butabu

This series of pictures, looking at the mud built architecture of West Africa, was photographed during two trips totalling four months in 1999 and 2000. First exhibited in London through Zelda cheatle gallery in 2002, it has subsequently been exhibited in London, Wales, Ireland and the USA. 180 images were published as a book in 2003 by Princeton Architectural press / new york. It is currently being toured in the US by Curatorial Assistance in LA. See review articles for further information.

In an article in the architectural review, london in 2004 James Morris wrote the following as a background to this work:

Too often, when people in the west think of traditional African architecture, they perceive nothing more than a mud hut; a primitive vernacular half remembered from an old Tarzan film. But why this ignorance of half a continent’s heritage. Possibly it is because the great dynastic civilisations of the region were already in decline when the European colonisers first exposed these cultures to a broader audience. Being built of mud, many older buildings have been lost unlike the stone or brick structures of other ancient cultures. Or possibly this lack of awareness is because the buildings are just too strange, too foreign to have been easily appreciated by outsiders. Often they are more like huge monolithic sculptures or ceramic pots than ‘architecture’ as we might think of it. But in fact the surviving buildings are neither ‘historic monuments’ in the classic sense, nor are they as culturally remote as they may initially appear. They share many of the qualities now valued in western architectural thinking such as sustainability, sculptural form and community participation in their conception. Though part of long traditions and ancient cultures they are at the same time contemporary structures, serving a current purpose. If they lost their relevance and were neglected, they would collapse. In the West mud is seen, effectively, as dirt, yet in rural Africa (as in so much of the world) it is the most common of building materials with which everybody has direct contact. The maintaining and resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm of life, there is an on going and active participation in their continuing existence. This is not a museum culture.

In this architecture one can see that from the most basic of materials, earth and water, and in the harshest of conditions, creative people have sculpted these most extraordinary buildings, superbly formed and highly expressive. They are vibrant works of art with their own very distinct and striking aesthetic. These bold monolithic masterpieces play skillfully with the African light and the inherent properties of the mud itself to emphasis shadow, texture, silhouette, profile and form. With in the duration of a year the mud render dries, the surface is covered in a web of cracks before it slowly starts to peel off. With each re-rendering the shape of a building is subtly altered. Change and movement are ever present. The material is tactile, warm and vulnerable. It demands and receives an engaged relationship with its users. Often people attempt to cement render the buildings. Not only does this destroy their structure as they rot from within, but it destroys their character. Their uniqueness is in their muddiness.

The future of these buildings is hard to predict. Mud is such a vulnerable material and there is an undoubted enthusiasm for building in concrete. Given the means, many would tear down their mud houses and build cement block and tin roofed replacements, as has been proved in those countries that can afford to do so. So what will happen when rural Africans are lifted out of their desperate poverty? Will there be an understandable rush to rid themselves of the physical manifestations of that harrowing past? It can already be seen happening in the wealthier countries such as Ghana and Nigeria where there is now virtually nothing left for future generations to repair and preserve. Not only the buildings have gone but the skills to build them too. No, it won’t be a rush, it will happen gradually, too slowly to notice. Already the extraordinary up turned jelly mould houses of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon are gone, soon too those of the Kassena and Gurensi in Ghana. The Sakho houses of the Boso in Mali are all abandoned and in ruins. It is highly possibly that at the point when West Africa crawls out from below the poverty line there will be little of its built heritage remaining to be appreciated. The saving grace is probably Islam, ever expanding and building more mosques, but even then only in the rural parts. In cities the Mosques, funded by Wahabi Saudi funds are atrocious concrete imitations of a bastardised Middle Eastern style. In the sparsely populated sahal plains of the Western Sudan these built forms are one of the most striking representations of human creativity and a unique part of our world culture – they should not be forgotten.