Construction Technology and Architecture

Sources

Stone Circles and Monoliths. The stone circles of the Senegal-Gambia region, dated circa 750, were produced to honor kings, chief’s, and perhaps other important individuals. Iron laterite (naturally cemented iron-filled sandstone), plentiful in this area, was the source material for these great stones. The numbers of stone circles are particularly high in this region, outstripping concentrations in other parts of the world. Stones number from ten to twenty-four per group or circle. Shapes of pillars are generally round, though some are square or rectangular, and others taper toward the top. There are also circles with V-shaped stones (known as lyre stones). Heights of stones usually remain the same within a particular circle. However, stones in different circles may range in height from twenty-four to ninety inches, in diameter from twelve to forty inches, and in weight up to ten tons. The West Africans transported the stones from the quarry, where they probably had been shaped, using logs for rollers or perhaps hammock-style slings. In the latter case many people would have been required. Next, workers had to tip and lift the piece into place by hand or with a rope system. The stone-raising systems had already been used elsewhere in West Africa. Farther south and east, in Ife (Nigeria), stands an eighteen-foot-high monolith of granite in honor of Oranmiyan, the founder of the Benin line of rulers and the kingdom of the Yoruba Oyo. Its estimated date is before 1000. Though intertribal trade may have allowed the communication of stone-raising techniques, it is more likely that the local community generated their own systems.

Traditional Settings. Traditional West African construction technology and architecture met the needs of people in a wide variety of climates with an extensive range of building-material resources, including branches, sun-dried mud, stone, textiles, and grasses. All buildings were the work of cooperative design and labor.

Nomadic Shelter-Building. Operating in areas in what is now Mauritania and Mali and relying on the foraging needs of their animals in the savanna and near-desert areas, the Tuaregs and other nomadic peoples of North and West Africa had to adapt their housing to the herd’s requirements. The building, dismantling, and reassembling of the portable, sturdy, durable, wind-resistant homes of the nomadic pastoralists of the Sahel (semiarid pastureland) and Sahara were (and remain) the work of the women. Built of flexible wooden (probably acacia) branches lashed together to make aerodynamically sound frames, then covered with skins, mats, or lighter textiles made of twenty-inch widths of camel’s or goat’s wool sewn together into a wide cloth, the desert dwellings had to resist the harshest winds and sandstorms. Shelters with a grass dome or conical roof continued to be used for centuries in the Sahel, even to the present.

Earthen Dwellings in Settled Communities. The functional adaptation of many West Africans before the 1300s in constructing traditional cylindrical huts with

rounded conical or dome-shaped roofs is striking. Often made of mud, the most easily shaped and molded of indigenous building materials, traditional earthen buildings in West Africa were round or ovoid. Commenting on this shape, architects and mathematicians have pointed out that the dimensions of a round building not only reflect nature’s forms but also provide larger actual living area per perimeter measure than square or rectangular buildings. Mud walls also lend themselves to surface design and decoration. Roofs were usually heavily thatched dried grasses over a branch frame. The family compound in a settled farming village would often consist of several round rooms, each with separate purposes, looking inward to a compound courtyard; the rooms were connected by curving wall segments. Depending on the degree of extension of the family, these compounds could be small or large and complex.

Conical Thatched Roof. The conical thatched roof is a technology that has continued for centuries and remains today in Togo and other West African countries. First, the sides of the house are built up—whether of laterite adobe mud, stone and mud, or of flexible and strong acacia branches and mud daub. Then, the cone shape is begun with three branches tied together at one end, and spread apart at the other end, with the wide ends set on top of the walls. More vertical branches are added to complete the cone shape. Next, approximately six-foot-tall straw bundles are tied with rope into a continuous mat. The thickest part of the bundle mat is what will become the bottom of the mat on the roof. The mat is rolled up and hoisted to the top of the walls, unrolled, and formed around the cone of branches. The steep pitch of the cone of thatch allows heavy rains to escape and not linger in the straw mat; however, it still must be replaced every two years. Ample headroom and ceiling height for allowing heat to rise above the human height level are available since the cone of thatch needs no truss. In other communities, such as the Dogon, the entire roof—cone plus thatch—is assembled before being lifted to the housetop.

Dogon Architecture. A notable exception to the widely used circular or oval-shaped buildings (and entire compound) is the design and construction of the Dogon peoples. In their second homeland, the highlands, nearly two hundred miles south of the Niger River bend and the Tellem cave area, the Dogon residences are square-rectangular, taller than wide, with cone-shaped roofs. Moreover, these are set high up in the mountains for the safety of the community.

Stone Dwellings. Referring to the non-Muslim part of the capital city of the Kingdom of Ghana a few years before 1067, al-Bakri said it was called al-Ghaba (Arabic for “forest”) and its houses were made of stone and acacia wood. The king’s palace was, like his subjects’, a group of similar domed houses but with the addition of a wall around the structures. Further, al-Bakri noted, the priests or diviners lived in houses with domes, too, but near the thickets and woods. Perhaps these woods were where some of them extracted their medicines.

Islamic Influence. During his trip to Mecca in 1324, Mansa Musa formed a friendship with Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, a Moor from Andalusia who was both an architect and a poet. When Mansa Musa returned to the Kingdom of Mali, he invited the Moor to accompany him. Al-Sahili did so and designed the Djingereyber (Great Mosque) in 1327 and a palace for the king. The mosque was described by the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun as “a square building with a dome” with an exterior with plaster and patterns decorated in colors. Among all the round buildings of the Western Sudan, the flat walls and square (or rectangular) shape of Islamic architecture stood out. Banco, the material with which it was built, was soil mixed with wood, dried grass, and other fiber allowed to dry in the sun. In the absence of adequate stone for building materials, banco was often the material of choice in West Africa. The contributions of al-Sahili’s construction technology and architectural gifts to West Africa are not only the shape of the buildings but also the horizontal wood projections coming out of the exterior walls. These torons were developed for hanging scaffolding when adobe mud walls needed repair after the rainy season. Al-Sahili also designed a mosque in Gao, the first building in which fired brick was used in West Africa south of the Sahara. Overall, the adaptability of the Islamic architecture to the region’s climate may have been less effective compared to the indigenous architecture. However, the large size needed for the prayer center for hundreds, and later thousands, of converts to Islam might not have been accommodated by an enlarged version of the indigenous architecture.

THE IMUHA (TUAREG) CLANS

Pastoralists and semipastoralists, the Imuha (Tuareg) clans in the West African desert and Sahel (semiarid pastureland) have since circa 1000 B.C.E. built, disassembled, and rebuilt their dwellings each time they have moved to different areas for food and forage. Their homes are made of a lashed framework of acacia covered with cloth and/or leather. Built with space acuity in mind (the efficient use of space in a dwelling or other building), the shelters must protect extended families from desert heat, wind, and sandstorms. Ibn Khaldun in Kitab al-’Ibar wa-diwan al-mubtada wa-’l-khabar fi ayyam al-*arab wa-l-’ajam wa-’l-barbar (The Book of Examples and the Register of Subject and Predicate [or, of the Origin and History], on the Days of the Arabs, the Persians, and the Berbers, 1374-1378 C.E.) refers to the “veil-wearers” (the men cover their faces below the eyes with cloth), calling the different clans in West Africa by the following names: Gudala, Lamtuna, Watrikay Masufa, Lamta, and Targa. These Berber-speaking camel breeders were the original Imuha peoples. At the time of his writing in the late fourteenth century, the clans served as a buffer for the Western Sudanic kingdoms against Arab invaders from the north. These nomads were also known to hold hostages and to demand tribute from travelers on the trans-Saharan trade routes. In later years, the federations of clans included the Kel Tademaket who moved around the Timbuktu region; the Iwellemmeden Kel Ataram who were based around what is present-day Menaka; the Kel Ayr, dark-skinned peoples near the Ayr region; the Kel Adrar in the Adras N-Foras mountain area of what is now northern Mali; and the Kel Geres, the most democratic of all the clans, located south of the Kel Ayr. Throughout the centuries the women have had complete responsibility for the design, building, and seasonal dismantling and rebuilding of their dwellings.

source : Ibn Khaldun, “The Book of Examples …” / “Kitab al’Ibar …,” in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, translated by J. F. P. Hopkins and edited by Nehemia Levtzion and Hopkins (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 317-342.

Labelle Prussin and others, African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

Salt-Block Buildings. Buildings and city walls composed exclusively of salt blocks were unusual construction phenomena found in the salt-mining desert town of Taghaza. Indeed, all the buildings in this town, even the mosque, were composed only of blocks of salt. Camel skins usually made the roofs. Salt was so valuable to the people of the kingdoms of Ghana and Mali and south of them that its reported prices ranged from 100 dinars per camel-load to an even trade, weight for weight, for gold. Salt to those in desperate need for themselves and their livestock was, literally, worth its weight in gold, yet buildings were made of it in the desert, when it was the only plentiful wall-building material available.

Benin City Walls. In what appears to be a response to slavers and other marauders, around 1450 the people of Benin made an enormous, highly organized effort to produce an effective defense system. The community dug a massive ditch and built banked-earth walls more than fifty-seven feet high (17.4 meters) and nearly seven miles long (11.6 kilometers). Historians estimate that it would have taken many thousands of people working more than ten hours per day if the defenses were finished in one dry season. Moreover, several other local villages wanted the same defense and so were connected to Benin and one another with similar ditch and earthen-wall systems.

Potsherd Pavement. Around 1000 the city of Ife constructed paved sidewalks or passageways and courtyards of a common material. Shards of terra-cotta pottery were wedged together on their edges in carefully placed rows. The origin of the urban improvements, according to Yoruba lore, occurred when Queen Oluwo became annoyed with dirt getting on the edges of her robes. More than 750 years later, the Frenchman Pierre Tresaguet used a similar idea, constructing roads by putting fieldstones on edge, instead of flat, and covering them with layers of crushed rock. His work was considered “pioneering” to the Europeans because, unlike Roman road design, it put the weight of foot, horse, wagon, and carriage on a well-drained subsoil, not stone slabs, and was much more economical both with time and materials. The famed English road builder, John McAdam, later modified Tresaguet’s technique.

Sources

Momodou Camara, “Stone Circles of the Gambia” (13 October 2002) <http://home3.inet.tele.dk/mcamara/stones.html>.

Graham Connah, African Civilizations—Precolonial Cities and States in Tropical Africa: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Ibn Khaldun, “The Book of Examples …” / “Kitab al’Ibar …” in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, translated by J. F. P. Hopkins, edited by Nehemia Levtzion and Hopkins (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 317-342.

Baba Kiabou, “Timbuktu: The Mythical Site” (12 October 2002) <http://whc.unesco.org/whreview/article7.html>.

Levtzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” in History of West Africa, volume 1, edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (New York: Longman, 1976), pp. 114-151.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Ife, Pre-Pavement and Pavement Era” (13 October 2002) <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ife/hd_ife.htm>.

Kelly Jon Morris, “Tin and Thatch in Togo,” in Shelter, edited by Shelter Publications (Bolinas, Cal.: Shelter, 1973), p. 10.

Elizabeth Newhouse, ed., The Builders: Marvels of Engineering (Washington, D.C.: Book Division of National Geographic Society, 1992).

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Labelle Prussin and others, African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

Norbert Schoenauer, 6,000 Years of Housing, revised (New York: Norton, 2000).

Frank Toker, “Learning from Architecture, II: What Only History Can Determine” (13 October 2002) <http://www.pitt.edu/~tokerism/0040/syl/learning.html>.

UNESCO, “African Nomads” (13 October 2002) <http://whc.unesco.org/exhibits/afr_rev/africa-c.htm>.

Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture (Boston: Prindle, Weber & Schmidt, 1973).