On November 21st, a couple of architecture students from KNUST, Nora and Alexander, visited us in Abetenim to discuss how they could be involved in the building process of the canter as well as future Nka projects. Nora was in her fifth year and had participated in building the Kindergarden project for three weeks the previous summer. Alexander who was also the president of the Architecture students’ association at KNUST, was a mature student in his final year and had also been practising for some years prior to his degree. His inspiration was the Accra-based architect, Tony Yaw Asare, who had been working with earth for many years. Alexander was political, pragmatic and seemed tuned into the current affairs in Ghana, whereas Nora may have had romanticised the idea of building with mud.
140
Alexander explained that casting concrete blocks would be considered an investment for most people in the rural areas who would not earn more than 100GHC per month so building a house for themselves and their families would not be easy. They would slowly save money to cast concrete blocks which they usually stored next to their house so that one day they would be able to accumulate enough blocks to build a modern and permanent house (see Figure 4.36 – 4.39). Modernity was a recurring theme in my fieldwork in Abetenim, and what the locals were talking about and wishing for. Marchand (2009: 18), also conveys the theme of modernity in his writings about the masons of Djenné and referring to the latter years of the 1980s and argues that ‘their once familiar scope of practices was confronted by a rapid encroachment of imported building materials and new technologies including cement breezeblocks, corrugated steel sheeting, and the use of formwork, poured concrete and steel reinforcing.
A pile of cast concrete blocks typically stored next to old earth houses, which are left without repairing or re-plastering so they naturally deteriorate and collapse. The owners will build their new home in their place made from concrete blocks.
Figure 4.36 Concrete
141
An atakpame house, half destroyed with only one room surviving still, and a pile of cast concrete blocks stored next to it waiting to be part of the newstructure.
Cast concrete blocks stored next to a new modern dwelling under construction at the time of my fieldwork in Abetenim. This building belongs to our landlady’s mother, who is considered quite well-off according to local standards.
Figure 4.37 Concrete
142
Another new modern dwelling under construction, next to a wattle and daub building and an Atakpame one in the background.
Concrete promises to last longer than mud in this context. Building with mud or Atakpame is a specialised skill nowadays and labour is costly. Maintenance of mud or Atakpame buildings, which is key in this context, needs to take place every year which the local people cannot afford, whereas concrete doesn’t require any. Also, as the people in rural areas used to build mud walls without any foundations, the intense rain easily destroys their buildings. In Abetenim many buildings are almost in ruins and often families live and sleep in one room in order to avoid wall-less spaces (see Figure 4.40 – 4.41). Yet their aspiration is to embrace modernity, in the unique manner which is perceived and practised in this context, and to be able one day to build their modern and more ‘permanent’ houses from cast concrete blocks. Hence, they save money and gradually invest in concrete blocks, which they usually store next to their dwellings, until they acquire enough quantity to be able to build their new modern houses. At the same time the existing mud or Atakpame houses slowly fall into ruins due to lack of maintenance. One of the reasons for this is that the locals’ priority is to invest in concrete blocks and not in the maintenance of the Atakpame houses.
143
One of the eroded earth Atakpame buildings in Abetinim. They fall in ruins due to intense rainfalls, lack of maintenance and lack of foundations when they were built. In this case, all its external mud plaster is eroded and so is part of the Atakpame wall. It is only a matter of time for this structure to collapse.
Another eroded Atakpame earth building in Abetinim. Here we see that its external mud plaster is eroded at the bottom as there no foundations, but its top part is still undamaged because of the roof overhang that protects it.
Figure 4.40 Eroded earth
144
Another reason that the existing mud or Atakpame buildings slowly fall into ruins is the combination of the worsening climatic conditions, such as the intense rainfalls, which destroy them, together with the fact that these earth structures were built without any foundations, which makes them prone to deterioration. One example is Kamal’s house – one of the masons who lives with his mother and two younger sisters in their family house- which has only one room left intact so his whole family have moved in that. Alexander described how building with mud would often not be viable and explained that, ‘to take time to convince people to use it and to use it correctly, it would probably be easier to just let them build with concrete.’ Building with earth, including earth bricks and rammed earth and so on, could present one of the solutions to tackling the national housing problem in Ghana. Yet there are still reasons for political actors to discourage it in formal urban settings. Some of these reasons include, but are not limited to, the following: building with local materials is a much slower process than using the conventional modern methods; that formal testing may not have been carried out and for which standards may not exist; the necessary process of spending a considerable length of time trying to influence the locals’ mindset about using earth for their dwellings, as Alexander has also argues. The latter broached the fact that in Ghana architects were generally believed to be rich because of their expensive education and because they could make a lot of money if they were involved in large-scale projects in urban areas, for example skyscrapers and hotels. He explained:
“There is no chance to use mud/earth in such projects or in urban areas. If you are an architect and you need to earn money to pay your bills and provide for your family then you aim to get a job with one of these practices in Accra or Kumasi. And if building with mud is what drives you, then you somehow make yourself an outsider and refuse to earn money or live in the cities as building with mud is not allowed in the cities. You people come from a very different context and can support these ideas and come out here to build with mud because your universities or institutions fund this type of work. In Ghana universities or institutions don’t support this type of work so you would need to fund it yourself which means you come from an affluent background.”
145
Addressing Nora, he suggested that she ‘may be able to support this idea because her family can fund it.’ But the people we were trying to convince were very poor; their aspirations differed largely from ours and we would need to dedicate time to try to convince them that building with mud may eventually be better for them. Part of the context of our work was the locals’ aspirations to build a ‘strong and permanent’ house and their struggle to survive.
Nora’s attitude to the subject seemed to contradict with Alexander’s as she emphasized the aesthetics of mud architecture over any other advantages. The latter caused her views to come across as more nostalgic and romanticised. Her own thesis focused on the rehabilitation of the alleged ‘witches’ in the Northern regions of Ghana and specifically the ‘witch camps’, which are villages that offer refuge to the women referred to as ‘witches’, who would flee their homes as their communities condemn them for practising witchcraft, and therefore pursue and punish them. Nora was interested in promoting the idea of building mud houses for the witches. She was also interested in designing and building a water tower for the Nka Foundation site so the visitors and participants of earth architecture workshops could have running water. The idea to have a water tower just in the Nka Foundation site, while there was no running water anywhere else in the village, was contested by most of us.