Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 281
C h a p t e r 3 . 11
The architecture of a traditional house
Introduction
Our data on the vernacular architecture of Dghweɗe houses are limited. In 1995 bulama
Ngatha of Hudimche kindly showed me around his house, but at the time I was much more
interested in the ritual aspects and I neglected the actual architecture. Bulama Ngatha also
gave me a first list of the architectural elements of a traditional house, consisting of about ten
rooms made of stone covered with single thatched roofs, which were often interconnected.
They are referred to as batiwe (room or building) and form the home of a nuclear family in
our layout (see Figure 18 and 19a-19c). Such a household compound was called gwalghaya
(gwal = people; ghaya = home or house) which we translate as homestead or farmstead.
Other than ghaya for the architectural structure of a Dghweɗe house, the word batiwe here
refers to how the underlying groundplan of separate rooms was organised according to
individual function. We will start by looking at the layout of our house plan and then explore
its outer appearance and visibility from across a hillside. A couple of weeks after bulama
Ngatha had shown me through his house I photographed a house from above on my way to
Kwalika, and I identified the different batiwe (rooms) according to bulama Ngatha's list (see
Plate 22a).
Between 1995 and 2005 I produced quite a lot of analogue pictures on 35mm slides, including
many of the interior of a house, in particular that of my neighbour Buba Nza'avara in Dzga.
He had a beautiful house on the hillside opposite my research station. I do not know whether
it still exists, but I know Buba has died. Neither do I know whether the two other houses that I
documented in 2005 still exist, or whether they have been destroyed by Boko Haram. At the
time I had dedicated several days to photographing with a digital wide-angle lens the interior
of three houses in Ghwa'a. This last session included again the house of my neighbour Buba,
while the other two belonged to Kalakwa Wila and Abubakar Dga, both from a small hamlet
situated between Dzga and Klala higher up. Kalakwa belonged to the rainmaker lineage
Gaske, and I include a picture of his rainstones in the next chapter which describes the house
as a place of worship.
After each photographic session inside of each of the three houses, John and I sat down at my
place and we looked through the photos and identified the various parts of the architecture
and linked them to a little database I had created on my laptop. We particularly identified the
names and the functions of the different rooms, and linked them with an ideal groundplan
which John and I had produced as a general guide. This way we could identify the entrance
connections and stairs between the various rooms. We also looked for objects in the various
rooms and identified them via our database. The ideal groundplan of a Dghweɗe house for a
small nuclear family is reproduced in Figure 18 below.
On the weekends following each photo session, I invited the owners and family members of
their choice to come to my place and I took portraits of them. I printed these within minutes
on a little mobile printer which I was able to run on a solar panel, an effort which was rather
well received. Sadly, I lost the digital versions of those photographs, and I had instantly given
all the prints away. Still, there are photos of the owners of the houses, which we reproduced
in parts in our general introduction (see Plate 1b and Plates 4a-4m), and in Plate 25a and 25c
below we see a picture of our friend Buba sitting in front of his three ancestor stones.
The Dghweɗe share the same type of design for the front of a house with the Chikiɗe,
Chinene and the Guduf, which consists of a curved stone wall and a kitchen on each side.
Before we go into the details of Dghweɗe architecture, we will look at the landscaped terrain
which contained those houses. I have chosen, in Plate 21e, a Chikiɗe example of such a
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