Enugu-ukwu and their Igwe

Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2002) ISSN: 1525-447X AGAINST HISTORY? A NIMO-BORN ARCHITECTURE OF UMU NRI (ENUGU UKWU)1

Ikem Stanley Okoye

Ona egbu nu ka mmanya

It (a portico) of course makes one punch drunk.

-- Michael Nguko

It is surely axiomatic that architecture cannot be subversive. In the senses of its physicality as “buildings” (that is, as objects, artifacts and their spaces) and as the practices of building (that is, the activity, and the cultures of signification circumscribing both),² architecture cannot intentionally undermine the ideologies, politics and social orders out from which it is produced.³ But can architecture be epistemologically subversive? Can one find examples of buildings whose raison d’êtreprojects significant degrees of difficulty to the act of knowing? Finally, what does it mean if these queries are answerable in the affirmative? In this essay, I will explore such questions through a particular southern Nigerian architecture of the 1920s and the early 1930s. Specifically, I will seek to understand how in Africa, in the 19th and 20th centuries, a set of buildings has done precisely this. Through them, we are able to see how knowledge and interpretation are circumscribed in difficult ways. I will argue that architecture may be subversive to the extent that particular kinds of encounter between a building and a person viewing it may resist historical interpretation. I will show that some kinds of building were produced to confront its users and viewers with historiographic difficulty. It is a difficulty, to which fell prey both the late 20^th century popular communal knowledge of people in the buildings’ locale (in this instance the town of Enugu Ukwu in the Igbo speaking area of southern eastern Nigeria), and the deliberate knowledge of the scholar (in this case Donald Cosentino and his editor, Susan Vogel).

What these examples of buildings, their interpretations, and my interrogation of them call attention to, is how the postcolonial public cultures of the Igbo locality of the buildings, and the private gaze of contemporary western scholarship can ‘successfully’ be led astray. We will see that particular histories result from such buildings; histories which persuasively but falsely establish the architecture’s connection to European interpretative schemes. I am talking specifically about connections to Italianate architecture, to the Greenbergian notion (via Germany) of Kitsch, to post colonial forms of consumption, and to a deformed idea of global culture. In the process of my critique, I will raise doubts about the adequacy and accuracy of the idea of the modern in the history of architecture and of the notion of the vernacular in architecture.

The essay moves in three modes. In the first, because many will be unfamiliar with the scholarly terrain of architecture, I present a brief critique of writings on Africa’s architecture, outside of the Mediterranean-rim, as well as what that oeuvreenables me to contest. I will then define the idea of vernacular architecture and how the buildings about which I write co-opt such a notion to work their deception. A critique of such scholarship will be equally applicable to a review of the art historiography of sculpture in Africa, and will serve as a caution to Africanist art historians. The second mode presents an example of the architecture in question, and discusses the milieu in which it was produced. In the third mode, I will focus more intently on the career of the creator and builder, Michael Nguko (of Amafum Etiti, Nimo). His presence challenges the classic view of creativity as socially embedded in the era when anthropology was in its infancy, and obstructed attention to the historiography of early-modern architecture. In the domain of architecture too Africa does not feature in modernity’s history and/or critique. (Hilde 1999, Frampton, 1992, Jencks, 1985), except where Africa serves as primitivist foil to the theoretics of ‘master’ modern architects like Le Corbusier (Wigley, 1995).

The structure of the essay makes it possible to read the three part in a different order from the present one. The second part “praxis,” may be read quite comfortably before the first part “split knowledge,” and the third part, “producing an architect,” may be read first and so on. However, expertise in this kind of reading requires a certain level of familiarity with the African context.

Part 1: Split Knowledge

‘Vernacular Architecture’ and Architecture

The architecture of Africa has become an object of both ethnography and anthropology. Within architectural studies, it is familiar to us as an architecture without an historiography (Gutkind, [1953], Lebeuf [1961], Hasselberger [1964], Rapoport [1969], Guidoni [1977]). Indeed, it is likely that, say Dogon or Fang architecture, or what passes for a description of either one (Lauber [1990]), would be evoked in our minds when we think of architecture in Africa. History is not absent from the study of buildings in the Mediterranean-rim of Africa. In studies of West and Central Africa for example, works like Salvaing’s Architecture Coloniale en Cote d’Ivoire which mines the colonial archive, show that for architecture, historical representations are possible within such geographic spaces. The implication of texts such as Salvaing’s is, however, that historicity is only possible for buildings produced either in the direct service of the Colonial administrations, or by European traders and their concerns, or for euro-Christian missionary projects. Texts like Salvaing’s enlist buildings erected by pre-WWII colonial administrations, and sanction them as ‘Colonial’, ‘German’ or ‘French’. Even when the writers have included in their surveys, buildings that were erected in the same period by local African patrons, they treat these buildings as belonging to a European cultural cartography. Any architecture whose surfaces, structure or forms present traces of historicity recognized by its scholars, is seen as necessarily an offspring of a West European or Mediterranean Islamic impetus. Basically, all the recent publications of which I am aware, assert that West and Central African buildings exist only where we have ascertained the absence of and/or possibility for change. Authenticity and staticity seem to make good bedfellows.

Vernacular Architecture

The modern idea of the vernacular has an interesting disciplinary outcome. The idea ‘vernacular’ was invented in Western intellectual history, at the same moment, as was the study of Africa. It is not surprising then to discover that Africa is implicated in the invention of the idea (and field of study) of ‘vernacular architecture.’ It is in every sense this correlation of Africa and vernacular is historiography’s version of the idea of the primitive in art history. There are good reasons why this birth occurred at the historical moment that it did, and these involve European cultural re-formation during the Enlightenment era. Their late 20th century outcomes are strikingly parallel.

Vernacularist or Traditionalist writing (in architecture) like art historical and art critical writing on African art, always implies the following claim about its objects and the worlds in which such objects operate: The category is self-evident (Goy, 1989: 3). Its objects, the buildings on which it focuses, are “everyday” (Cromley and Hudgins, 1995: xi), and its producers are “common,” “ordinary” and non-professional people (Bourdier and AlSayyad 1989: 6). The enclosures they delineate and the construction of such enclosure are primarily of functional import with symbolic function. The latter implies that such space will never be produced simply for the enjoyment of spatial aesthetics. Moreover, the types of buildings designated vernacular are over-determined by technological limitation, and for many contemporary vernacularists therein lies its moral salvation. (Glassie, 1990: 273). The form and aesthetics of its buildings are significant to the production and reproduction of its society, and to such society’s culture specifically, by which the building’s appearance is also constrained. In other words, there is no intellectual space for vernacular architecture outside public culture.

Vernacular buildings are, therefore, objects whose epistemological service is an index of the processes of culture-making and remaking, and of the production of ethnicity. This view clearly governs Paul Oliver’s theoretization and organization of the Africa section in the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, and which account for paper titles like “Center and Periphery in the Javanese Dwelling,” and “Speaking To and Talking About: Maori Architecture” (Emphasis mine). Vernacular buildings do not, as does an unmarked architecture, consist of a terrain of activity in which participants either produce culture as transformation, or attempt to reproduce culture that actively maintain its stability against natural odds. In its standard usage, ‘vernacular’ circulates notions of the authentic. Culture is subsequently detached from the realm in which architectural signification is actively recognized by the individual creator who is conscious of this constructedness, and who is knowingly involved in its manipulation/ negotiation. ‘Architects’ of the vernacular are hemmed in by ‘tradition’ and have no individuality that need concern the scholar.

I will now challenge the preceding views, especially the issue of how we know a culture and of the place of individuality as an epistemic ‘point of resistance.’ This challenge is important not because the ideas are particularly persuasive,⁴ but because, in the absence of a rethinking of the way in which Africanist research is done, it has maintained its durability. Often, it does so, supported paradoxically by the general knowledge of the local architecture and the consciousness of how we read them. Local narratives that then arise seem to have resisted the possibility of other historical constructions.

Part 2: Praxis

Oba D.A. Nwandu’S House at Enugu Ukwu

Africa Explores, the popularly well received exhibition at the Lower Manhattan located Museum for African Art, opened in 1991. In essence it marked an American view of Africa at the end of the century, and the critical attention paid to the exhibition would be the envy of any art museum curator. I am not about to enter many of the issues raised in its critiques. Nevertheless, it was quite coincidental that having just completed a research project in southeastern Nigeria in 1991, I chanced upon a photograph in the Africa Explores catalogue, which seemed very similar to the one I had taken (fig. 1). The photograph’s label confirmed that it was the same bungalow on which part of my work was focused at the time. The single level structure was located in the town of Enugu Ukwu in the family compound (house) of the late D.A. Nwandu.

As I went on to read the text of this section of the Africa Explores catalogue, I was astounded by Donald Cosentino’s description and historical interpretation. It read quite unlike what I was already beginning to construct as an historical interpretation of the same house. Not only was the history I was writing somewhat tortured in comparison to Cosentino’s free-flowing certainty, but the essential conclusions we reached were quite opposite. Whereas Cosentino had suggested that the house was a product of the 1970s and of contact with Italians, my investigation seemed increasingly pointed towards the 1920s and to a mixed bag of cultures: Igbo sculpture, Arab Muslim architecture, Igbo uli painting, the observation of ‘architecture’ in nature such as spider’s webs, the locally invented colonial era architecture of Onitsha and Awka, and perhaps the Amaro architecture of Lagos.

Writing in a chapter of the Africa Explores catalogue titled ‘Afrokitsch,’ and in a sub-section titled ‘Udoji Culture: Kitsch in Nigeria,’ Cosentino locates the old Nwandu House within a field that he terms ‘Udoji Culture.’ First let me explain what the term Udoji means historically. Then I will question the idea that kitsch, which Greenberg always posited in relation to an avant garde products is even possible let alone a useful paradigmmatic anchor in a description and/or critique of the modern in Nigeria.

The Udoji Civil Service Commission was created in 1973 to make a recommendation to the Nigerian Federal Government regarding the salary levels of civil servants. It followed what was then an obvious oil-related expansion of the economy, the price rises that followed, and the apparent difficulty that civil servants whose salaries had been stagnated for many years before, had with living on their income. By the completion of its work, and the submission of its report, the commission headed by Jerome Udoji, the man after whom the commission was named, recommended an across-the-board pay-rise for Federal workers. It was accepted and effected by government in the following year. Since the Federal Government is by far the largest employer and source of contractual patronage, the result of the Udoji recommendation, was a large increase in the economy’s money supply levels, increased consumer expenditure levels, and an inflationary impetus to the cost of living. Life for large sections of middle class urbanites was, in short, good. This, after all, was the era of that was soon to give rise to the extravagances of FESTAC, the Second World Black Festival of Arts and Culture, which under the banner of Black and African brought together people of color for a celebration of culture. These included Egyptians, Trindadians, Cubans, Brazilians from Bahia, Papua New Guineans, and Australian Aboriginals. This is the era to which Amiri Baraka looks back today when he is said to have lamented, in the context of an era of Shonekan’s deception and Abacha’s dictatorship,⁵ “[...]when will Nigeria be Nigeria again!” Certainly, a cultural event of the magnitude and significance of FESTAC has not occurred in Nigeria since, and cannot in the forseeable future.

With great persuasion and good reason then, Cosentino posits this moment as a founding one in Nigerian history. For the cultural effect of Udoji, he compares its social transformations to an equally powerful change in American culture. He suggests it is comparable to the new hedonism that followed Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show when rock and roll became commodified. In other words, Udoji brought, so Cosentino implies, a general belief in the possibility of romantically recasting the course of a history gone sour with the Biafran war. That is, the horrors of war, and the traumatic rending of Nigeria’s independence optimism that resulted, was finally exorcised so many years after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, by the healing effect of a sudden increase in money circulating the economy. This is not unlike what occurred in pre-1968 Western Europe and North America.

Against the background of Udoji, Cosentino writes the following about this period’s architectural culture, and of the location of the Nwandu House within it: “The paradigmatic career in the Udoji economy was that of the contractor” (Vogel, 247). He continues later “Udoji nairas [...] found their way back to ancestral villages, where contractors were employed to construct ‘villas’ and ‘lodges’ for homeboys who had made good in Lagos, Enugu and Kaduna”(italics mine) (Vogel, 247). “Often,” he continues “these houses were built according to the international tropical shoe-box design, but there were also fantastic creations such as [this] chief’s house with flamboyant garrets and elaborate balustrades [...].”(Vogel, 247). Cosentino then goes on to state that “the Igbo contractor [i.e. Nwandu, but whom he does not name] may have taken inspiration from the Italian firm he worked for,” and ends finally with the claim that “Udoji optimism is unmistakable in the design of the house” (Vogel, 247).

It is not indicated from where this implied history of the house derives, but it seems likely that it comes either from casual discussions Cosentino may have had, or from interviews he would have arranged with residents of the town. Or, the information may have been given to him in interviews with a member of the Nwandu family or household, or a resident of the compound. Neither his informants nor his field associates could have included the building’s original patron, for Chief Nwandu had passed away some twelve years before Cosentino wrote the essay.

Here, I want to insist that I am not suggesting that Cosentino made things up. I am not suggesting that his is the product of a sloppy research.⁶ Indeed, from my own work in the very same localities, it seems very likely that Cosentino merely wrote what he was told by his informants. In the post-Biafra War era, this information would have seemed accurate since the Udoji commission is easily assumed to have produced a certain architectural culture of flamboyance. Rather, at issue is how localities view their own architectural history, specifically, how it is constructed in social memory and social imaginary. At another level, the issue is also about why this architecture allows such a construction. Why it is able to operate such a deception on local history, and on the history constructed by a historian of art, architecture or culture. Even more crucially, we should seek to objective of the original commissioners might have been in producing a building so capable of subverting our senses of history as to render them susceptible to misplacement.

Working in West Africa even well beyond Igbo-speaking areas, researchers have become aware of the caution with which they should view the testimony of local people. It was a common experience that often the testimonies of my interlocutors were not born out by historical facts. For example, testimony might suggest that the age of a set of buildings hovers around thirty years. Correlating a multiplicity of evidence, one then discovers that the information offered in interviews misses the mark by more than half a century. Clearly, such perceptions may present problems for a discursive practice whose own historical structure varies significantly from that of its object. This may be important to the nature of humanistic studies more widely. We are forced to question the reliability of interviews for which the historical and political location of the informant has not been properly understood.

I took my own photograph of the house in 1991. To the rear of the person standing facing the house, is a structure that leads one away from the interpretation offered by Cosentino. The entrance to the compound of which the house is a part, is marked, as is the entrance of traditional Anambra Igbo domestic architecture, by a gateway (fig. 2). As will become evident, the gateway structure shares many stylistic qualities with the bungalow. Both are built from locally available stone. The surfaces of both structures are elaborated by a stylized emphasizing of the mortar joints, easily recognized as an architectural style of its moment (fig. 3). Both structures also share the ornamental articulated molding, which in the house picks out the upper outline of the bay’s pediment. In its gate, the same symmetrical composition, which combines rhythmically flowing linear progressions of curves and straight lines, occurs. Unlike its use in classical or neoclassical European architecture, the molding is much less about the specific articulation of structure, than it has to do with identifying the building with what was then a newly emergent, particularized aesthetic.⁷

Large, circular disc-like forms also mark the ornamental schemas of both structures. In the house these discs, encircled by a molding, enclose a radiating floral motif. In the house they enclose a “Star of David” “Solomon’s Seal” motif. The motif is also present in the house as one of two elements which articulate the false balustrade, and which links together the pediments of the two halves of the house. It is likely that this molded, linear element, reminiscent of some decorative aspects of Italian Baroque architecture, is what led to the suggestion by Cosentino that the work was inspired by contact with Italian contractors. It must be said nevertheless that they were not building anything here in the 1970s other than modern, International Style architecture.

The entrance gateway may be read quite differently, especially if one is prepared to understand it by also attempting to construct a history of Igbo gate houses within which this one might be located. Chike Aniakor, Nancy Neaher and Liz Willis have written on the role and importance of the entrance gateway to what we have come to see as the traditional Igbo compound. Amongst its most important roles, the gatehouse indicates the status of the family, communicating through the elaborate nature of the gate structure, and the richness of the door leafs it would once have framed, the importance of the head of a family. When particular kinds of door and supporting panel are framed by such a gateway, it indicates the presence of an ozotitleholder within the compound. Neaher has even suggested that we might think of the gateway though the idea of the skin as filter, and of its protective function. Letting in visitors whose intent is good, but serving as a warning to anyone who might cross its threshold with intent to do harm (Neaher 1980).

It is possible to regard these modes of communication as textual; decorative schemes are well structured, despite the visual variation that appears to exist at the level of pure aesthetics. Let me indicate this is a review of the transformation of the gatehouse over this century. One of the earliest visual records of the gatehouse as an architectural type is seen in this photograph of an entrance gateway published by Basden in 1920 (fig. 4). Judging by the erosion of the unprotected sacrificial mounds in front we may assume that it was constructed at least two years before the photograph was taken. The photograph was probably taken at least two years before the publication. An upper limit for the gates’ production would be 1914, though it could in fact be older by a decade, say 1904. Basden himself arrived in Nigeria in the region where such gates were produced in 1900. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to discover in which town or village the gateway was located, or which family commissioned and owned it. Both are pieces of information which would be critical to any attempt to reconstruct its meaning. Though it does not allow us any detail of its mgbo ezi, or external carved doorway, the photograph has recorded in good detail the clay portals which once framed such entranceways. It can be seen that the whole surface is covered over in low relief. We may describe this as a kind of reversed-relief, the development of embedded shapes and forms arrested at the structure’s own implied surface.

The sub-surface forms of the Basden gateway are certainly continuous with other structures produced in this locale since then. Moreover, other gateways a few decades into the 1900s confirm this continuity. So, for example, this gate house (fig. 5) which was in existence in 1979 when this photograph was taken, but which has since been demolished, was the entrance gateway to Ezeokoli’s compound in the town of Nnobi revamped circa 1937 (but first erected circa 1915). Ezeokoli was both a titled man and the town’s one time British Warrant chief, a position to which he was appointed shortly after the establishment of the colony in its region. The gateway shares many of the qualities that are found in the earlier structure, although in this case, its mgbo ezi, suffered neglect they were, were still in location when the photograph was taken. The doors possess the formal spatial properties that we expect to find, properties whose linear geometric equivalents have been remarked upon by other scholars, Herbert Cole, Chike Aniakor and Nancy Neaher.

The clay portals that surround the door opening have not drawn comment. When they are compared to the earlier gateway, we notice that the style and aesthetics of its own decoration possesses many of the characteristics of the earlier one. The style is therefore not random or transient, but has had longevity comparable to that of the wooden panels. Many of the same elements, the embodied impressions of iron-bars, once a form of currency and a sign of wealth, appear in both gateway elevations. Even more recent ‘traditional’ gateways continue to incorporate the same elements, though the tendency over time has been for a turn from three dimensions to two: The ornamentation being more and more simply painted on to the gate-portal’s surface.

A scholarly history of this gate house tradition had not been produced. What links these gatehouse schemes even though we see them as being very different? The answer is that they are all are expressions of well-being and of financial success which in their moment of production would have been legible as such in their communities. The motifs to which I have pointed are representations of success. They were all symbols of wealth in the form of the different kinds of currency accepted in each period. This symbolism was maintained, even in the less intensive, less labor-consuming manner of the 1950s.

Against such richness, the Nwandu gatehouse takes on a much more legible form. This legibility does enable new insight into the Nwandu House itself. Although the door-leafs that may have completed its original entrance have long since been replaced, and even though this gateway is constructed of a different material (stone), enough still remains in the portal to raise unsettling questions. Might this presumably Italianate, non-African gateway, actually be more a part of the tradition I have just reviewed than of anything else to which it might be allied? Can we still, with certainty, imagine that the Nwandu House is either a product of the 1970s, or that it can be described as kitsch?

Greenberg’s notion of kitsch was theorized quite specifically in relation to the problem new forms of high culture (once romanticized as the ‘avant-garde’) in the modern west had with popular culture. Central to Greenberg’s analysis was a location of his argument within a broadly Marxian rationalization of capitalist economy, and the centrality for artists of the ‘medium’ of their various practices. This would be the concreteness of words for poets, or the materiality of paint for painters). For Greenberg, most especially, kitsch was a product of the ‘rearguard’, the very opposite of whatever the art of the avant garde pursued, and these (as well as the possibilities in between) are actualized by individual consumers. Specifically, kitsch survives in a capitalist economy because of the prevalence, of those unable to go beyond an ‘unreflective enjoyment.’

Indeed I cannot do Greenberg the justice he deserves were this essay to be considered in relation to his larger production of writing. But it should be clear that there are certain assumptions about African culture and its history that one would have to assume in order for this notion of kitsch to be even minimally applicable. Certainly it is not, if one is aware that the architectural culture of which I write was produced in the 1920s. Still, even the error of assuming a 1970s date for a culture emanating from the jazziness of Lagos fails to score relevance. It would be stretching things to claim that the Nigerian economy was capitalist in the 1970s let alone whether it was so in the 1920s. Or, that there were distinctly separable class-based cultures, or that there existed a history out from which something recognizable as artistic avant gardes emerged, or that workers in Nigeria were as leisure-time deprived as they were in Western economies. What I am getting at, is of course that ultimately the idea of kitsch here has relevance if one is not at all talking about Nigeria, but about how those from beyond its world might produce significance from its objects. The time constraint in studying the building was Cosentino’s, not that of adult Nigerians in Enugu Ukwu. It is this constraint which seems to have converted something he encountered in Nigeria into kitsch. The Nwandu House, and the category of architecture to which it belongs is certainly not Afrokitsch, if by this term (invented by Cosentino) one was meant to understand an African person’s experience of the objects of her or his own culture as kitsch.

Let me then return to the Nwandu building. I had indicated how it was beginning to appear that the house’s gateway was thoroughly inserted in a highly original, modern, reinterpretation of traditional gatehouses. This can indeed be pushed to a more certain conclusion. At a general level, the lively dynamic pattern created by its mason, both structural and ornamental, enables its portal to stand out, and to draw attention to itself very much as did the flamboyance of the traditional style portals. The key component of the traditional portal is present here too. The circular disc, surrounded by a substantial molding, and enclosing a Star of David or Solomon’s Seal form, is actually a reference to wealth. The old Nigerian penny once bore this mark exactly. In effect then this motif, that is not unconnected to Igbo modern mythologies of a Jewish origin,⁸ simply replaces the earlier motifs of cowries, iron bars, and manillas. These older motifs are still observable in 1975 in the clay built, traditional gatehouses of Igwe Ezeokoli of Nnobi and Nwafor Orizu of Nnewi. At the time they were built, the motifs were the contemporary symbols of wealth.

Furthermore, for the modern gatehouse, the wall’s color-contrasted lyrical lines is an effective recall of both the three dimensional dazzle of the mud portal’s reversed-relief, and of the lyricism of uli, a strictly gendered body-painting and architecture-ornamental practice, that was once exclusively practiced by women. From this tradition the builder’s style has borrowed an emphasis on line, picking out the mortar joints in a manner that is the opposite of what European masonary practice most typically attempted to achieve: the dissolution of the mortar joint. It becomes obvious then that something much more culturally situated, much more meaningful and complex than kitsch, (an easily consumed, commodified, non-intellectualizable cultural product) unfolded here in rural southern Nigeria.

With such information at hand, one may search beyond the surface responses typically given by villagers; and ask for specificity. Who for example were the builders? Who was the creator of the design? What culture did he (or she even) inhabit? Who were his or her peers? Where did he learn his craft? How did the style proliferate historically? Why are examples of portals in this style so concentrated in a particular area—the area which includes Enugu Ukwu and is heavily influenced by Nri culture? What kinds of people commissioned them?

Indeed, it is essential to eschew the namelessness and anonymity integral to the construction of Africanist art histories and cultural ethnographies of the 1920s, and to insist on producing a historical narration of this architecture that could consist of socially constructed, individualized historical agents and their linkages. Such an approach brings to light the other, hidden realities behind the architecture’s visually dependent mask.

Patrons

Houses and gateways in the style of the Nwandu House proliferated at particular sites. There was also a pattern to its possession. Facing the entrances to the compounds of the Adama of Adazi Nnukwu (fig. 6), Igwe Michael Onyiuke in Nimo (fig. 7), Chief Nkwonta in Enugu Ukwu, fig. 8, and others in nearby towns of Igbo Ukwu, Awka and Abagana, one begins to recognize that far from simply being a style preferred by the rich, such gates specifically front the enclosures to the households of men who were holders of status-granting titles of the Ozo society. Frequently such individuals were the chief’s of their towns (some were only so by warrant of the Colonial government), and not infrequently such chieftaincy titles linked them historically to the Nri diaspora and its circulation of a titular structure of organization. This type of gateway became a mark of a particular ‘class’ of people in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, as did the older type of gateway it replaced in a previous era. I have yet to find such a gateway fronting the house of the other kind of wealthy person that we might easily identify in this colonial moment: the first crop of young professionals, doctors, lawyers, clerks and politicians. The identity and form of architectural self-representation of this group of wealthy persons took a very different form. In fact, with some wit, we might more accurately describe them, to invoke Cosentino’s misplaced term, as “homeboys”.

The owners of the Nwandu style house or aesthetic, were as far away as one can imagine from even a witty designation as ‘homeboys’. Instead, the gateways in the front of the residences explored alternative forms of modernity strongly allied, even in its radical nature, to traditional notions of stature, occupation and career rather than to overly European ones. It is imperative to mention that, although young men at the time, owners of the Nwandu-type house had rejected much of what the modern-colonial culture might have to offer to self-representation.

This historical moment, already anticipated in the turn of the 19th century, certainly marks a disjunction that is political in the first place, and is available to exploration by historians, anthropologists and social scientists. In these arenas, it can easily be established that revolutions did occur at the levels of social action. Such revolutions must also have included the evidence the buildings themselves presented, both within the institutions in which architecture is produced, and the institution of architecture itself. In architecture specifically, one expects that the difference which this transformation engendered must be observable in the pedagogues within which builders were produced, as well as in the techniques of construction and in the materials that are usable and/or appropriate for building.

Part 3: Producing an Architect

Michael Nguko and His Individualistic Architecture

The Nwandu gateway in Enugu Ukwu, is a late example of a definitive gateway style that a local builder Mazi Nguko of Nimo (fig. 9) was developing in the 1920s and 1930s. Here is summary of his career. Nguko was past twenty by the time he joined the workshop of Thomas Isiadinso, a local builder who worked out of Enugu Ukwu. Before this apprenticeship, he had been employed in many unlikely capacities; including as a blacksmith and as a professional circumciser. Before his entry into building, he was therefore immersed in a customary world.⁹ Neither his own training nor his subsequent experience as a builder brought him in significant and direct contact with colonial Europeans and their world.

In or before 1920,¹⁰ following apprenticeship with Isiadinso, Nguko worked for a brief time as a sub-contractor in the Enugu area, first for the Italian construction firm Cappa D’Alberto, before moving to a salaried position with the colonial government’s Public Works Department where he remained for seven years. He resigned in 1931 then about 30 years old, to begin a career as a freelance builder. He worked out of Nimo from about 1933 onwards, and found no lack of patrons willing to employ him to build their residences.

In Nimo, Nguko also built for other families that were at the time highly regarded locally, and whose heirs have since become a part of the educated elite class in the metropolitan sites of Lagos, Enugu and Abuja: the Agbim and the Onyiuke families are two examples. In the same period, Nguko also built for both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.¹¹ In the neighboring town of Enugu Ukwu, the town in which he had been trained over a decade earlier, Nguko built for Nwandu (ca.1942), Nkwonta, and Okoye (no relation). These individuals, heads of large families, had little or no formal education. Each one of them became substantially enriched by involvement first in trading, by the 1950s and 60s in building contracting, in places as far afield as Kaduna, Lagos and Enugu. As building contractors (families which were in other words capable of erecting their own buildings) their engagement of Nguko indicates that he had become recognized as something akin to an architect; an individual able to offer more than simply the technical ability to building in a new way.

Many of these patrons already had their own new style houses erected in the 1920s and early 1930s, and in all probability by his former teacher master-builder Thomas Isiadinso.¹² In such instances, Michael Nguko was called in to replace a traditional clay enclosure wall and entrance gate, with a new enclosure and an elaborate entry gate of his own creation. The majority of such enclosure projects occurred between about 1939 and 1943.

Nguko’s increasing independence led to a revitalized career producing a number of unique buildings and architectural objects beyond his hometown of Nimo. Between 1942 and 1945 Nguko left the southeast for northern Nigeria where he remained at least until the late 1950s or 60s. The move far north meant he was to live and build in places far from Igbo-speaking territory such as in Minna, Kano and Katsina. He only gave up his northern residence in the post-Independence period, as the ethnic strife of 1966 forced most southerners to flee back home to the South. The success of Nguko’s practice during the years of this northern sojourn indicates that Hausa-speaking Muslim patrons, the new rich, were unexpectedly attracted to his style and all the sources he mixes in his design.¹³ This was unexpected given Nguko’s Christian faith and southern origin.

It is certainly ironic that when much later Nguko finally returned to the south, the wealthier and more traveled citizens of his hometown of Nimo saw his architecture (including work he had produced before his sojourn in northern Nigeria) as incorporating a northern vocabulary (muslim Hausa-Fulani and middle-eastern architecture). There after, he was referred to by the alias “Malam”; the Hausa language term for a Muslim cleric often used too in northern West African contexts as an honorific designation. Even more interestingly, Nguko’s fame amongst the wealthier, traveled class of Nimo (and of other southeastern locations) was politically produced. This social group is the one that the British created by legal fiat. These warrant and paramount chieftaincies converted the non-autocratic Igbo institution of eze into autocratic forms of kingship more closely resembling that of the powerful emirs of northern Nigeria. Many such eze and other wealthy individuals had acquired their wealth as traders and contractors, having once worked in northern Nigeria. A few were actually resident in the north while their southern, home-located projects where in progress. One may, therefore, understand the ideological appeal Nguko’s architecture had for this class from which his largest patron group was drawn. That the same builder who was also patronized by northern Emirs produced the compounds of these Igbo individuals, meant that they (Nimo chiefs) could claim an equivalent status.

Nguko’S St. Paul’S and the Nguko House

Two buildings by Malam Nguko serve well to explore his practice in detail. These are St. Paul’s, Nimo which was just mentioned above, (fig. 10), and the house he commenced erecting for himself in Nimo, but which he has never been able to complete. The main body of St. Paul’s church is unremarkable, partly because of the post-Nigerian-civil-war renovation of the building. At this time, the external surface was plastered over and painted, thus depriving it of much of the surface quality that a brick or stone surface once lent it. The only vestige of its original appearance is the east-side entrance, the one most directly facing the gateway into the main compound.

Its striking entranceway and portico consists of a rectangular lower section and a large semi-circular pediment cut off below its horizontal axis and thus slightly narrowed at its base. This entrance door is flanked by two narrower entries (now blocked in) over which Nguko has placed a large arch. The whole of this assembly is bound by a larger arch which springs from the same pier as do the smaller openings.

Unique aspects of the elevation include a form that terminates in two large discs, defined by plaster molding, and in essence hung over the large arched form, from which a stoutly proportioned cross projects. We also can hardly miss the pair of finials, which resemble the minarets of a classic Middle Eastern mosque, replicated here in miniature. According to the builder, they were inspired by and I quote “photographs of Mecca.” Why Mecca for an Anglican church building? His answer indicated that he simply mixed elements and forms that he found powerful in aesthetic terns, regardless of what their original meaning might have been. For the congregation, Nguko’s architecture would not have been imagined as connecting their church to Islam since few would have had any knowledge of Islamic architecture. Had they such knowledge at the time, they likely would have refused the church’s design.¹⁴

A third aspect is the juxtaposition of different textures and patterns. A complex of forms breaks the surface up into many separated areas. These are filled in by a series of approximately circular shapes which forms a nearly regular crystalline pattern. This pattern is achieved, as in Nguko’s other masonry, by purposeful picking out the pattern of the irregular stone joints (in a raised plaster pointing). The central panel just over the entrance, bounded by a ‘St. Paul’s Church Nimo’ inscription, is different in being covered in a series of diagonal lines outside the central circular disc. These lines are laid on a background whose surface resembles a finely textured pebble-dash. The color of this central panel is sandy and green; it is also distinct from most of the rest of the larger semi-circular pediment.¹⁵

Nguko’s mixing of ideas reveals an aesthetic preference that is not fleeting, judged by his sustained interest in a constantly changing texture. To take an even more striking illustration, his preference for a fragmented and changing texture is exemplified maximally in Nguko’s own house (fig 11). This is evident most particularly in the oldest section of this still unfinished building and of the ground level of the main entrance-portico (fig. 12). Here, aspects of the St. Paul’s Church’s elevation are repeated, in a more determined, scaled-up manner. The house portico also consists of a pair of circular moldings, one enclosing the other, over a centralized, horse-shoe shaped entrance archway. A detail (fig. 13) of the elevation shows how Nguko was intent on juxtaposing a variety of textures and patterns within a single frame. Here we see a texture much like that of the St. Paul’s facade, and there a strict horizontal and vertical regime; her we find narrow horizontal bands in which each unit is rendered as an extended oval, over there a stack of pentagons.

The overall effect is both dazzling and engaging, but never disorienting; the composition held together by the boldness of their boundaries. These preferences and strategies are not uncommonly observed in a number of well-known Igbo masquerade costumes in which an unexpected stylistic coherence is produced from such juxtaposition.¹⁶

By these description I do not mean to suggest that Nguko should be thought of simply as we would an architect in our present. Certainly, Nguko never produced drawings for his work in this period. He even allowed that some of his ideas for the St. Paul Church’s plan, though not for the porticoes, came out of a discussion with the diocesan Bishop who was himself also Igbo. The necessary consensus to come up with an agreeable plan for a church meant that the builder could not exclusively claim his knowledge of the plan, its building and construction. The possibility of seizing the position of authority over his field of knowledge, as might a master mason or unchartered architect in the same context in late-19th century Europe, did not arise here. Nguko certainly recognized his own inventiveness and originality. He also seemed aware that the recognition of alien sources such as Islamic architecture would have risked the Bishop’s disapproval of the St. Paul’s façade. But even if the Bishop failed to recognize this affinity, Nguko’s success in making them his own personal style is indirectly responsible for the fact. As was commented on previously, even Muslim Nigerians found his style desirable.

Speaking excitedly about the St. Paul design, Nguko maintained an unexpected enthusiasm about the design of the portico, as if it had occurred recently. He did so, as he had done throughout our extended interviews by using a language that was poetic; and that clearly indicated the use of the Igbo language in ways more typical of the artistic persona. Summing up the effect of St. Paul’s design for example he stated quite appropriately: “Ona egbu nu ka mmanya.” (It [the appearance of the portico] of course makes one as drunk as does palm wine).

In one stroke, evoking all the seductiveness of palm wine (transparent whiteness, bodied sweetness) and of its unanticipated effect (jolity, inebriation, drunkenness and loss of control), Nguko characteristically captures much of what I have since struggled to communicate in many more words. Indeed, Malam Michael Nguko had a talent for articulating the culture and aesthetic of the world of his craft that matched his own abilities as an architectural creator. The context in which he was raised was probably crucial. His father was a sculptor and blacksmith who was well known locally.¹⁷ Malam himself had followed his father’s art, and expanded this to include a practice in a new architecture. One of Malam’s own sons started at a tender age to be interested in the making of things, often copying the sculpture which his father was creating in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁸ The Nguko family was clearly one that immersed itself in a culture of creativity. Father’s taught and critiqued sons; in order for this to occur an aesthetic language was obviously employed. We wonder how Malam’s conception of any particular building proceeded and how now he would articulate this. What were his contexts and methods of invention? In what terms did he think his buildings? How did he build (carry out) his ideas?

Before immersing ourselves in these questions, one clarification must be made. The striking architectural forms of Malam Nguko’s work, exemplified by the gatehouses I have explored and many others not detailed in this paper [fig. 14]), might lead one to assume that their conception involves the use of drawing. The formal qualities of his work amongst which may be listed compositional symmetry, tangential meeting of circular elements, curvilinear floral patterning, the layered, horizontal planarity of the portal’s architectonic elements, and the floral and lyrical plasterwork moldings certainly encourage such a view. One is therefore surprised to discover that Nguko does not use drawings, or at least that he did not do so until fairly recently (1980s).

Nguko has claimed that he only finally acceded to the use of drawing because he was involved in a project in which his ideas had become so complex its execution presented several unsolvable difficulties. The encounter with drawing occurred in the context of a house located at Asata, then a new district of the colonial town of Enugu) which Nguko was building for the headmaster of a school at Enugu-Ngwo.¹⁹ This headmaster insisted upon, and then taught, Malam how to draw plans and elevations, and to produce “technical drawings” for the resolution of his more complex ideas and decorative schemes. To the headmaster, who subsequently became a good friend,²⁰ Nguko owes his scant informally-acquired knowledge of drafting conventions, at a much later moment in his career.

Malam Nguko’s extensive pre-world war II oeuvre (the period relevant to this study), produced without the knowledge of drawing as a critical tool for creative practice, raise questions already encountered in the introduction to this work, and around the churches at Enugu Ukwu and Abagana. One of them is how to understand the possibility of putting up buildings, like Malam’s, without the benefit of drawings. Clearly, even admitting the likelihood that Malam worked from photographs, he also had an acute memory of the many things of architectural interest he had encountered in his itineration. Furthermore, in the absence of drawing, the builder must create in the abstract (in imagination alone), molding and remolding an initial idea as the emerging physical object, and the materials from which it is to be constructed must provide suggestions for (and constraints to) its further development. The mastery of the interplay of innovation and improvisation in the process of building seems requisite for the work which results. Thirdly, it is clear that such a builder must have literally absorbed into his own body, a knowledge of limits, proportions and tensions. His body must act as its own statics-directed memory. His was once a purely corporeal practice.

Confirming the three aspects of such an assessment, Nguko testified that he utilized to good effect a constructional system derived from long-established indigenous building methods. Though not in themselves geometric, such methods employ gravity, the weight of objects, the catenary effect of a weighted string, and the experience of the body (Blier, 1987). It is not that these are formalized outside the actual practices themselves, and that Malam could, with ease, teach other individuals how to go about working this way.²¹ One gleans some aspects of his allegorical relation to non-delineational method, and to its application in the creation and erection of complex design in the following exchange:

Writer: Ebe isilu na i naro ese ife ese tupu i luba aluba, onazinu agba ghali ka i nwelu ike si luta otutu udi uno na kwa ichomma ya nke munwa fugolu bu n’aka gi ka odi.

(Since you say you do not draw before you start building, it is (is it not) a bit puzzling that some of your buildings that I have seen and which are clearly in your personal style, were buildable to start with, and that moreover their ornamentation was possible to install. [Implied in the Igbo is a question demanding explanation which the English translation cannot quite capture.])

Nguko: Okwa ima ishe ana akpo iketu?....

(Do you know what an Iketu is?)

Writer: Mba, anunurom nya bu okwu. Kedu ife obu?

(No, I’ve never heard that [Igbo] word before. What does it mean ...)

Nguko: Imaro ife a na akpo iketu! nya bu uno ududo na alulu onwe ya...ebe o na esilu umu aruru onya... ehe, o bu nya k’a n’akpo iketu. I nenenugo ka ududo si atu nyabu ife ma o na alu nya? Osi eba o tupu onweya dado ebe ozo..nkaa abulu ofu laayini ...etua ka o ya esi lulu nya na aga, na ekewa... N’izizi, nya bu ife puta o na a gbam yalii. M nodukata mu nebe nya nkkili. M’nodu nno na ekili ya ma ona alu nya bu ife..na amenu ya undastudi... mekatata ofu mbosi nghota aghugho nya bu ududo ji alu uno. System nya dinu egwu. Obu etua kamu nwa sikwu alu uno. M puta, mjilu anya nkiti neta etu mu cholu ka ife sidi, mmakwunye ya plom, na atuya atu mu tusia nya etua ona adi bevul. Ududo kam’bunu. Anarom e-use i nu fom woki ndi kapinta na adi alu udu molding ina afu na uno mu lusiliu..oputa ona agba ndi mmadu ghali kamu si emenwu nya bu ife.

(You do not know what an iketu is?....the house that the spider builds for itself...where it sets traps for ants and insects...yes? ...well that is what an iketu is. Have you ever watched a spider build its house? It throws itself from one place to the next...and that become some line... that’s how it builds its house and continues to expand on it and to divide it up. At first, that process puzzled me. Once in a while I’d stop everything and watch the spider. I’d just stop and watch that thing..sort of understudying it...and then all of a sudden I understood the spider’s house building secret. Its system is really quite fantastic. That is exactly how I build my buildings. I just use my eyes to work out how I want things to be, then on to a string I attach the [weight], and then throw it, and when I’ve thrown it, it always comes out beveled. I am the spider of course. I do not use a carpenter’s form-work for installing my moldings either...that generally still puzzles people...)

Nguko created surface interest in a number of ways. Decorative elements like the linear, twisting, vine-like, relief floral ornament (fig. 15) draw in the eye because they are mimetic and instantly recognizable. Surface texture itself is also, however, also used to good effect; the juxtaposition of stones of different sizes, whose jointing then could also add to the brilliance of the patterning formed by the mortar at the joints. Nguko was equally responsive to explaining such especially intriguing architectural and architectonic detail of his buildings. Take for example his improvisational use of stone, and the impression of flatness achieved by the emphasized, patterned mortar-joint. This fools the viewer’s perception by distorting relative texture (changing the relation between foreground and background). Confirming such observations Nguko summed up his approach with the response:

Ime okwute ka olaru...di ka nya na chi nya si we ke ya, ifu na ife oya aputa ya adimma na anya.

(If you make stone lie in properly, to lie down...like itself and its chi created it, you will see that it will bring its beauty out to the eye [i.e. will be pleasing to the eye]).

He employed a specifically architectural language to describe a constructive and aesthetic quality of a material. This response was elicited by a question concerning the difficulties of working with the quartzitic stone used locally in building. In Nguko’s response also occurs conjunctions of a traditional viewpoint with a new architecture and its interpretation, which puts paid to the idea that these architectural objects were not fully understood and absorbed within an African (Igbo, in this instance) linguistic, a charge usually lodged by scholars who interpreted these regimes of architecture simply as being European objects in Africa (Salvaing). Although in common English parlance stones are laid, they do not create themselves, nor does stone have recourse to negotiating its being with its own chi. At a broad level, this is nothing if not an architectural statement, granting to the object itself a certain aesthetic autonomy.

Michael Nguko was prolific. Not surprisingly, he was hardly able to recall the many buildings he had created. According to him, as soon as one project was finished he quickly moved on to the next. He indicated a certain disdain for nostalgia, and for conserving a memory of earlier works. He chose, however, to remember a building he worked on for a man from Osili, Enugu Ukwu; a house which came to be known popularly as Osombuno (that is, Oo som bu uno or ‘only I am [fine enough to be called] a house’). The ‘I’ in the phrase is noteworthy. The building (personalized as speaker in this popular-cultural characterization) boasts of its own beauty to the viewer. Architecture is thus given a voice. This is nothing short of a local recognition of the height to which Nguko had elevated architectural culture, and of his visible establishment of the (once unimagined) possibility of invention offered by what I have come to describe as ‘new way’ building. Nguko himself receives the public admiration implied by this naming with amusement, stating whimsically that if there was money to be had in the kind of work he did, then he ought indeed to be well off.

Subversion

Although Cosentino correctly sensed an element of the exhibitionist in the facades of such houses and their gateways, I have shown that the structure was not a product of the 1970s oil boom or of any such culture. It was built well over eighty years ago (or fifty years before the moment to which Cosentino attributes it) in a society that was the very opposite of oil-boom optimism. In fact it was a society that was only just coming to terms with the implications of colonial pacification. I have shown in detail how thoroughly immersed in local notions, symbolisms and style of chiefly gatehouses the modern so called ‘italianate’ ones were.

That Africa Explores so completely misses the history of the period of Nwandu house forces us to seek a deeper explanation for such error. These errors probably did not exist at the moment the buildings were erected. The question how such buildings and entrance gateways were received by citizens of the locality, and by visiting colonial administrators or missionaries is an important one. Local people much admired this new architectural style, which at the time was received as a modern reinvention of a quite familiar form. Similarly, there is no evidence that Europeans saw the buildings as anything more than part of the local architectural scene. At the time, they do not seem to have mistaken such buildings for those built for European traders or for the colonial administration or for missionaries. In this sense there is a convergence between the views of the building as locals understand it and the view of it held by those from outside. To the locals, they were residences occupied by wealthy holders of traditional office. The difficulty seems only to occur once an attempt is made to historically account for the buildings. Recall my earlier complaint:

In the vernacular, [...] culture is detached from the realm in which architectural signification is actively recognized by theindividual creator who is conscious of its constructedness, and who is knowingly involved in its manipulation/ negotiation as such. ‘Architects’ of the vernacular are, that is, hedged about by ‘tradition’ and are therefore of no individuality that need concern the scholar.

We have seen where that has led. Against an Africanist background in which the notion of vernacular had been theorized, the buildings were deemed to be vernacular, unless European colonialists produced them. And, since the Nwandu House was obviously not a part of a vernacular scene, it is then assumed that it must be both European derived (albeit something called kitsch), and a product of a much later historical moment. What is uncertain is how long after the buildings were erected the beginnings of their misrecognition commenced even in its own locale.²² Which generation of colonial officers if at all first began to see these buildings as no longer marked by an irreducible difference from Europe?²³

Rather coincidentally, I had taken a photograph of the entrance gateway well before I had any conscious interest in this subject (and certainly before Cosentino wrote his essay). It is not an architectural photograph as such, because there are people in front of it, disrupting our view (fig. 16). I went back to this photograph (which I had taken in the 1970s) and was rather amused to discover who indeed the group of men entering through it were. How interesting to discover that the man who stands second from the left, wearing a light-blue attire is Jerome Udoji himself, the man who had lead the Udoji commission around which Cosentino formulated his theoretics. They were there to pay their last respects to the Chief whose funeral they were attending.

Indeed the photograph captures a resolution whose conflictual nature is now hardly evident. Gatehouses and houses like the Nwandu House once graced the buildings erected by those young men, quite unlike Udoji himself (a class of 1948 alumni of Cambridge University’s Law department [Udoji 1995:24-37]), who in effect rejected the possibility of higher education and eventually of service in the colony’s (and immediate postcolony’s) institutions. Pursuing artisanship and apprenticeships in areas that would become professionalized in the post 1960s era (building, carpentering, blacksmithing, construction contracting or management), they were in this era ideologically opposed to the likes of Jerome Udoji. The former group, as they grew older, came to occupy the seats of traditional chiefship and title, ‘offices’ that could well have inherited the mantle of rulership at the end of colony. The buildings and gatehouses of which I have written were immersed in this context. They were used by these individuals to represent their own stature and wealth quite consciously with furtive side-glances to the ‘educated’ competitors, who in the end came to occupy the positions of power in both politics and government.

The resolution of this conflict over ‘futures’ occurs much later in a kind of assimilation of each other’s norms and values to one another. Nwandu, for example, was in the 1970s the Mayor of the city of Enugu for a brief period. It is important to note that Enugu is not related to his ancestral home of Enugu Ukwu despite the similarity of their names. Nwandu had therefore no ‘natural’ route to the occupation of this position except through the power of the government that succeeded the colonialists. In the same general period, Jerome Udoji became Chief Jerome Udoji. Only after this mixture did these two groups come easily to socialize with each other, to attend the funerals of their peers regardless of which side of the ‘education’ divide the deceased might be located, to respect each other for their own very different contributions to the history of modern nationality.

In the photograph, both Udoji himself (second from right, in light blue agbada) and those gathered (including G. E. Okeke, and their sons in second row) to pay their respects to an old friend, could hardly ever have been describable then as ‘homeboys.’ A traditional architecture, developed within a cultural integrity whose history was impressive is, we recall then, what in Nwandu’s case came to be mistaken for his post modern, post Independence legacy. A very interesting reversal. And, if this is not the workings of an epistemic subversion, then what is?

References

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Illustrations

Except where indicated, all photographs are © Ikem Stanley Okoye

Endnotes

1. This essay is developed in part from an earlier paper ‘Contra-History: A “Recalcitrant” Architecture of Umunri’ which was first delivered at the triennial meeting of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (New Orleans, 1999, session ‘Architecture and Subversion’ organized and chaired by Dominique Malaquais).

2. This may seem obvious, because architecture as a constructive activity paid for by patrons who if anything represent institutionality, can hardly survive by biting the hand that feeds it. Even deconstructional (‘deconstructive’) and other forms of postmodern architecture, whether on Lagos’s Awolowo Road, or in Portland, Oregon, or in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, were produced for patrons hardly invested in bringing down the socio-political status quo. In the history of architecture, however, architects and critics have assumed the possibility of a subversive or revolutionary architecture (see for example Charles Jencks concluding section of Modern Movements in Architecture [Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Press, 1973]). This must be understood however, to skirt the fact that while such moments transformed the structural conception, visual appearance, stylistic character and institutional significance of buildings (post 1950s Kenzo Tange in Tokyo and later in Abuja, early 1910 and 20s Le Corbusier in France, Ledoux in 18th century France), they did so after the political order itself had been overturned by a plethora of forces including but hardly led by those producing architecture (see for example Werner Szambien, Les projets de l’an II : concours d’architecture de la période révolutionnaire. Paris, Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1986; Anthony Vidler Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime Cambridge, Mass, 1990; Neil Leach [ed], Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.) ‘Revolutionary’ moments in architecture occur, as well, largely in the form of drawn projects proposing possible futures, and not initially as projects just about to be built. It’s as if architecture, by definition, involves a significant lag as representation and reproduction --this says nothing at all about its representational value which I believe to be higher than those of other spheres (sculpture, painting, or oral and written literatures for example). Within architecture as a field or discipline, transformations that might be called ‘revolutions’ are de riguer as are acts (usually the erection of temporary structures) that might be viewed as ‘subversive’.

3. I write this knowing how ubiquitous the term ‘architecture’ has now become in everyday speech given a background in the world of computer software and hardware technology where it has taken on a meaning much more restrictive than imagined in Against Architecture (Denis Hollier’s 1989 comprehension of George Bataille). That is, the word architecture now has a meaning akin to something like what in everyday language we normally mean by the terms ‘structure’ and/or ‘organization.’

4. Indeed since I wrote these words, some scholars (Ian Grandison, 1999 for example) have convincingly argued for its being put to rest. Moreover, vernacularists themselves have responded to their own self-criticisms and are increasingly speaking in terms not of a category of buildings we might call vernacular, but that from the initial study of such a flawed category has nevertheless arisen a methodology that may now be taken to all buildings. The ultimate product of the vernacularist tradition will, in the end, be an at least scholarly deconstruction of the idea of Architecture itself (architecture that is as separate from all buildings as such).

5. After General Ibrahim Babangida nullified the elections which M.K.O. Abiola seems to have won in the elections of June 12, 1993, and after Babangida had resigned under the pressure of a growing popular dissatisfaction with military government as such, Chief E.A.O. Shonekan (a civilian, private citizen, friend of Ibrahim Babangida, and one time CEO of several Nigeria-based international concerns including the United African Company [UAC]) was in August 1993 persuaded to lead an interim government. The government consisted of both civilians and the military. General Sani Abacha’s displeasure with proceedings of the cabinet in which he was defense minister, led to Shonekan’s removal by his own defense minister in November the same year (with hardly a whimper on Shonekan’s part it should be said, and he allowed it to be presented as a resignation). Abacha then arrogated to himself the presidency. Many in Nigeria believe Shonekan was bought off, and there were reports, confirmed at the time by internet searches, that Shonekan became a significant investor in German industrial shares.

6. Cosentino is Professor of Folklore at UCLA. He curated the highly successful show ‘Vodun Art in Africa and the Americas’ which circulated the United States in 1999. The exhibition catalogue (of the same name) which he also edited (it contains essays by himself and by many of the most distinguished scholars of Voodoo/Vodun and its arts) won the Arts Council of the African Studies Association Arnold Rubin Award for an edited volume. I was a member of the committee that chose this book for the award.

7. I will suggest later, and this is why I describe it as particularized, that in the context of the power relationships of the colony, this architecture survived (and helped its patrons progress in the context in which they were a colonized people) precisely by enabling such projections of a European civility on their surfaces.

8. Like several other African peoples, modern Igbo have spoken of themselves as originating in Israel. This, however, is likely to be an infiltration of early colonial and missionary readings of igbo culture (circumcision, rules of purification, ideologies of sacrifice et cetera) into Igbo ethnic identity formation in the 20th century. See “Some similarities between the Israelites & the Ibos,” in Basden 1966 [1938]: 411-423.

9. That one individual might earn a living from such a combination of skills and activities, seems unlikely viewed from our contemporary practices of labor-division and labor-specialization. Such juxtapositions of practice were however also common in nineteenth century Europe, through the offices for example of the `barber’. This is now memorialized (if gruesomely) in the modern, popular imagination of the English by Wheeler’s adaptation (Wheeler [1912]) of Christopher Bond’s Sweeny Todd (Wheeler’s full title is Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street). The dread constructed by Bond’s text may however be little more than a modern discomfort with a previous arrangement of occupational categories. Certainly for the context of Igbo-speaking Nigeria, the example of Urualla Baluchi Okeke (father of Isaac Okeke the carpenter from Nimo) indicates a logic. He was said to be a priest of a local religion, was a ritual object producer, a sculptor, general art/craftsman (onye nka), herbalist and specialist in surgery (iwa afo). According to his grandson Uche Okeke, these were all under the same agwu (tutelary deity), so that they were all conceptualized as inspired from a common spiritual source. Recent scholarship has however elaborated the logic of such juxtapositions as blacksmith and circumciser in amongst Bamana peoples of Mali for example (McNaughton [1988], Eugenia Herbert [1993], and Sarah Brett-Smith [1994]).

10. Nguko marks this by his memory of the great influenza epidemic which hit Nimo and other places during 1918.

11. Nguko is himself Anglican, and would therefore have been of the same actual congregation as were the some of his early clients including the Agbims of Nimo. This explains his selection as their `architect’. Even more interesting moreover, is that Thomas Isiadinso, Nguko’s reputable teacher who died in 1937, was himself Anglican. Isiadinso of course went on subsequently to train many Catholic builders himself, and both he and Nguko were themselves to work on Church buildings for Roman Catholic and Anglican Protestant congregations. Enugu Ukwu, the neighbor of Nimo from where Isiadinso comes, is a complete denominational inverse. It was substantially involved (and almost exclusively) with the Church Missionary Society. Isiadinso’s context of work would have therefore been at this point in time, quite the opposite of that of his students, in the sense that his would have been the practice of a minority individual seeking employment in a majority (and sometimes so with hostility) community of which he, speaking denominationally, was not part. How such close neighbors came to be so apposite denominationally, suggests that inter town competition was a quite significant factor in the ideology of progress. Such polarizations served to intensify the race for success --a race which for the closeness and cordiality of Nimo - Enugu Ukwu relationships in the early 20th century, underscores Enugu Ukwu’s importance in the Nri theological network. (Nimo is adamantly neither of Nri, nor therefore on the other hand subject to the pressures of the exploitation of Aro migrants).

12. Isiadinaso’s career, no less significant than Nguko’s receives broader treatment in Hideous Architecture: Feint, Modernity and the Occultation of a Modern African building Practice (Okoye, book in progress).

13. It is interesting that as recently as 1992 and by this time in his eighties, Nguko had been hired by the Babangida family (apparently by the former military President’s brother) to “build his house” (it is more likely that he was asked to take charge of the building of the entrance gate and of the surrounding wall of a house designed by a professional (university trained) architect. The style thus still finds patrons in contemporary Northern Nigeria. Nguko’s architecture is also undergoing a late 20th century revival in the southeast (a 1993 completed Nimo chief’s Enugu residence, Ekulu [GRA]). Both half a century in front of the period we study, they indicate a continued resistance to the more western influenced, post modernist architectural styles that have been increasingly prevalent in end of the millenium Nigeria.

14. On the whole, its mosque-like qualities notwithstanding, the portico’s outline recalls, vaguely, Italianate or Latin American church architecture. However, the portico’s large circular ‘ears’ with its ‘Solomon’s Seal’ motif dispels this idea. This star form is derived from a logo on the now defunct Nigerian penny in use since its introduction in 1908 by the colonial government --a symbol that seems to derive from one of many West African elaborations of the cosmological diagram according to Islam. This motif is, in various forms a common ornament of Sahelian Islamic architecture. Though the Pound and Penny were Colonial currencies carried over into the post-Independence period, after 1974, Nigeria converted to a currency form in which the Naira was the replacement, itself constituted of one hundred Kobo. Kobo, in origin a Hausa word, in fact was the local term applied to the penny in colonial times. Nguko’s deliberate delineation of two interlocking triangles bounded emphatically by a circle picked out by a plaster molding confirms the reference.

15. In this elevation, Nguko is therefore purposefully eclectic, mixing together with inventions of his own, architectural forms from different sources. Many of the sources are located within then contemporary Nigerian culture. Thus while unique aspects of the portico refer to `Mecca’, to Byzantium, and to Renaissance Italy (storied columnar supports and dual order Roman arches are examples), other references such as the “Star of David” form appear repeatedly in many of his other buildings. Nguko invented the use of symbols such as the penny star as a designation of well-being. He employs it at the entrance to many of his buildings, most commonly on buildings belonging to members of then newly-expanding class of nouveaux-riches who had little formal education, and whose wealth was produced through commerce and contract work (many of them came from Enugu Ukwu and from Nimo). The symbol therefore became a sign of the patron’s wealth. Yet, we must ask why this symbol is relevant to a church building? I interpret the penny-star sign on the St. Paul’s Church portico from a location that in Nimo recognizes the Protestant church’s difficulty within what even then was the increasingly Roman Catholic locale. To its own congregation, as to the majority who would see the symbol from the road, the message of the star was likely meant (and received) as a statement of self-assuredness, indicating the grace and the blessings which God sends the Protestant church; in short it represents the Anglican church’s own prosperity despite the odds.

16. Perhaps most comparable in this regard is the fabric that consists the costume of the Igbo masquerade in such forms as the agbogho mmonwu; the fabric is colorful, of varying and yet abutted pattern, which nevertheless constitute an unexpected stylistic coherence. These costumes are easily and specifically identifiable, and thus represent an aesthetic that Igbo speakers (especially those of northern Igbo territory) found very appealing. This play with contrast and oppositionality in the constitution of an overall balance is a central quality of many other patterned aesthetics identified in other parts of the continent, including that of the Yoruba masquerade (both of Gelede and Egungun costumes) and of the textiles of the Kuba of Congo. At least for the aesthetics of both, the border-paneled Shoowa cloth (Kuba) and the portico of Nguko’s house, regularity seems anathema. (In Shoowa (Kuba) pile cloth in other words, a pattern with the potentiality for regularity may be varied constantly across the surface challenging the eye to locate a center which does not exist. Kuba cloth often does not create borders around any locatable pattern, while the other one separates its different but related patterns by distinct breaks. They thus share a quality of irregularity with the Igbo costume (and with Nguko’s wall). When, not uncommonly, the Shoowa cloth pattern is made up from joined strips, the pattern shifts are as abrupt as they seem in Nguko’s patterns.

17. Presumably Michael Nguko’s father was also a farmer or trader of sorts, since Igbo society save for the rare instance of a place like Oka, did not operated the strict guild-like system of some of her neighboring ethnicities.

18. This same son eventually went on to an art education at the prestigious IMT (Institute of Management and Technology) art school at Enugu, whose tradition of excellence goes back to an early sixties founding as the Government Trade Center, an early government arts and technical college.

19. Enugu Ngwo is the site of the Colliery Technical School, established in the early 1960s, apparently to ensure the employment of the local community in more skilled work at the local coal mines (Asogwa, 39). It is not unlikely that this headmaster was himself a graduate of the school. Nguko’s use of drawing may therefore have commenced as recently as the late 1970s. For the moment, this text departs from the issue of what historical meaning may be attributed to the fact that the insistence on Nguko’s learning to draw comes from a headmaster, and that this same headmaster is actually conversant enough with technical drawing to teach some of it to an already well-skilled builder. The headmaster himself was a native of Oghe.

20. This same headmaster ultimately became his brother in law by marriage to Michael Nguko’s sister.

21. Indeed a former student of Nguko’s, who had dropped out of apprenticeship before he was `qualified,’ has indicated that this difficulty was exactly what he was unable to deal with, and that it often led to intolerable frictions between master and apprentice. Nevertheless, Nguko did take on a significant number of apprentices himself, and this accounts for a subsequent proliferation of his architectural style.

22. We must remember that the idea of the vernacular was a category inserted into colonial ideology in forms that would have been experienced at the everyday, popular level, and that familiarity with it would have preceded its exportation to scholarly language in the metropoles. Most evidently, the vernacular would have been familiar, as idea, in the rules governing language (local languages, often excluded from school contexts, soon acquired the moniker, ‘vernacular.’) See for example Rudyard Kipling’s characterization of the central character of an India-located narrative as ‘speaking the vernacular by preference,’ here referring to Hindi. Hindi, the vernacular, is the local while English (the not-vernacular) is the global (Kim p [1989 ed.]).

23. The answer to this question must, of course, await a separate investigation.

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Copyright 2003 Africa Resource Center