Asante Traditional Buildings

The Asante Traditional Buildings are a small group of surviving shrine houses scattered around the city of Kumasi, Ghana, the last significant remnants of the building tradition of the Ashanti Empire before most examples were destroyed in nineteenth century wars with Britain. Built in timber frame construction infilled with earth or clay and finished with steeply pitched thatch or, more recently, corrugated iron roofs, the buildings are arranged around a central courtyard in a form historically used for shrines, chiefs' residences and other significant structures. Their walls carry low relief decoration in abstract and figurative motifs, executed in the same earth plaster as the walls themselves, historically the work of women. UNESCO inscribed the buildings as a World Heritage Site in 1980 as an exceptional testimony to a once-widespread Ashanti building tradition that has almost entirely vanished elsewhere.