Architecture and the Built Town

Yoruba building starts from one idea and scales it. A family compound is a ring of rooms around an open courtyard, presenting a blank wall to the street and opening entirely inward. A chief's house is the same thing larger. A palace is the same thing very much larger, with dozens of courtyards, each assigned to an office of state, and with carved posts holding up its verandas. A town is a ring of these compounds around a palace and a market that together form its centre. The type is coherent from the single household up to the city, and its most distinctive feature, the courtyard that catches its own rain, was destroyed in the twentieth century by a roofing material.

The àgbo ilé

The compound, àgbo ilé, is built from rectangular windowless rooms arranged around one or more central courtyards 1. The courtyards are deliberately large relative to the roofed area, because the courtyard is the living space: it is where the family gathers, talks, eats, works and receives, while the rooms are for sleeping, cooking and storage 1. Rooms open inward. The compound's outer face is a wall.

The impluvium. The roofs pitch inward, so that the entire roof plane drains into the courtyard, where a sunken basin collects the water 1. This is the impluvium, a term borrowed from Roman architecture because the principle is identical. It does two things at once: it harvests water through the dry season, and it creates a cool humid microclimate at the centre of the house. The same form appears in Benin compounds, so it is a regional West African solution rather than a specifically Yoruba one.

The kọ̀bì. Projecting roofed bays and verandas at the courtyard edge give shaded seating and form the transition between the public courtyard and the private rooms 1. The terminology is loose in the accessible sources: kọ̀bì is generally the projecting gabled porch, ọ̀dẹ̀dẹ̀ the veranda proper, and the two are not always distinguished.

Materials. Walls are cob, puddled laterite mud built up in courses without formwork or moulded bricks, each lift left to dry before the next goes on 1. Wall bases are broadened for stability, and the eave projects well beyond the wall face, because an unprotected mud wall is destroyed by rain running down it. The deep overhang is structural, not stylistic. Roofs are thatched with grass, or with raffia palm leaf on the coast. Timber frames carry the roof.

Corrugated iron changed everything. Introduced in the colonial period and later replaced by aluminium sheet, pan roofing is lighter, permits steeper pitches, and removes the annual labour of rethatching, so it was adopted quickly and comprehensively 1. It also throws water outward. A compound roofed in corrugated iron cannot have an impluvium, because the whole hydraulic logic of the inward pitch is reversed. The pan-roofed compound is a different building type occupying the old plan, and this is the single largest change to Yoruba vernacular architecture, made by a material rather than by a design decision.

How a compound grows. It accretes. A new room or wing is added onto the perimeter as each married son establishes his household, so the compound expands outward from its founding core, adding courtyards rather than being planned whole. It is headed by the baálẹ̀, the compound and lineage head. Size is therefore a direct reading of lineage size and standing, and the hierarchy runs continuously: the ruler's àáfin has the largest courtyards, then chiefs' houses, then elders' 1. The palace is not a different building type from the house. It is the top of one scale.

The àáfin

The palace multiplies the courtyard house 1. Large àáfin contained dozens of courtyards, each allocated to a function: reception, the ọba's private quarters, the wives' quarters, shrines to dynastic òrìṣà, the drum court, the treasury, and courts belonging to particular title-holders. The state's administrative departments existed as physical rooms. Construction was the same mud wall and thatch as the ordinary compound, distinguished by scale, by carved wooden pillars and by decorated verandas 1.

Named palaces include the Aláàfin's at Ọ̀yọ́, the Ọ̀ọ̀ni's at Ifẹ̀, the Olówò's at Ọ̀wọ̀ which is recorded as having the largest courtyards in Yorubaland, the Deji's at Àkúrẹ́ with elevated platforms, the Ògògà's at Ìkẹ̀rẹ́-Ekiti with its carved posts, and the Ìlẹ̀ṣà palace courtyards 12.

Ọ̀pó: the carved veranda posts

The posts carrying the palace veranda roof are the principal architectural sculpture programme, and they are load-bearing structure and iconography at once 1. The subjects recur across the corpus.

The equestrian, ẹlẹ́ṣin, a mounted warrior with weapons, referencing cavalry power and by extension Ọ̀yọ́, whose empire was built on horses.

The kneeling woman, often with a bowl or a child, embodying ìkúnlẹ̀, kneeling, which is the posture of respectful offering and also the posture in which a person kneels before Olódùmarè to choose their destiny before birth. A kneeling female figure holding up a palace roof is making a claim about what actually supports a kingdom.

The king with his senior wife, in hierarchically manipulated scale.

The masterwork of the genre is the Veranda Post, Ọ̀pó Ògògá, by Olówè of Ìṣẹ̀, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, one of a suite carved for the palace of the Ògògà of Ìkẹ̀rẹ́ around 1910 to 1914 3. The king sits enthroned and crowned, and his senior wife stands behind him at a much larger scale with her hands on the crown. The composition is the argument: the crown is placed and held by the women of the palace, and the king's authority is physically upheld by a figure larger than himself. Related posts and doors by Olówè are held in Washington, London and Munich, and the Ìkẹ̀rẹ́ commission is treated more fully in the file on wood sculpture.

Palace doors were carved in registers with narrative imagery, including the arrival of colonial officials, tribute processions, hunts and market scenes.

The town

The core is palace plus market. The central market, ọjà ọba, the king's market, was recognised as the dynamic centre of the city and was located directly in front of the palace, and the two together form a single core 4. This is not a commercial facility placed conveniently near government. The peace of the market and the authority of the ọba are the same guarantee, the market is where public life happens, and in Yoruba thought the market is also the meeting point of the world of the living and the world of the spirits, which is why so many proverbs turn on it.

Radial layout. Compounds cluster along roads radiating outward from the palace and market core to the town gates, producing a roughly concentric city 4.

Quarters. The town is divided administratively into wards, each under the jurisdiction of a titled chief, and the regional vocabulary differs: àdúgbò in Ọ̀yọ́ and Ifẹ̀, ìtún among the Ìjẹ̀bú, idimi at Ondo 4. The territorial divisions map onto the chieftaincy structure exactly, so the town's map is its constitution.

Walls and ditches. Major towns were defended by earthworks, a ditch with the spoil thrown up as a bank behind it, topped with a wall and pierced by gates, bodè, which were manned and where tolls were taken 4. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ has multiple concentric circuits, recording successive expansions.

Sungbo's Eredo is the largest of these by a wide margin: a system of walls and ditches southwest of Ìjẹ̀bú-Òde in Ogun State, associated in tradition with the Ìjẹ̀bú noblewoman Ọlóyè Bilikisu Sungbo, with a total length of more than 160 kilometres enclosing an area roughly 40 kilometres north to south by 35 east to west, with ramparts up to 20 metres high and ditches up to 20 metres deep in places 5. It is generally dated to around 800 to 1000 CE and is described as Africa's largest single ancient monument 5. It was submitted to the UNESCO tentative list in 1995 by the National Commission for Museums and Monuments and remains tentative, not inscribed 5. The frequently repeated claim that it exceeds the Egyptian pyramids in volume of material moved is widely circulated but the underlying calculation was not verified for this file and is not asserted here.

Afro-Brazilian Lagos

Who the returnees were. From roughly the 1830s, formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants returned from Brazil and Cuba to Lagos, Porto-Novo, Ouidah and Abẹ́òkúta, in numbers that rose sharply after the 1835 Malê revolt in Bahia and again after Brazilian abolition in 1888. They were called Àgùdà, from Ajuda, the Portuguese name for Ouidah, or Amaro. They should be distinguished from the Sàró, the recaptives returning from Freetown in Sierra Leone, who came with English rather than Portuguese and Brazilian culture.

The Àgùdà were frequently master masons, carpenters and architects, and they introduced ornate plasterwork, arched windows and grand balconies 6. Their building trade, learned in Brazil, was their entry into the Lagos economy, which is why their architectural mark is so much larger than their numbers.

The style. Two-storey stuccoed sobrados; symmetrical façades; arched windows and doorways; decorative pediments; ornamental plinths, pilasters and columns; balustraded balconies with wrought iron; external stairs; and brick construction, which a Sardinian tile factory supplying Lagos made possible 6.

Named builders.

Senhor Lázaro Borges da Silva and Senhor Francisco Nobre were the most prominent master craftsmen in late nineteenth-century Lagos, working across carpentry, bricklaying and architecture 6.

Francisco Nobre and Balthazar dos Reis built the Holy Cross church in Lagos in 1878, with dos Reis, a cabinet maker and woodcarver, making its altar and pulpit 6.

João Baptista da Costa built the Shitta-Bey Mosque in 1882 on Martins Street in the Brazilian Quarter, assisted by an indigenous builder named Sanusi Aka 6. Sanusi Aka is the important name in that sentence. The collaboration of an Àgùdà designer with a Yoruba builder is the mechanism by which the style stopped being an import and became Lagosian.

What survives and what does not.

The Water House on Kakawa Street, Lagos Island, built in the nineteenth century, is one of the few remaining residential buildings in the Brazilian style in Nigeria and is standing 7. It is associated with the da Rocha family; the sources consulted give the owner variously as João Esan da Rocha, a returnee who became one of the wealthiest men in West Africa, and as Candido da Rocha, and the father-and-son relationship that would reconcile these was not verified. The popular explanation of the name, that the family owned a borehole and sold water to Lagosians, is traditional and unconfirmed.

The Shitta-Bey Mosque is standing and was designated a national monument in 2013 6.

Ilójo Bar, also called Casa da Fernandez, at Tinubu Square on Lagos Island, was demolished on Sunday 11 September 2016, in disputed circumstances over the Eid weekend 8. It had been declared a national monument by the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in 1956 8. A listed national monument was destroyed.

Its history is more complicated than the mourning suggested. Traditional accounts date it to 1855 and attribute it to the Fernandez family, but research by the Dutch journalist Femke van Zeijl found that the structure comprised two different halves built much later, between 1903 and 1914, and that the name Casa da Fernandez refers to José Amoedo Fernandez, from Galicia, who acquired and remodelled it in 1903 8. Alfred Omolana Olaiya bought it in 1933 and renamed it Ilójo Bar after his home town of Ilójo in Ijesa Isu, Ekiti State 8. The Fernandez family employed returning ex-slaves from Brazil and Cuba who had mastered building in the Americas 8. So the most-mourned Brazilian building in Lagos may have been commissioned by a Galician owner using Àgùdà labour, decades later than believed. That does not make its demolition less serious; it makes the documentation problem more serious.

Branco House was pulled down in 1955 and survives only in a watercolour published in Vaughan-Richards's Building Lagos 9.

The state of the stock. Reporting from 2016 and 2017 onward is consistent: Lagos's Afro-Brazilian building stock is disappearing, to redevelopment pressure on Lagos Island land, to neglect and roof failure, to fragmented family ownership that makes maintenance decisions impossible, and to the demonstrated fact that national monument listing did not save Ilójo Bar 8.

Ọ̀ṣun-Òṣogbo and the heritage position

The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005 as site 1118 10. It is roughly 75 hectares of dense forest on the Ọ̀ṣun river outside Òṣogbo, regarded as the abode of Ọ̀ṣun, dotted with sanctuaries, shrines, sculptures and artworks in honour of Ọ̀ṣun and other deities, and it is among the last stands of high forest in southern Nigeria 10.

Its survival is not accidental and the story is unusual. Susanne Wenger, an Austrian artist who settled at Òṣogbo, led the New Sacred Art movement which physically rebuilt the shrines in iron, mud and cement from the 1950s onward, and worked to have the grove's traditional prohibitions on fishing, hunting and felling reinstated after a period in which they had been ignored 10. Her monumental sculptures are now part of the inscribed property. This raises a real question about authorship and authenticity that the site's admirers tend to skip: a World Heritage site of Yoruba sacred art contains a large body of work made in the twentieth century by an Austrian artist and her Yoruba collaborators, working in cement. The defensible answer is that the grove is a living religious site rather than a preserved ruin, that Wenger was an initiated priestess of Ọbàtálá and worked with Yoruba artists including Adébísí Akànjí and Búráìmọ̀h Gbádàmọ́ṣì, and that shrines have always been rebuilt. But it should be stated rather than smoothed over.

Current threats reported from 2014 onward include urbanisation, residential building near the boundaries, portions of protected land allegedly sold to developers, and hotel construction near the south entrance 10.

Nigeria has only two inscribed World Heritage sites, Osun-Osogbo and the Sukur Cultural Landscape in Adamawa, which is not Yoruba 10.