Mud, Courtyard and Homestead: Ten African Building Traditions

The Yoruba compound is built of rectangular, windowless, single-room structures around a courtyard ringed by verandas, and the courtyard is deliberately larger than the rooms because it is where families gathered, cooked and crafted goods. Sungbo's Eredo, a mud-wall defense, is described on the page as Africa's largest pre-colonial monument.

Igbo builders in southeastern Nigeria use mud and laterite for foundations and walls, thatch from grass, palm leaves or reeds for roofs, and stone where needed. The page singles out the Mbari houses, two story sacred structures filled with life sized painted mud figures, and surface decoration in Uli design and Nsibidi script.

Hausa building in northern Nigeria and Niger follows a plan of primary room, courtyard and enclosing wall, worked in laterite in the style called tubali. The page notes that new walls look crisp and sharply defined, then weather into a more organic form through seasonal rain and are restored by yearly repairs.

Ashanti houses in Ghana use wattle and daub under steeply pitched raffia thatch, and the fihankra layout places four rectangular rooms around a courtyard, with the fourth partly enclosed for ritual use or shrines. Wall surfaces carry Adinkra symbols in red laterite bas relief below white clay geometric designs.

Dogon villages on the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali are sited defensively in the cliff's natural nooks, with houses sharing walls and floors around the head man's ginna. The toguna meeting house is built too low to stand upright in, with a roof of eight layers of stacked millet stalks, a design meant to keep discussions from turning violent.

Somali building spans ancient burial cairns of dressed and dry stone, medieval coral stone, sundried brick and limestone construction after the arrival of Islam, and early modern fortifications. The page names distinctive mosque minarets and pillar tombs as features that set Somali Islamic architecture apart from other African traditions.

A Nguni homestead is a cluster of houses for one extended family, each dwelling called an indlu, arranged in a semicircle and often with an attached kraal. The page records that sheet metal now replaces thatch on many rondavel huts while the arrangement stays, and that traditional dwellings were 4.3 percent of South African households as of 2022.

The Zulu umuzi circles beehive shaped iQukwane huts around a central cattle enclosure, and hut position follows rank: the chief or his mother opposite the entrance, the great wife nearest him, sons on the left, daughters on the right, and guests nearest the gate. Women build the huts of wattle and daub on a hillside with the entrance facing downhill.

Southern Ndebele women paint house exteriors by hand with geometric designs in ground ochre and clay, keeping symmetry and straight edges without rulers or squares. The front wall and the gateway wall called izimpunjwana carry the most elaborate work, and because the pigments are not durable the walls are repainted seasonally.

Malagasy houses are rectangular rather than round, with a steeply sloped roof on a central pillar, reflecting the Southeast Asian origins of settlers who came from South Kalimantan in Borneo nearly two thousand years ago. Brick spread under Queen Ranavalona II from 1868 to 1883, while stone stayed reserved for tombs because of ancestor veneration.