1. Some Aspects of Nigerian Architecture

Author(s): Arthur M. Foyle

Source: Man, Vol. 53 (Jan., 1953), pp. 1-3

Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2793896

Accessed: 16-05-2019 08:25 UTC

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SOME ASPECTS OF NIGERIAN ARCHITECTURE* by ARTHUR M. FOYLE, A.R.I.B.A. Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London PAGAN HUTS I Mud is the universal building material in Nigeria, and lnowhere is it used to better advantage than among the Pagan tribes of the Jos Plateau. The landscape here is impressive, consisting of rolling downland, while here and there the ground rises higher in great masses of rock like huge cairns, worn smooth at the top through centuries of erosion. Pagan villages are invariably cleverly placed to take the utmost advantage of these natural features. Usually the top of a commanding hill is -chosen and the huts are perched on the flat upper surfaces of the gigantic jutting rocks whose sides are so steep that only one way of approach is possible. Often the siting is so skilfully con- trived that the village merges in the landscape so as to be hardly visible even from a short distance away, and the effect of concealment and security is completed by sur- rounding it with a thick, impenetrable cactus hedge, the actual entrance being carefully concealed from the intruder. These hedges must have been a formidable barrier against the slave-raiding Fulani horsemen, and in conjunction with the careful concealment of the villages account to a large degree for the survival of the Pagans as a compact group in the face of a hostile world. Near Vom the villages are usually composed of a series of clusters of beehive huts (Plate Aa), each group being arranged in an' informal way around a central open space which is used for communal activities. The irregular shapes left between huts are filled with rough stone walling, and there is but one low entrance with the thresh- old set well off the ground. Few of the huts are used for sleeping purposes, most of them serving as kitchens, granaries or buildings to house livestock. The huts themselves are built of solid mud and covered with a thatched roof (Plate Ad), the whole building being set up on squat stilts to minimize the danger from ants and to prevent the interior being flooded by the torrents of water which cascade down the rocky slopes during the rainy season. There are two main methods of constructing the roof. Either a light framework is made on the ground and then lifted into position to be thatched, or alternatively a domical mud roof is built with projecting pegs ready cast into it to receive the thatch as soon as the mud has hardened. The design of the granary varies considerably from vil- lage to village, sometimes being in the form of a separate hut with a removable conical roof, sometimes for greater safety being incorporated into one of the sleeping huts. At thejal (Aten) village of Ganawuri, near Vom, a distinctive type of hut is found which is worthy of a detailed descrip- tion. Here the granary is conceived as the most important room, and the hut is planned in such a way as to prevent any possibility of its contents being stolen; indeed, so intri- cate is the arrangement that the owner has some difficulty in reaching his own storehouse (fig. i). The circular granary, about five feet across, is placed in the centre of the ground floor so that its walls give added support to the first floor above. A small opening in the ceiling of the ground-floor room enables one to reach the first floor, from which, how- ever, the granary is still inaccessible. The first floor is divided into two rooms, and to get to the second one it is neces- sary to pass through an opening in the roof and to drop down through another opening. One is then back again in the first floor and the granary is at last accessible through a hole in the floor beneath. To convey the contents back to the ground floor it is necessary to go through the whole procedure in reverse. In building a hut of this kind it does not matter if the ground is irregular since the floor is raised slightly above it. The mud used for the walls is mixed with a little chopped straw or twigs to give it strength and gradually worked up by hand into the shape required (Plate Ac). As the wall is built up in thin layers it is dashed with water at frequent intervals to prevent it cracking in the sun and to ensure a gradual and hard setting. The work is carried out in short lifts and a rough area is left at the top of the finished work to act as keying for the next stage (Plate Ab). It is in the finishing-off of the hut that the craftsmanship of the builder is best seen. All corners and edges are neatly rounded so that the intersections of roof, walls and floors are well reinforced, while the roof is domed and stiffened by cross walls. The whole structure thus becomes truly monolithic and well able to withstand the gales that sweep across the Plateau in winter time. Internally shelves and seats and even the footholes for climbing up to the first floor are all built out of the solid mud and smoothed over to an almost streamlined appearance. This may be mud building in its simplest form, but great natural skill and ingenuity is shown in dealing with a most unpromising material. 4granr FIG. I. SECTION THROUGH A JAL GRANARY Drawvn by A. M. Foyle, I949 * Part of the substance of a communication to the Institute, 4 December, 1952. With Plate A and three textfigures IThis content downloaded from 146.230.187.153 on Thu, 16 May 2019 08:25:17 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

No. i Man JANUARY, I953 In recent times the general economic Nigeria has begun to have its effect secluded life. Opencast tin-mining an ever-increasing area of the Plateau, the amount of land available for some now find it difficult to maintain supporting communities. Many Pagans their cultivation for work in the mines, venture into the towns and take longer can the people of the Plateau mountain fastness upon the plains detachment, for the Colonial Development slowly but surely penetrating where failed to force their way. Thus the struction of some of the most interesting soon cease is a real one, and there records to be made of a type of through force of circumstances soon BENIN HOUSES The primitive huts of the Plateau may hardly deserve the name of architecture, but at Benin a highly developed method of mud building and a traditional and formal way of house-planning have combined to produce buildings of real architectural quality. At the height of its power Benin was the prosperous capital of a powerful empire. The city was laid out on a formal pattern of broad streets running at right angles to each other along which the houses were built to a regular frontage, a rare thing for Africa. After the punitive expedition of I897 the major part of the city was destroyed by fire, but in the modern town the ancient formal plan is still recognizable, while around the perimeter can be traced the outline of the great wall. This was originally double-palisaded with thick tree trunks, against which were laid spars five or six feet long fastened together and plastered over with red clay, while in front of it was a ditch and a hedge of thorns. The wall is now entirely ruined and in many places is so overgrown with bush that the traces of it are practically lost. Most of the buildings in the African town are little more than mean shacks, sub- divided over and over again with a separate family occupy- ing each compartment, but there still remain a few chiefs' houses planned in the traditional manner, while in the surrounding villages there are some important buildings which certainly antedate the Great Fire (Plate Ag). The houses of Benin chiefs are planned so that the rooms are arranged around a series of internal courtyards (Plate Ae), leading one into the other much on the pattern of the Classical Roman house with its sequence of atria. In the centre of the roof of each courtyard is a hole which serves to admit light and air, while immediately below it in the floor is a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away the storm water. Indeed, so striking is the resemblance to Roman examples that theories have been advanced linking the Benin plans with Roman sources via Egypt. The internal courtyard, however, is a typical Mediterranean feature and here is more likely to be due to Portuguese influence. Or perhaps the Portuguese simply introduced some formality into the courtyard arrangement which itself is common throughout southern Nigeria. The various courtyards may be with or without style of columns, depending on their size, but a common feature in them all are couches and shrines constructed entirely of mud, the surface of which is polished to glaze and has a remarkable quality of endurance even the oldest examples appear to have been but recently built. The sequence of courtyards culminates in the apartments of the chief, while on each side are arranged wives' and boys' quarters. Externally the mud walls are finished in a pattern horizontal ribs, a fashion of building which has practically died out, and old houses are usually recogniz- able by this kind of work. The roofs were originally thatch-it was through one of these roofs catching that the Great Fire began-but this has now been replaced practically everywhere by corrugated iron, althougll old method of providing a thatched coping on a wooden framework to the tops of courtyard walls persists. In contrast to Yoruba and Ibo houses the roof construction is of heavy timbers carefully framed together around the opening in the roof, and they are sometimes ornamented with carving. Doors and their jambs and the wooden posts supporting the peristyle around the larger courtyards are often ornamented in the same way. Behind the rather unimpressive exterior (Plate Af) of the house of Chief lyase the Younger lies one of the best preserved examples of a chief's house still to be found in the city, although various alterations have been made to it from time to time, particularly to the street frontage where a small brick portico has been added. The general lines of the plan (fig. 2) show a central block in which there is the main sequence of courtyards and apartments, surrounded on each side by rooms of lesser importance for the women- folk and the boys, while the odd corners are taken up by numerous small rooms without windows which are used for storage. In this particular house the courtyards are small, being little larger than room size, and the first con- tains the shrine of Erha, the Paternal or Ancestral Altar. On it stands a row of brass-plated wooden heads, shown wearing coral-bead collars, in frout of a line of rattle sticks. 1*X Cl *lU D F100 I L.r W L> FIG. 2. PLAN OF THE HOUSE OF CHIEF IYASE THE YOUNGER, BENIN 2This content downloaded from 146.230.187.153 on Thu, 16 May 2019 08:25:17 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

JANUARY, I953 Man Nos. i, 2 The next courtyard contains two the third is the shrine of Orunmila, (fig. 3), the most imposing in the of a series of recesses like pigeon in chessboard fornmation and stretching ceiling. These recesses are typical particular house abounds in them, the chief's couch personal charms and them have been let pots and kitchen the narrow walk with patterns and from Benin mythology strands of coral and Benin builders are and there are several well repay detailed of much larger above and one example has a peristyle of squat mud columns covered with figures in relief work running round them in parallel bands, while others have Brazilian Classical loggias (cf. MAN, I952, i65) running across the whole of the frontage. Unfortunately the traditional methods of building in mud are fast dying out and no more houses of this kind are likely to be built in the future, while many of those that remain are now becoming dilapidated, for after a certain time the cost of maintaining a mud building becomes prohibitive. When this happens the doors and windows are stripped out for re-use and the building is left to tumble into ruin. In her long history Benin has been rebuilt manv times, and one traveller in the eighteenth century describes great areas of waste land in the centre of the city covered with the ruins of houses so that those that remained 'stood far apart like poor man's corn.' That the same con- ditions prevail at present need not be regretted, for the growing commercial prosperity of Nigeria will ensure that a new Benin will arise on the ruins of the old. What is a matter of concern, however, is that no accurate records have yet been made of a method of building and a system of planning which is without parallel in the whole of Nigeria. FIG. 3. THE SHRlNE OF ORUNMILA IN THE HOUSE OF CHIEF IYASE THE YOUNGER, BENIN EKEIGOROIGORO: A GUSII RITE OF PASSAGE* by PHILIP MAYER Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa 2 Ekeigoroigoro is a rite centring on the revelation of images. It is sometimes loosely called 'the last of girls' initiation mysteries (chinyangi),' but though like those it is a mystery revealed by adolescent girls, it is separate both in performance and in function.' The initiation mysteries proper are revealed to one or more novices on a night called esubo, while they are being secluded after circum- cision or clitoridectomy. Each sex has its own mysteries which it jealously conceals from the other. Ekeigoroigoro, on the other hand, is organized without reference to any particular novice or novices; it is in charge of a different team of instructors; it is revealed to both sexes; it is wit- nessed an indefinite time after the completion of initiation proper. Only in one respect does it add to the far-reaching advance in status already gained by initiation: nobody should conclude marriage by the enyangi ceremony with- out having witnessed ekeigoroigoro. This does not mean that without having seen it he or she cannot marry. Marriage (by transfer of bridewealth) can take place any time after initiation; the enyangi ceremony, a last solenm ratification, need not be held until many years later, or even at all. If a person who happens never to have seen it * With 3 text figures 3This content downloaded from 146.230.187.153 on Thu, 16 May 2019 08:25:17 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms