image description: Igbo architecture. EKE’S HOUSE, WITH HIS MEETING HOUSE (BARELY VISIBLE ON LEFT) IN THE TOWN OF UMUONA, AWKA DIVISION. THESE HOUSES AND THE COMPOUND WALLS ARE ERECTED BY MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY UNDER THE DIRECTION OF EKE’S PRIEST. Herbert M. Cole, Art as a Verb in Igboland, 1969. When people were abducted and trafficked to the United States from West Africa in the late 1600s/early 1700s, they were forced to build their own houses. Architects and construction workers preserved traditional designs. The front porch common in the United States, in both appearance and in social function, has strong evidence connecting it to traditional West African forms of architecture. the “shotgun house, a type of house that originated as a design of enslaved people’s houses, was one room wide and two or three rooms deep, and more often than not has a front porch. Before “shotgun houses began to be built in the U.S., the closest thing to a porch was the elevated balcony seen on some French and Spanish colonial houses, which was not typically used as a living area at all. One of the most common traditional housing types seen even today throughout West Africa is the Yoruba-style courtyard compound of “shotgun houses, where the houses are attached side-by-side to form a square facing inward toward a large central courtyard. The Yoruba compound houses share a pitched roof that extends forward beyond the front wall into the courtyard, forming an overhang supported by wooden columns. The area under the overhang is not used as a walkway, but as an outdoor extension of each house. The occupants of the house use it as a place to rest, work, and socialize, and both the space and their use of it act as symbols of their connection to the community. To sit in under the overhang is to be simultaneously at the individual family home and within easy sight and reach of whoever might be in the courtyard or under the overhang in front of their own house. Slave masters prevented enslaved people from gathering in groups, so compound houses were not able to be built. Our ancestors built separated houses, sometimes without the overhang—which, as part of an individual house, was a porch—but more often with it. Either with or without the porch, the front door of the house opened directly onto the road, so the front of the house became a place to be simultaneously at home and in public. Evergreen Plantation preserves 22 slave quarters and is included in the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail for its quality and significance. Image by Michael McCarthy At the same time, enslaved people’s architecture in the Caribbean was influenced by the houses of the native people of the islands. The Arawak people of Haiti and many of the natives of other Caribbean islands built a type of house called a bohio, which was rectangular and had an roof that extended out past the front door, which was in one of the short sides. This style was crossed with the West African “shotgun style to create a type of house that became common in the Caribbean, which in Haiti was called a caille. A caille was essentially a thatched-roof version of an American shotgun house, and had a porch. Enslaved people trafficked from Haiti to Louisiana and Mississippi built houses in this style entirely out of wood, because wood for construction was more readily available there, and this was the prototypical American shotgun house. Hector Hyppolite, “the greatest of Haitian primitive painters”, stands before a caille in Port-au-Prince, 1945. (photograph by Earl Leaf, Le Centre d’Art, reproduced from Haitian Art: The Legend and Legacy of the Naive Tradition by L.G. Hoffman, Davenport Art Gallery, 1985) seen here (American folklore says that the houses are called this because a gun can be shot straight through the house from the front door out through the back door without hitting anything, but it is also likely that the word is an English bastardization and combination of the Yoruba words togun, meaning “house,” and shogun, meaning “a god’s house.” In Yoruba culture, one’s house is also home to our ancestors.)
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 18:40:29 +0000
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