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The Expressive Dimensions of Yoruba Architecture

February/March 2025Nigeriavol9-no1
Yoruba

Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

The Expressive Dimensions of Yoruba Architecture

While the form of Yoruba architecture has changed, the idea of the agbo ilé has not gone away.
Yoruba

Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

The Expressive Dimensions of Yoruba Architecture

While the form of Yoruba architecture has changed, the idea of the agbo ilé has not gone away.

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. 

THE FORM OF YORUBA ARCHITECTURE

Until the mid-twentieth century, Yoruba people lived in ‘agbo ilé’—a conjugation of houses that formed what Frobenius described as ‘astonishingly large compounds.’ Each compound consisted of a number of houses (three and four were common). Each house had a number of rooms whose door opened into a verandah that ran along the inner side of the compound. The high thatch roofs, held up by pillars of mud or posts of wood, draped down over the side of the buildings, providing covering for the verandah. In that section of the house, domesticities took place: women braided the hairs of their daughters, clothes were spun, things were mended, and things were carved. As it was for the carefree people of Ibadan, for whom the verandah was a ‘porch,’ it could also serve as a place for chilling or ‘lounging’. 

The rooms, for the safety of the houses, had no openings other than the entrance, which were short and trim. The doors could be drapes made with palm fronds or wooden slabs. Like the doors, the houses, in sync with the environment, were drawn from locally available materials. The walls, thick and considerably high, were of mud in the wattle-and-daub method. Straws were fitted into frames and mud was plastered on either side of the frames to make the walls. The straws were necessary for solidity and durability. Similarly, the ceilings were made of palm rafters overlaid with mud. Space existed between these and the roofs, where farm things and totems or personal artefacts were stored. The roofs were thatched with a variety of grasses or leaves (Samuel Johnson, pioneer Yoruba historian, noted three: bere, sege, and ekan). The flaps of the roofs extended over either side of the houses like low-hanging arms. The slanted posture of the roofs helped to avoid the retention of rainwater on the ceiling and to prevent leakages in the rooms. Rainwater poured out into the courtyard and from there found its way out of the compound or into an impluvium (a special feature in palaces). 

Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

The most important feature of Yoruba houses was the courtyard; it was at the heart of the compound. The breadth of the courtyard and the number of courtyards in any particular compound was a sign of status and standing in society. If a common man had one, a chief could have three. The courtyards of kings were reflective of a magnanimous disposition toward space that is no longer available today. Nigerian academic, G. J. Afolabi Ojo, recorded that some palatial courtyards were ‘as large as two standard football fields.’ The courtyards were often paved with potsherds—an innovation that originated from Ife, dated to the 10th century during the reign of Queen Luwo Gbagida, a female Oni. The pavements extended beyond the palace at a point in Yoruba history. 

Around the palace, there were walls 18 feet high, in some cases, and between the walls and the buildings inside the palace were ‘back forests’ or palace gardens. The Yoruba king had to stay secluded from common life, had to maintain a certain sanctity: the grand courtyards and forested backyards were there to serve as practical metaphors for his freedom. He could hunt animals, take fresh air, do worship on behalf of his people, all within the circumference of his palace, without feeling any constriction.

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BEYOND FUNCTIONALITY

Was there a philosophy behind the housing style of the Yoruba people? Did they feel themselves bound only by available materials and available technical know-how? Were the protruding thatch roofs over their mud buildings there merely to do the job of easing off the rain? Is there ‘a metaphoric potential’ (to borrow John Vlach’s phrase) or an expressive dimension to what they did with space? 

A house has to be functional; it has to shield and give comfort; it has to provide a kind of security. ‘Ilé ni àbọ̀ simi oko,’ as a Yoruba proverb goes. (‘Home is the place of rest after hours of toil on the farm.’) But ‘shelter’ itself is a metaphor and ‘security’ raises questions of what true security looks like. In the quoted proverb, the nature of ‘rest’ is not only physical. Home and farm are representative of two poles of experience for the Yoruba, life alternated between both geographies. Frobenius detailed the way the Yoruba man educated his son: 

Directly a little chap begins to run, his father takes him every morning to the farm. He carries him a little when he tires, but always takes care to make him put forth all his strength and thus increase it. When they get to the farm, he spreads a mat beside the plot of ground on which he is at work and puts the infant on it. It must at first look on and watch its father working. 

Soon, a little hoe was fashioned for the boy, who learned to make one mound to his father’s ten. The father, seeing the work was a little rough, straightened his child’s attempt, teaching the child to do better next time: 

When they get home again the boy is not allowed to run away and play with his young friends; but has to wait, sometimes for quite a while, until his father gives him leave. This will teach him to be obedient.

‘Ilé’ is both house and home. Two proverbs: ‘Ọmọ tí a kò kọ́, ni ń gbé ilé tí a kọ́ tà.’ (‘The untrained—literally, the ‘unbuilt’—child sells the house built by his parents.’) ‘Ilé là ti ǹ kó ẹ̀ṣọ́ ròde.’ (‘The virtues a child bears to the world are bequeathed in the home.’) The same word means both an edifice, the inanimate thing, and family, the hands that cultivate an individual. For the Yoruba, security and shelter are at once physiological and intensely psychological. 

In 1976, John Michael Vlach, a professor of American studies whose scholarship was concerned with African-American folk art (he passed in 2022), took Armstrong’s notion of continuity (representing an organic attitude, in this case, to architecture) and discontinuity (a synchronic attitude) in affecting works and applied it to Yoruba houses. Vlach argued that a ‘structure of tensions’ (Armstrong’s phrase) was inherent both in the style and structure of Yoruba architecture, one that was intensively continuous. He saw in them ‘a tendency for an inward focus of design elements.’ 

Vlach based his case on the centripetal (‘sociopetal’ is his word) nature of Yoruba society. The palace of a king sat in the middle of the town. New towns, as Johnson recorded, formed around a Baálẹ̀. The Baálẹ̀ served as the ‘attracting’ core around which ‘a cluster of huts’ formed. This cluster extended backwards and around the core but did not break from it. When the space which radiated from the core to the town walls was exhausted, the authorities had to be consulted. The walls were then torn down to make room. 

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The same principle is applied in each agbo ilé. In each house, a god. The patriarch’s room had a more stated roof and faced the single gate into the compound (the gates of the Oba’s palace overlooked the major market of each town); he was the lord of the compound, the oldest wife the mistress of the compound. However, the courtyard provided the spatial metaphoric expression of the principle of centrality in the home. A well-delineated space, there were shrubs at its centre—for measuring time and under which potions were kept. 

As the houses looked to the courtyard and the courtyard was a metaphor for—a presentation, not a representation, of—the attracting core around which the compounds sat, the ‘orísun’ of the town: the various members of the household, in the same way, looked to the patriarch, while the patriarch looked to a chief, who himself looked to the Oba or Baálẹ̀. ‘The Yoruba composition process,’ Vlach concluded, ‘essentially entails a reorganization of disparate units into an interlocking whole.’ 

The compound was a world within a world. It must have featured greatly in the education of the child. Other than the fact that light could not penetrate the rooms, during the day they were hot. The verandahs and the courtyards were active places. The two poles being farm and home, the enclosed environment was coded to instruct the child. On the farm he tried his hand at tilling the ground—he was allowed to fail safely there: the agbo ilé was the place for his dress rehearsal in preparation for life. He learned behavioural patterns, courtesy, discipline; he saw people playing their part in the earnest business of life and auditioned, having no idea what he was doing. 

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‘Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ wrote the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, ‘man is laid in the cradle of the house.’ In this essay (the first from The Poetics of Space), Bachelard designates the ‘oneiric house,’ the house of childhood from which our dreams and—especially—daydreams take their nourishment. The oneiric house is a space of intimacy, where, perhaps, intimacy itself was first cognized for the child-in-the-man—a space in a house, a room. 

A translation of Bachelard’s concept of the oneiric house to the agbo ilé: for the child raised in such a compound, his space of intimacy was contaminated by bodies, by hands, by a weave of beings in motion. He would not be able to remember the courtyard and the piazzas without remembering the faces of those who inhabited the space; his intimacy, his sense of what intimacy was, was forged; it came to being in the reality of close selves. 

The space defined his conception of intimacy. In turn, his proper (socio-culturally correct) understanding fitted him (like a new bungalow to an existing collection of houses) into society. He saw himself as belonging to a community, as one who communes; what he owned, he owned in communal trust. (Frobenius shared that in Ibadan, when someone sold him an artefact, after a while they came back to retrieve it because of a tongue-lash received from a member of the family, even when the object was clearly the possession of the one who sold it.) 

In this light, Wole Soyinka’s ‘Abiku’—the eponymous vulgar child—becomes a malformed child of a kind: wretched and impoverished, utterly lacking in true spirit. The child, not the mother, is in need of help. ‘You must know him / When Abiku calls again,’ the child boasts, but he knows nothing of the poetry of the home he has ambitions to torment. He sees fingers pointing him ‘near the way I came’ and not arms extended in the shape of an embrace (the agbo ilé itself has the look of arms extended in an embrace, to me). He never takes root long enough to come into intimate knowing of the home he is born into. He represents a discontinuous attraction, seeking to disrupt the order ‘sociopetally’ maintained in the household and in the community. The ‘wonderful,’ ‘half-bodied child’ in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, who comes out of a thumb and terrorizes his parents and everybody in ‘the house’ where the drinkard lives with his wife and in-laws (a disturbing arrangement in itself: a wife moves into her husband’s compound, not the other way round), is like Soyinka’s ‘Abiku’ in this respect—they lack cultural refinement. 

The agbo ilé might have been a way, too, to address the deep rivalries that stem from polygamy. Children born to different mothers by a father had to interface constantly with one another. Members of the household felt a responsibility toward each other, one that would not have held if they lived in separate spaces. The safety of a member was directly linked to that of the other members, as this Yoruba proverb attests: ‘Bi ará ilé ẹni ba njẹ kòkòrò búburú ti a ò sọ fun, hẹ̀rẹ̀-huru rẹ kò ní jẹ ki a sùn,’ which roughly translates to, ‘If you find a member of your household eating a bad thing and fail to correct him, be assured that his cries will hurt your sleep.’ 

The Yoruba had a high regard for the beautiful, and their buildings were expressive of aesthetic intent. Johnson, writing about Aganju, an Oyo king, said he was ‘a sovereign of an accomplished taste,’ who initiated verandahs with brazen posts and inaugurated a culture of hanging flowers during festivals. Gardens later formed a main part of the beauty projects that the palaces partly represented. Igi ose, Akoko, and a species of Ficus surrounded the palace, serving (in J. B. Falade’s words) as ‘self-contained paradises or sanctuaries’ for the kings. Frobenius was charmed by the fine lines of the houses and gave a description of the temple of Sango at Ibadan. What applied in the temple applied to the palaces: the posts that held up the roof had to please the eye. They usually stood seven, eight feet high, with two figures raised one above the other. Elegant relief sculptures of animals, mythic figures, of people attending to the quotidian, abounded. The carved doors of the Ekiti artist, Olowe of Ise, are well-known and remarkable for the high-relief subjects that looked completely, actively involved. 

Recently, Dr Adeyemi Akande, a lecturer of art history at the London Metropolitan University, speculated about a possible link between the thatched roofs of Yoruba houses and the bronze and terracotta sculptures. Fundamental to both, as he sees it, is the centrality of the ‘Ori’—the life force or personal spirit of an individual. William Fagg, the British curator and art historian, in 1963 (in Nigerian Images), saw that there was an ‘African proportion’ in the head to body dimension of the brass sculptures, a fact that has been considered a representation of the value the Yoruba accorded to the ‘orí.’ And, in a famous passage from The Voice of Africa (Vol. 1), ‘Oh! how often did I look with longing across the space which kept me from the beautiful high roofs of the great Yoruba houses which were thatched with leaves!’ Like an oversized stovepipe hat around the head of a child, the roofs wore the buildings. For Dr Akande, while the effort may have been ‘subliminal’, the Yoruba wanted to communicate the same value for the inner-head through the very pronounced coverings. As a case in point, we have word from the great Yoruba historian that ‘àrolé’ (heir, but literally one who roofs the house), derives from a tradition of replacing the roofing of a house after the father’s death by the eldest son. The ritual had to precede the son’s movement into the vacated room. 

THE WIND OF CHANGE

Some kind of change was inevitable. The corrugated roofs which Frobenius despised were common by the 1950s. They were preferred for their efficiency as shields from the weather. The mud houses, wearing these new caps, and sometimes plastered over with cement, gave the towns and villages an odd look. The oddness was made worse by the ilé pẹ̀tẹ̀ẹ́sì that shared the space with them. In some cases, side by side. In Abeokuta, Ogbomoso, Ibadan, the story building—two, three, or more (like the courtyard of previous years, the number of stories reflected wealth)—rose and covered the landscape. In more remote sections of the southwest (Igbeti is one example), the change was much slower. 

English education, urbanization, upward mobility in socio-economic terms (funded, in part, by the cocoa trade), Christianity and a shift toward monogamy and a conception of the nuclear family as fundamental—all contributed to the change. The fresh class of rich and fairly rich men wanted rooms with windows for the entrance of sunlight, windows with glasses in them, and balconies decorated with motifs that cast interesting shadows on the pavement in the evenings. The hybrid style of Afro-Brazilian architecture was available to use, though in most cases its grander and more eccentric aspects were minimized. 

Ake in Abeokuta is still dense with the vernacular type of architecture that replaced the indigenous one. Opposite the Alake’s palace stands the Centenary Hall, built in 1930 to commemorate a hundred years of the presence of the Egba people in Abeokuta. Around it are several other houses erected at about the same time, in the same Afro-Brazilian style. 

While the form of Yoruba architecture changed, it is remarkable that the idea of the agbo ilé (the feeling attached to it) did not go away. A man who told me most of the houses in the Wasimi area of Ake were built in the fifties also gave me the names of some of the compounds. Agbole Horo, Agbole Wasimi and Agbole Bayinbo were some of those he mentioned. Sadly, today, many of us live quite remote from the indigenous and the evolved forms, and even more remotely from the feeling at the heart of their metaphoric expressions⎈

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