There's no place like Home: The African Family Home and its Psychosocial Implications
Beyond positioning itself as a place of shelter and refuge from the elements, the home is a container of life. It is where we pass our days in all its mundanity, and between its walls where we construct the memories which, once threaded together, become our lives. Often times these memories are made in relation to our families. The home becomes a collection point for like individuals brought together by shared blood, kinship, circumstances, and/or culture. It is here where lives converge and run in parallel, extending beyond themselves into the ancestral pasts that brought them together, and into the futures that they will create as they intersect in the present moment. The architecture of the domicile is both site and witness to all this, and the African family home is no different.
In many examples across the diverse continent of Africa, the concept of “family” has been architecturally defined in the ways in which spaces are contrived; both functionally and symbolically. This can be seen in the sequencing and definition of spaces that form a family’s compound. In the example of the Tamberma people of northern Togo, we can clearly see anthropomorphism applied in the organization and use of the home; as though the domicile itself were an extension to and a member of the family living therein.
A Temberma Village in Northern Togo
As seen in the diagram and plan below, the home and all its components are analogically linked to human physical attributes. Let that be the front doorway of the compound anthropomorphized as the mouth or linou as it is “the means by which everything enters the interior” (Blier, pp.374); or the centrally positioned woman’s bedroom that evokes the form and identity of the womb, being the space where the woman of the household will usher in new generations for the continuum of the family lineage. This ring of circular and cylindrical rooms threaded together by an earthen wall is molded and defined by the sociocultural dynamics of the people it is erected for. All spaces are derived with meaning that connects back to the human as a culturally defined individual, and their programmatic spatial usages as a collective within a family unit; linking all this to a larger generational framework.
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Diagram of house with its human parts (Drawing by Donn Thompson) |
Houses of worship and their architectural presentation, are also connected with this idea of socially defined symbols of significance related to familial structures and dynamics. The Larabanga mosque in northern Ghana can be seen to integrate the architectural expressions of “clustered ranks of engaged earthen buttresses” along its facade, previously used to mark an ancestral presence or resting places. By adopting this architectural language the house of worship creates subconscious associations with concepts of “piety, wisdom, and literacy” that enshroud the collective memories of the revered historic ancestors that the original form was meant to edify. (Prussin, pp 425-426.)
There is something delightfully ubiquitous in the shared human experience of creating a dwelling space for a family. Imbuing each space with significance and care, the psychosocial implications are carried forward in the conception and design of the home, ensuring that the home not only caters to the needs of the family but that it is itself a member of the family.
- Suzanne Preston Blier “Houses Art Human: Architectural Self-Images of Africa’s Tamberma” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 371-382
- Labelle Prussin, ‘Non-Western Sacred Models,”Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (Sep., 1999), pp. 424-433
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