Architecture in Northern Ghana: A Study of Forms and Functions

By Labelle Prussin

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520324978

Labelle Prussin

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Architecture in Northern Ghana

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS /BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1969

Architecture in Northern Ghana

A STUDY OF FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

/ BY LABELLE PRUSSIN

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Copyright © 1969 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-84789

Designed by Douglas Nicholson

Printed in the United States of America

To Rachel and Deborah

FOREWORD

We shape our buildings and they shape us.

—Winston Churchill

Man is a builder. He takes the materials supplied by nature, applies to them the crafts and engineering skills he has become master of, and fabricates for himself an artificial environment that satisfies his creature comforts, meets his social requirements, and fulfills his aesthetic tastes and religious sentiments. In turn, by shaping his environment he structures his social relationships and reinforces his cultural proclivities, for the circularity that characterizes all cultural matters, wherein cause becomes effect and effect cause, is particularly manifested in the buildings man creates.

The significance of architecture in the character of primitive life has long been recognized: the pioneering study by Louis Henry Morgan, Houses and HouseLife of the American Aborigines, is an anthropological classic. Morgan understood, better than most who have followed him, that the study of housing should be sociological, not technological. As Paul Bohannan remarks in his introduction to the recent edition of Morgans book, Morgan raises the basic problem: What does domestic architecture show anthropologists … about social organization, and how does social organization combine with a system of production, technology and ecological adjustment to influence domestic and public architecture?

Yet the anthropology of architecture remains primitive. There have been practically no attempts, writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, to correlate the spatial configurations with the formal properties of the other aspects of social life. Like others, Lévi-Strauss has given attention to village plan in his description of the Bororo in Tristes Tropiques (1964). Fred Eggan has shown how architecture reflects the social system among the western Pueblos; Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen explain how it expresses the cosmogenic view of the Dogon culture; and Edward T. Hall tells how architecture reveals man’s inner view of social relationships. But such attempts to elucidate the social, cultural, and ideological aspects of man’s efforts to give form to space are rare; more frequently architecture in nonliterate societies is treated as a part of technology.

Architecture is an aspect of culture which mediates between man and his environment; it therefore has an ecological, as well as a social and a cultural, significance. Since man must find his building materials in nature, the type of structures built in areas where transportation is limited is determined by what is available. Because they offer protection from the vicissitudes of the environment, structures reflect meteorological and other external conditions that offer the principal hazards or discomforts of life. And, for historic societies, important among the hazards to which structures must be adapted is the presence of predatory neighbors. Military considerations have been influential in the development of the architecture of historic societies, and there is no reason to believe that it has been otherwise among unlettered peoples.

If anthropological literature on primitive architecture is scanty, the architects’ contribution to the subject is virtually nil. Movements that have arisen in other areas of aesthetic expression, notably the plastic arts and music, where an appreciation of the quality of native arts was followed by a response to their inspiration, have had no counterpart in the realm of architecture. A few works, such as Bernard Rudolfsky’s Architecture without Architects (1965), are steps in that direction. Articles like Cardwell Ross Anderson’s in viii

the A.I.A. Journal (1961) and J. Marston Fitch and Daniel P. Branch’s in the Scientific American (1960), though more academic in approach, hardly constitute the beginnings of an anthropology of architecture.

If an anthropology of architecture is to be established, it must be done by persons who have a thorough knowledge of both fields, who appreciate the the essential character of the art of shaping space as well as the social and cultural context in which these spatial forms must function. It is for this reason that I was happy to have Labelle Prussin as a student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and am pleased to write this foreword. Her background and training as an architect, combined with five years’ work in Ghana, have given her a rare combination of skills and insights. Although this book, her first work, opens the door but a small way, it nevertheless casts light on the scene.

Architecture in Northern Ghana is a study of village pattern and household architecture of six tribes occupying a limited region of high environmental constancy and basic cultural uniformity. A wide range of architectural styles and structural features within this selected group demonstrates the creative character of these Ghanaian tribesmen and display for us, in photographs and architectural renderings, the shapes that life takes on. Many influences help to create these shapes: available materials and technological limitations; economic activities and their by-products; social relationships not only within the kindred, but in the community as a whole; religious beliefs and attendant practices; and, perhaps most important of all, traditional habituation. The present work only suggests the parameters that enter into architectural style in this area; it does not evaluate their relative importance.

Miss Prussin raises many questions in this book— questions that are both necessary to ask and in themselves illuminating. To most of these questions she does not provide an answer. This seems to me proper in a pioneering work, for prematurely to provide answers would stultify further investigation, while raising the significant questions opens the field for study. This work does demonstrate that tribal architecture has a dynamic quality, both traditional and adaptive, both limited and innovative. It is responsive as much to the inner environment of cultural presupposition and social interaction as it is to the external environment of wind and weather.

The responsiveness of tribal architecture to both internal and external forces is a lesson that has practical significance. The architect knows that in shaping life space he also shapes lives. According to Lévi- Strauss, for example, the Salesian missionaries realized that the surest way of converting the Bororo was to make them abandon their circular villages and place their houses in parallel rows. A dwelling that satisfies physical comforts may also create social discomfort. If architecture—particularly the mass architecture of the future—is to serve the former and avoid the latter, it must take cognizance of the significant social relationships in the lives of those who inhabit the spaces it provides. Only through a true marriage between architectural skills and anthropological understandings can satisfactory housing be developed in regions of exotic culture. The architect cannot be expected to be a sociologist, even within the confines of his own culture. Where his skills are being used for peoples with alien ways of life, the anthropological understanding is a necessary corrective against the tendency of both architect and planner to find answers to the sociological implications of their actions through conjecture and introspection. It provides them not only with the essential fact that men are not all alike, but with the more vital implication that these differences affect the life style of a people.

WALTER GOLDSCHMIDT

Los Angeles, California May, 1968

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Ford Foundation, which through its Grant to the Research Group of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Science and Technology, Ghana, for a Village Survey, made possible the fieldwork that served as the basis for this survey; to senior staff members of the Faculty of Architecture who conducted some of the preliminary field surveys; to E. K. Akowuah, G. K. Klu, W. Segbefia, and E. K. Torkornoo, students in the Facultv of Engineering who helped carry out the field surveys; to the clerical and technical staff of the Faculty of Architecture for their patient cooperation and help; to Mr. Lynden Herbert, architect, for his help with the illustrative material, both photographs and drawings; and, above all, to the many District Commissioners, chiefs, elders, and villagers who gave me permission to record their way of life.

Responsibility for the errors and omissions lies with the author alone.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. KASULIYILI, a Dagomba Village

2. YANKEZIA, a Konkomba Hamlet

3. TONGO, a Tallensi Settlement

4. SEKAI, an Isaia Village

5. LARABANGA, a Gonja Village

6. BIRUFU, a LoWiili Settlement

COMPARATIVE SUMMARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The architectural forms evolved by man in adapting to his environment are as diverse as the environment to which he conforms; they are as varied as the range of functions generated by his culture.

Traditionally, the architectural discipline has narrowly delimited the boundaries of its domain by a socially conditioned aesthetic in which durability and monumentality are governing criteria. So parochial a focus relegates the overwhelming majority of man’s building efforts to the realm of building technology. These building efforts, though occasionally termed primitive architecture, have seldom been considered by serious students of architecture or architectural critics. In this survey I am attempting to illustrate that what has, in many instances, been termed building technology is, in a very real sense, architecture.

Architecture may be viewed in several perspectives. It may be regarded as a building process, in which man puts the available materials at his command to work for him. From this point of view, architecture is building technology. Second, architecture may be seen more conceptually, as the enclosure of space. Emphasis is then not on the technology of enclosing space, but on the nature and the quality of the space created by the technology. Finally, architecture may be construed as a material manifestation of a culture’s symbolic system. As such, it is a