ezeagu:

Instead of marble fountains, Benin should dedicate one part of the city to historical site seeing where they would rebuild a part of the old Benin City. They can't be surprised how many international visitors would show up.

(f) The exterior of the house of Chief Iyase the Younger, Benin, 1949.

(g) A courtyard in the house of the Enogie of Egban-En, near Benin, 1949.

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 occupying 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 in itself is common throughout southern Nigeria. The various courtyards may be with or without a peristyle 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 a high glaze and has a remarkable quality of endurance so that even the oldest examples appear to have been but recently built. The sequence of courtyards culminates in the private apartments of the chief, while on each side are arranged the wives' and boys' quarters. Externally the mud walls are finished in a pattern of horizontal ribs, a fashion of building which has now practically died out, and old houses are usually recognizable by this kind of work. The roofs were originally of thatch-it was through one of these roofs catching alight that the Great Fire began-but this has now been replaced practically everywhere by corrugated iron, although the old method of providing a thatched coping on a light wooden framework to the tops of courtyard walls still 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 contains 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 front of a line of rattle sticks.

The next courtyard contains two small shrines, while in the third is the shrine of Orunmila, the spirit of Good Luck (fig. 3), the most imposing in the whole house, consisting of a series of recesses like pigeon holes built in the solid mud



FIG. 3. THE SHRINE OF ORUNMILA IN THE HOUSE OF CHIEF IYASE THE YOUNGER, BENIN

in chessboard formation and stretching right up to the ceiling. These recesses are typical of Benin work and this particular house abounds in them, there being several over the chief's couch in the next room where he keeps his personal charms and fetishes, while in the kitchen rows of them have been let into the thickness- of the walls to take pots and kitchen utensils. The lower half of the shrine and the narrow walk around the impluvium are decorated with patterns and designs in cowrie shells illustrating figures from Benin mythology walking in procession and carrying strands of coral and other emblems of the Oba's authority.

Benin builders are justly famed for their craftsmanship, and there are several other houses in the city which would well repay detailed exploration. In some the courtyards are of much larger dimensions than in the house described 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 conditions 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.

Benin builders are justly famed for their craftsmanship, and there are several other houses in the city which would well repay detailed exploration. In some the courtyards are of much larger dimensions than in the house described 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 conditions 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.



"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