who specialized in illustrating the ubiquitous will strive to incorporate some variant of louvered or
chronicles of the late nineteenth-century French military accounts of natural openings into the house he builds (Figs. 3-4).
the Guinea Coast of West Africa. Bamboo walls simulating openwork screens are designed
l o . Bruce Allsop, T h e Study of Architectural History (New York,
1970)~p. 83. See also Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Archi-
tects (New York, 1965); Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture
(Englewood Cliffs, 1969); Christopher Alexander, Notes on the II. It is important to distinguish the question at issue from build-
Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, 1971); Charles Jencks and George ing technology per se as well as from technological resources avail-
Baird, Meaning in Architecture (New York, 1970); Christian Nor- able in structuring the environment, both of which do follow an
berg-Schulz, Existence, Space and Architecture (New York, 1971). evolutionary development.
/ ~irnbucktu
.
I 1 Desert
sophic aspects of space, aspects which, by investing the quality: it is an ideal. To reach the center is to become
concrete, physical reality with meaning transform it into a initiated, to achieve a consecration. The center is the point
meta-language, whose symbols communicate to user and from which man acquires his position as a thinking being
viewer alike. in space. The belief, equally widespread in Africa, is often
expressed concretely as a tree or pillar symbolizing a ver-
Existence
tical world axis.
Since time immemorial, man has thought of the world as Among the peoples who inhabit the Cross River area
being centralized. Legends and myths of origin throughout between southeastern Nigeria and the southern Cameroon,
the world attest to a belief in the "center" as a point of the center of the internal courtyard of the family domicile
birth, a point of 0rigin.~4The center takes on a sacred was marked by a pair of carved wooden pillars, obaschi,
chained to each other, symbolizing the primordial union
24. For a major discussion of the symbolism of the "center," see which marked the beginning of the world. The communal
Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols (New York, 1969). meeting house or egbo often had a carved post or ekwom
Fig. 16. Section through a Fali granary in the northern Cameroon
(after J.-P. Lebeuf, "Labrets et greniers des Fali," Bulletin I F A N ,
15 [1953]).
38. Raymond Lecoq, Les Bamileke (Paris, 1953). p. 65. See also
Paul Gebauer, "Architecture of Cameroon," African Arts, 5, 1
(1971). 39. Peter B. Hammond, Yatenga (New York, 1966), p. 168.
Fig. 21. The Friday mosque at Bobo Dioulasso, Upper Volta (photo: author).
projecting, like engaged pillars, from the wall surfaces of formation was thus no more than a reflection of the way in
sacred structures, such as granaries, within the compound which libations addressed to the ancestors at the threshold
itself. They are the hallmark of the so-called "Sudanese of the doorway were transformed into the saraka or alms
stylewin African architecture; more important, they are a giving among those cultures which adopted Islam.40
symbol of continuity and fertility. Among the Dogon, the Just as Islam, in its role of urban catalyst, generated the
earthen pillar is used both to mark the ancestral shrines unfolding of a new architectural imagery out of indigenous
deep in the cave recesses of the Bandiagara cliffs and to tradition, so the development of highly structured political
represent the mythical ancestors of the Dogon founding hierarchies among the Yoruba, the Fon, and the Ashanti
lineages, in the form of earthen finials above the faqade of instigated new architectural definitions of space. Since rul-
theginna, the residence of a Dogon elder or hogon. Among ing dynasties were validated by divine gift, and the political
the Tallensi, tall conical pillars located at the entrance ap- domain was in many ways the counterpart of the religious
proach are symbolic grave markers, while among the domain, there was a continuum from the sacred to the
Kassena two such tapering earthen pillars, enlarged, frame political realm. Instead of the earthen representations of
the opening into the compound's circumference wall. This genealogical ancestors, it was the mythological heritage
latter pair not only symbolizes the viability of a farming which formed the subject matter represented on palace
unit, but mediates the transition from a profane, unknown, walls and entrances. The brass plaques on the palace walls of
to a sacred, familiar realm (Fig. 20). the rulers of Benin, the earthen bas-relief sculptures on the
Eventually, under the impetus of Islam, these same an- pillars of the Fon palace at Abomey, as well as the arabesque
cestral pillars were transposed not only on to the multitude motifs on Ashanti shrines reflecting the rich proverbial lore
of Dyula mosques found in these regions, but on to the of the Akan peoples, while different in form are equivalent,
portal fagades of Djennt's urban architecture to become the
sarafa har or quoins (Figs. 21-22). The architectural trans- 40. Louis Tauxier, La Religion Bambara (Paris, 1927), p. 459.
Fig. 22. The classic DjennC potige
fagade with its flanking sarafa har,
or quoins (photo: Marli Sharnir).
in concept and function, to the sarafa har on the DjennC resentation of the primordial ancestry of the Dogon clans,
faqade. carved in horizontal registers on the door itself and em-
The sacred quality of the entrance is often extended, bodying the entire Dogon cosmology, by association re-
logically, to the means of closure itself: the door and its inforces the sacred quality of the entrance. By the same
lock. The best-known example, perhaps, is the wooden token and similar logic, the wooden carved lock itself
Dogon door, to be seen today in every respectable museum symbolizes the union of male and female, since fertility and
collection of African sculpture. The anthropomorphic rep- continuity are the counterpart of ancestry (Fig. 23).