The Expressive Dimensions of Yoruba Architecture

African indigenous architecture has always been something of a misnomer. Ethnologists in the 19th century and anthropologists and art historians for much of the 20th found it a stone of offence. Few were as keen of sight as the German, Leo Frobenius, who, though approximately a man of his age, was often perceptive. Frobenius recorded fragments regarding the buildings and funerary structures of the cities and towns he visited on the West Coast (among the Yoruba and the Nupe, for instance), providing sketches and photographs.

There was an established (European) conception of what architecture was and ought to be. It was believed that to call African vernacular buildings ‘architecture’ was to do injustice to the word and it was like hanging too heavy a burden on the necks of the buildings themselves—God forbid the cheap things crumble. Since they were seemingly unsophisticated buildings (their complexity not been immediately evident), it was better to call them ‘mud huts’, ‘shelters’, or, as Julius F. Gluck phrased it, ‘preforms of architecture.’ Preforms because they were rudimentary conceptions, faint, inaudible traces of soul, conceived and brought forth in the unconscious. In short, the best term, the preferred, was ‘primitive architecture’.

The impermanent nature of indigenous African architecture was one reason for that attitude. Architecture had to be a monumental statement; it had to remain. That meant it had to be made of durable materials. Though ‘Yoruban’ and Igbo houses could stand for decades, compared to brick houses, they were more vulnerable to time. Then there was the remoteness of these structures: in 1910, when Frobenius went around Yorubaland, the face of West Africa had begun to change. He complained more than once about corrugated roofs in Ibadan. ‘The European veneer which here and there has not even stopped short at the introduction of horrible roofs of corrugated iron, gets thicker in the neighbourhood of the railway station, and makes it difficult to distinguish what really is original,’ he wrote in one place. He was more pleased about Ile-Ife, stating his distaste for the growing houses built in Lagos by repatriated slaves from Cuba, Brazil and Sierra Leone:

The hateful symptoms of modern, negro, Lagos-born, mushroom greatness, as well as the traces of real decadence, are very rarely indeed observable. The spacious compounds of patriarchal ownership are not yet swept away there to make room for newcomers and their ridiculous affectations.

They were remote in another sense. The absence of a literate culture, which meant that the people kept no blueprint of these structures, was a problem. Furthermore, to call them architecture would be to elevate them into the domain of art, and, though the buildings had aesthetic aspects (doors and wooden beams with carved symbols), art historians were reluctant to bestow the term—not just on African indigenous architecture but also on its ‘art’. For good reason in some cases. For instance, Robert P. Armstrong, in The Affecting Presence, argued that ‘art’ raises questions of what is and is not art, questions of what beauty is and of what standards to measure it by, that end up distracting from the object to be looked at. He came up with ‘affecting things’, ‘affecting events’ and ‘the affecting presence’ as descriptive terms. An affecting thing is an intentionally designed cultural object capable of eliciting a genuine feeling from those who come into contact with it. For Armstrong, Amos Tutuola’s books are, in their strange impossible undulation, affecting presences made manifest: but West African indigenous architecture was not.

As architect and Africanist, Labelle Prussin, puts it in her 1974 essay, ‘Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture,’ ultimately, the issue was born, ‘of a marriage between conceptual fallacy and Western ethno- and egocentrism.’ As well as, one could argue, a peculiar failure of imagination. Scholarship would have to change before a serious and careful, less presumptuous reading of indigenous African architecture began to emerge.

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