This article addresses the range of architectural styles in sub-Saharan Africa. For a technical exploration of architecture as an art and as a technique, see architecture. For a discussion of the visual art of Africa, see African art. For a discussion of ancient Egyptian architecture, see Egyptian art and architecture. For a treatment of the later architecture of Egypt and other parts of North Africa, which were heavily influenced by Islam, see Islamic arts: Visual arts.
Of the buildings of the continent south of the Sahara, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are perhaps the best known. This complex of stone enclosures, particularly those popularly termed the elliptical building and the acropolis, was built on sites established as early as the 3rd century CE. The first Shona phase of building was probably begun six centuries later and continued until the 15th century, when, under the Mwene Matapa, or “Ravager of the Lands,” Zimbabwe reached its peak.
The architectural forms of Great Zimbabwe, however, are atypical of many African architectural styles. The site has a massive defensive wall and, included in the elliptical building, a conical tower of unknown purpose. It is also monumental in scale, having functioned as a royal citadel, and it has become a national symbol. While some of these features can be found in other examples of African building, they are rare, and the emphasis on Zimbabwe has overshadowed the great diversity of materials, forms, purposes, and uses characteristic of architecture elsewhere in Africa.
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The Arab and Amazigh (Berber) architecture of Egypt and North Africa has had an impact on African architecture south of the Sahara. Similarly, the states of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea have influenced architectural types in Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania, where the Muslim presence has also been strong. These influences are discussed below (see below Influences of Islam and Christianity).
General Characteristics
African architecture reflects the interaction of environmental factors—such as natural resources, climate, and vegetation—with the economies and population densities of the continent’s various regions. As stone is the most durable of building materials, some ancient stone structures survive, while other materials have succumbed to rain, rot, or termites. Stone-walled kraals from early Sotho and Tswana settlements (South Africa and Botswana) and stone-lined pit circles with sunken kraals for pygmy cattle (Zimbabwe) have been the subject of archaeological study. Stone-corbeled shelters and circular huts with thatched roofs were also recorded in the 20th century among the southern Sotho. Rectangular and circular stone farmhouses, unusual in being two stories, have been built by the Tigre of Eritrea and Sudan for centuries, while in Niger some Tuareg build square houses in stone.
Such exceptions apart, the overwhelming majority of Africa’s thousands of peoples in rural areas build in grasses, wood, and clay. Because of the impermanence of many of these materials, existing buildings, though based on forms many centuries old, are of relatively recent date. Where vegetation is largely confined to thin grazing cover, peoples are often nomadic, using tents of animal skins and woven hair for shelter. In the veld and less-forested areas, grasses are used as building material as well, being employed widely for thatch and mat roof coverings. Hardwoods in forest regions are used for building, as are bamboo and raffia palm. Earth and clay are also major building resources. Characteristic soils of Africa include semidesert chestnut earths and laterites (reddish residuals of rock decay), which are often low in fertility but easily compacted. Earth-sheltered houses are made by the Iraqw of Tanzania, and a number of peoples in Mali and Burkina Faso have partly sunken dwellings.
Ecological and demographic factors play an important part in building design. Soil erosion and overgrazing, as well as pressure on land as a result of population growth, have also contributed to migratory movements. The growth of urban centres led to wide-scale migration in the 20th and 21st centuries, and these migrations have had a profound effect on the dispersal of house types.
Geographic Influences
Nomads and pastoralists
As a consequence of their hunting and gathering economy, the San of the Kalahari move frequently. Some San scherms (shelters) are little more than depressions in the ground, but groups such as the !Kung build light-framed shelters of sticks and saplings covered with grass. Other hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza of Tanzania, live in dry savanna territory, which contains a wide range of game animals. Their domed dwellings of tied branches are given a thick thatch in winter. Some forest dwellers, such as the Bambuti of the Ituri Forest in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, are also hunter-gatherers. Their similarly constructed temporary shelters are interlaced with crossed sticks, over which mongongo leaves are layered.
Pastoral nomads follow defined routes, reducing the risk of overgrazing and enabling them to contact other nomadic groups. Camel-herding nomads such as the Kabābīsh of central Sudan use the traditional Bedouin tent, which consists of a rectangular membrane of strips of woven camel hair that are attached to webbing straps and secured with guys over rectangles of poles. A central row of four poles supporting curved ridge pieces reduces the possibility of damage to the tent. In Niger the Tuareg use a tent of superficially similar form, though the strips are made of goat skins sewn together. As many as 40 skins are required to complete each tent membrane. Farther south, Tuareg subgroups employ a structure similar to that used by many camel-herding nomads from as far away as Djibouti. Common to these people is the use of the pole frame in the form of a humped dome over which woven mats of grass or palm fronds are secured. Palm leaves are split by the Oromo of Somalia; Oromo women then weave strips of coloured cloth into the mat, with the patterned side laid over the frame in order to be visible within the tent, while on the outside the shaggy, rough fibres are exposed.
The cattle-herding pastoralists of Southern and East Africa settle for some years in one location. The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania construct an oblong, or sometimes square, low-domed hut some 20 feet (6 metres) long and at shoulder height from closely woven frames of thin leleshwa sticks and saplings. Arranged in a circle around the cattle enclosure, or manyatta, the frames are packed with leaves and plastered over with cattle dung, which acts as a deterrent to termites. The huts are aerodynamically designed to resist high winds, and the manyatta thicket boundary acts as a defensive barrier. A number of other tribes use a similar structure; the Barabaig of Tanzania, for example, build thornbush enclosures in the form of a figure eight, with one loop used as a kraal for the cattle and the other lined with huts with flat-roof frames.
In Southern Africa, the Zulu, the Swazi, and, in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, the Nguni construct frame domes, using concentric hoops. Others make a ring of poles inserted into the ground and brought together in a crest, either as a continuous curve (early Xhosa) or to a point (Sotho). These structures are expertly thatched; the Zulu domes, or indlu, have finely detailed entrances. Some Nguni types have layers of mats beneath for insulation, the covering thatch being brought to a decorative finial and the whole held down with a grass rope net to withstand strong winds.
Savanna kraals and compounds
Later houses of the Xhosa tend toward a consistent form—the rondavel, or cylindrical, single-cell house with a conical thatched roof. This type is prevalent throughout Southern Africa. Variants in the region include a low plinth or curb supporting a domed roof (some Swazi and Zulu), flattened domes or low-pitched cones on head-height cylinders, and high, conical roofs. Methods of construction also vary, though a common method is a wall with a ring of posts and infilling of wattles or basket weave packed and plastered with mud. Rings of posts may have packed earth infilling, and in more wooded regions walls may consist mainly of timber posts. Some southern peoples, including the Venda of northeastern South Africa and the Tswana of Botswana, build veranda houses with deep, thatched eaves supported by an outer ring of posts. The units are traditionally single-cell, undivided, and illuminated only from the doorway. Additional living space may be claimed from the exterior, with a semipublic space in the front and a private space, with hard-packed earthen floor, at the rear of the dwelling being used for food preparation, cooking, and other domestic occupations. Both spaces are bounded by a low wall. In many areas houses are dispersed; in others the kraal, with huts ranged around the perimeter of a large cattle enclosure (as among the Ila of Zambia), serves a defensive function against raiders and predators. In Namibia the kraal of the Ambo (Ovambo) people had an outer concentric ring leading to cattle pens, an inner fenced meeting place, and subdivisions for wives’, visitors’, and headman’s quarters.
Similar houses are constructed in the East African lakes region, where the form probably originated. Houses of considerable size are built by some Luo (near Lake Victoria) and Kuria (Tanzania) people, the former making extensive use of papyrus reeds from lake borders, using the thicker stems structurally and the leaves for thatching material. Luo homesteads are frequently ringed with hedges within which cattle are penned; fields extend beyond for the growing of cereals. Most of these Central African peoples construct granaries, often basket-shaped and basket-woven, raised on stilts to keep rodents away and placed beneath a thatched roof to keep them dry. Veranda houses are also built, and secondary thatched roof crests, which permit ventilation, are not uncommon.
Cylindrical houses are built by the majority of peoples in the savanna and semidesert regions of Sudan and western Africa. With less wood available, these are often constructed of mud in a coil pottery technique. It is customary to lay the mud spirally in “lifts” of approximately half a metre, allowing each lift to dry before adding the next. The Musgum of northern Cameroon once created spectacular homes from compressed sun-dried mud, although their tall conical dwellings with geometric raised patterns are no longer made today. The Batammaliba of Togo and Benin build elaborate two-story dwellings that are integrally connected with Batammaliba cosmogony and social order.
The characteristic settlement form in western Africa is the compound, a cluster of units linked by walls. Many compounds are circular in plan, but others, conditioned sometimes by the uneven terrain, are more complex. Earthen wall and floor surfaces are plastered smooth and dried to a rocklike hardness. These surfaces are often decorated with coloured clays (as are the homes of the Bobo in Burkina Faso and the Nankani in Ghana) and, in some instances, sculpted with ancestral motifs (such as the Kassena do in Burkina Faso). Flat roofs with parapets are also built, sometimes in the same compound, supported either independently by a log frame of forked posts and cross members or by joists inserted into the clay walls; hollowed half-log gargoyles throw off water during seasonal rains. Dwelling huts, granaries and other stores, and pens for goats and fowl are built within the same compound.
Dwellings of approximately rectangular plan, though often with curved and molded corners, are also found among the cylindrical units, and some peoples, such as the Lobi of Côte d’Ivoire, build compounds with straight walls. Throughout the western savanna region the trend has been toward rectangular-plan houses, largely because of Islamic influence from the north (see below Influences of Islam and Christianity) and contact with rainforest peoples from the south.
Forest dwellings
To the south of the savanna is a thinly populated strip, possibly depleted by the slave trade, beyond which lie the rainforests. These regions, especially in Nigeria, are among the most densely populated parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and they have had contact with European traders since the 16th century. The rectangular-plan houses of the Akan peoples, including those of the Asante in Ghana, date to a period before the 16th century, but they may have replaced an earlier savanna form. Until the 20th century, Asante houses were constructed primarily of pole frames with mud infilling. Such houses were finely decorated, in mud molded over grass armature, with fluid motifs. In the early 21st century, rural Asante houses were often constructed of “swish,” or pisé de terre (earth rammed into a wooden formwork), raised in lifts. The pitched or hipped roof is covered in thatch or, more frequently, with corrugated iron. Though the materials have changed, the basic form remains in the village compounds: four independently constructed rectangular-plan structures forming the sides of a courtyard. Yoruba compounds in Nigeria are somewhat similar, but the four sides are often under one continuous roof. Rain is collected from the roofs, and the plan is therefore often compared to the Roman impluvium, or cistern, house plan. Farther south in Nigeria the Igbo and related peoples traditionally built rectangular houses, often with open fronts facing a courtyard and surrounded by enclosing mud walls. Similar rectangular buildings with thatched hipped roofs are used by other rainforest peoples, including some groups of the Fon in Benin and the Baule and Dan of Côte d’Ivoire. But in regions where widely dispersed peoples, such as the Senufo of Côte d’Ivoire, border the savanna, cylinder-and-cone houses with deep thatched eaves are common.
Closer to the coast of western Africa, some peoples build houses raised on stilts. Most notable are those built in the lakeside village of Ganvié in Benin. The buildings are constructed of mangrove poles, a material also used by coastal Swahili-speaking people in Kenya. In some coastal regions, such as that occupied by the Duala in Cameroon, houses are constructed of bamboo, though they are mud-plastered. Bamboo—which grows to heights of more than 49 feet (15 metres) in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and parts of Central Africa—is used by many peoples as a building material. Its straight stalks, used as screen walls, are lashed with thin wood strips to produce crisp rectangular houses with peaked thatched roofs, as among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania. Bamboo construction reached its apogee in the tall houses of the Bamileke and other peoples of western Cameroon, who constructed steep prefabricated pyramidal roofs raised on platforms with verandas; the whole structure frequently reached 33 feet (10 metres) or more, with male and female ancestor figures often flanking the doors. Tall conical houses, made of bamboo poles joined at the crest and then leaf-thatched, were built by the Ngelima and the Panga of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Raffia palm is also used by the Bamileke and the neighbouring Bafut and is an important material among the Kongo of Angola and the Bushongo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The most impressive of these structures are the rectangular, pitched-roofed meeting halls of the Mangbetu of Congo; their houses are of the cylinder-and-cone type, mud-plastered and geometrically decorated. Large meeting houses are found in Nigeria among the Yakö and other peoples. On special occasions pole-frame shelters are constructed with monopitch roofs loosely covered with grass or palm fronds. Awnings are also used, and among the Asante immense umbrellas shade dignitaries and members of royal families.
Palaces And Shrines
In the 19th century the earth-and-stone palace of the Asantehene (king) of the Asante empire at the capital city of Kumasi covered some five acres (two hectares). It had many courtyards with verandas and open screens and more than 60 rooms with steep thatched roofs. The exterior walls of the palace were covered with rich embellishments in raised clay, patterns that may be related to Islamic calligraphy. Shrine houses were also constructed. Little of the palace survived the Asante wars and a punitive expedition by the British in 1874.
More extensive was the great palace of the oba of Benin City, Nigeria. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was as large as a European town, with many courts surrounded by galleried buildings, their pillars encased in bronze plaques. Roofs were shingled, and there were numerous high towers topped with bronze birds. Benin City was burned by the British in 1897. The Yoruba of western Nigeria are also an urban people. Their towns traditionally have as their centre the afin (palace) of the oba, from which radiate broad roads dividing the town into quarters, each with its compound of a subordinate chief. Some afins in the precolonial era were of great size, encompassing much of the surrounding bush; the afin of Oyo, the capital of the Oyo empire (17th and 18th centuries), was reported to cover 640 acres (260 hectares). The palace buildings were substantially built, and the open verandas were supported by carved caryatid pillars. Yoruba towns still have palaces; though the architecture is often Westernized, traditional courtyards, recreation grounds, and high surrounding walls persist.
The zimbabwes (“stone houses”) built in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Rozwi kings of southern Central Africa were royal kraals, an example being the citadel of Chief Changamire at Khami, Zimbabwe. Ruins at Regina, Nalatali, and Dhlodhlo (also in Zimbabwe) all display fine mortarless stonemasonry worked with chevron patterns and banded colours. Many African palaces were larger and often better-crafted versions of the traditional dwelling type, raised on hillocks or plinths. Such were the palaces of the kabaka (king) of the kingdom of Buganda, including the great barnlike thatched dome with an open reception veranda at Mengo, near present-day Kampala, Uganda. Other palaces were royal compounds, such as that of the fon (chief) of Bafut, Cameroon, which within a high fenced enclosure contained separate quarters for the older and younger wives, dormitories for the adolescent sons, houses for retainers, stores, meeting places, a shrine house and a medicine house, burial structures for former chiefs, and structures for secret societies.
While many African peoples have or have had kings, not all have resided in palaces, and not all have been divine. Some peoples have no recognized chiefs or leaders at all. Religion, however, plays an essential part in the life of all African societies. Among some, such as the Fali of Cameroon or the Nankani of Burkina Faso, spiritual symbolism informs every part of their dwelling types. Among the most-studied peoples in this respect are the Dogon who live on the rockfall of the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali. It has long been believed that the Dogon perceive each dwelling compound anthropomorphically as a man on his side in the act of procreation. The man’s head is associated with the hearth, the stores with his arms, the stables with his legs, the central workroom with his belly, and the grinding stones with his genitalia. From the individual parts of the house to the entire village plan, each element has a religiously symbolic association, and totemic sanctuaries with markedly zoomorphic form are built and dedicated to the ancestors of the living. It should be noted, however, that the scholarship of Marcel Griaule and his followers, who documented the complex cosmogony expressed in such plans, has been open to debate and revision. Among the structures significant to the Dogon are the rounded sanctuaries dedicated to the ancestors, covered with rectilinear checkerboard designs; granaries with wooden doors and locks carved with multiple human figures; and the men’s meeting house, or togu na, a low structure with a stacked millet roof and structural posts.
Monumental temple architecture is rare in Africa, for in animist religions spirits may reside in trees, carved figures, or small, simple shrines. Shrine rooms containing votive objects and dedicated to spirits or ancestors are common, however; like the shrine house of the Asante, with its rooms for an orchestra and the officiating priest, many such houses are similar to the dwelling compound. A more notable structure is the elaborate mbari house of the Owerri Igbo of Nigeria. A large open-sided shelter, square in plan, it houses many life-size painted figures sculpted in mud and intended to placate the figure of Ala, the earth goddess, who is supported by deities of thunder and water. The remaining sculptures—often witty—are of craftsmen, officials, Europeans, animals, and imaginary beasts. Because the process of building is regarded as a sacred act, mbari houses, which once took years to build, were left to decay, and new ones were constructed rather than old ones maintained. Contemporary mbari structures are formed from cement, and the symbolism of decay and renewal has therefore been lost.
