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Constructing Identity: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Architecture in the Gambia-Geba Region and the Articulation of Luso-African Ethnicity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Peter Mark
Peter Mark*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
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Extract

The precolonial architectural history of the northern Upper Guinea coast from the Gambia to the Geba rivers has yet to be studied in depth. Yet this region, the first to be visited and described by European travelers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is among the best-documented parts of sub-Saharan Africa for the four centuries of precolonial African-European contact. The establishment of communities of Luso-African traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth century makes the Gambia-Casamance-Bissau area important to the study of early sustained cultural interaction between Europeans and West Africans.

One result of the establishment of Portuguese and Luso-African trading communities was the development of a distinctive style of architecture, suited to the climate and making use of locally-available building materials. The history of the trade itself has been extensively studied by George Brooks. His work, along with that of Jean Boulègue, provides a firm foundation for the study of local architecture and living space. It is not my intention to rewrite these excellent sources, although much of my material is drawn from the same primary documents they have used, and although, in presenting the historical context from which seventeenth-century coastal architecture developed, I necessarily cover some ground that Brooks has already trod.

In addition to the history of building styles, several related questions that are highly significant to the history of European-African cultural interaction need to be addressed. These questions include: what were the respective roles of Africans, Europeans, and Luso-Africans in the development of a distinctive architectural style? Is it possible to discern the influence of evolving Luso-African construction on local African architecture? And of local building styles on Afro-European construction? In other words, to what extent does architecture reflect mutual, two-way interaction between European and African society?

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 22 , January 1995 , pp. 307 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1995

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank David Henige, Paul Jenkins, and Jan Vansina, who read an earlier draft of this paper, for their helpful suggestions.

References

Notes

1. Brooks, George, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder, 1993)Google Scholar; see also Brooks, , “Perspectives on Luso-African commerce and settlement in the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau region, 16th-19th centuries,” Boston University African Studies Center, 1980Google Scholar; see also Brooks, , “A Nhara of the Guinea-Bissau Region: Mae Aurelia Correia” in Robertson, Claire and Klein, Martin, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983).Google Scholar

2. Boulègue, Jean, Les Luso-Africains en Sénégambie (Lisbon, 1989).Google Scholar

3. For the role of lançados see Brooks, Landlords; the lanyçados were for the most part Portuguese (some of them Jewish) who had settled on the coast, many of whom remained permanently and married local women.

4. From north to south the fluvial region may be divided into: Gambia River, Vintang Creek and Fogny, Soungrougrou (or Sangrédegu) Creek and northern Casamance, Casamance River, Kasa region, Rio San Domingos (Cacheu).

5. The inhabitants of the Cacheu-Lower Casamance-Fogny region today constitute the Jola people. Jola (or Diola) ethnic identity is, however, largely a product of the colonial period. On this point see Mark, Peter, The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest, Form, Meaning and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks (New York, 1992).Google Scholar Before the late nineteenth century these different groups did not have a sense of common identity. Nevertheless, cultural and linguistic similarities existed then, as they do today, probably in part the product of migration from Kasa north into Fogny. This population movement, and the gradual displacement of indigenous Bagnun-speakers by Diola-speakers was described by late seventeenth-century observers, particularly Jajolet de la Courbe and Labat, who probably used Jajolet de la Courbe's account. The Diola-speakers had reduced the Bagnun-speaking population to a few villages in northern Fogny and along the Soungrougrou by the time of Bertrand-Bocandé's ethnographic study in 1849.

6. On Floup (or Jola) involvement in trade see, for example, the extensive commercial contact between the nineteenth-century people of Thionk-Essyl, north of the Casamance River, and the French at Carabane; Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes sur la Guinée portugaise ou Sénégambie méridionale,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 12 (1849), nos. 67, 68.Google Scholar Bocandé writes of the Floups who lived north of Cacheu and Domingos, San, “Presque tous les habitants parlent très bien le créole portugais,” p. 327.Google Scholar That they spoke the local trading language strongly suggests involvement in trade; note that these are the same group described as traders by Jajolet de la Courbe.

7. Fernandes, Valentim, Description de la Côte occidentale d'Afrique (Sénégal au Cap de Monte, Archipels), ed. and trans. Monod, Th.et al (Bissau, 1951), 59.Google Scholar

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 62.

10. Ibid., 57.

11. More accurate late nineteenth-century estimates placed the population of the largest villages in the Casamance at between 2000 and 3000; see Archives Nationales françaises, section Outre-Mer, Sénégal et Dépendences I 96 ter.

12. The use of figures such as 10,000 to symbolize a very large sum is common in the Mande world. In 1500 the Gambia formed the western extremity of this culture area. Some of Fernandes' informants likely themselves had Mande informants. Thus 10,000 inhabitants should not be understood literally. See Diawara, Mamadou, “Contribution to the Study of Social Differentiation in the Jaara Kingdom,” HA 22 (1995).Google Scholar

13. Fernandes, , Description, 37.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 92.

15. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch points out that the forts, whose construction materials were largely imported from Europe, could hardly have served as models for domestic architecture. The difference in scale also made direct modeling unlikely. These comments, made apropos of African communities, are also pertinent to the local Luso-Africans. See Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, Histoire des villes d'Afrique noire, des origines à la colonisation (Paris, 1993), 158.Google Scholar

16. The Tratado Breve was not published until 1733. However, later seventeenth-century chroniclers had either direct or indirect access to Almada's account. Pierre Davity closely follows the narrative in his description of the Casamance region. Later authors such as Dapper relied on Davity (Adam Jones, personal communication). Dapper, in turn, was used by Barbot. Thus, as late as 1732 Almada's writing helped to establish European images of the Guinea Coast; see Barbot on Guinea, the Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678-1712, ed. Hair, Paul, Jones, Adam, and Law, Robin (London, 1992), 166-68, 212-16, 225–27 et passim.Google Scholar

17. Almada writes, Tratado, 273, “Ha algumas fortelazzas de guerra chamadas por eles Cao-sans, ao longo do Rio e esteiros, fortes de madeira muito forte, fincada toda a pique e terra-plenada, com suas guaritas …”

18. cf. ibid., 274: “Os escravos que hao e vendem cativam em guerras.”

19. Ibid., 288, “a outra nao fugia nem se defendia; o uso disto os fez ja terem melhor conhecimento, porque pelejam e se defendem e matam e cativam aos imigos;” On the identification of the “Arriatas” as Jola speakers see Mark, Peter, A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History of the Basse Casamance Since 1500 (Stuttgart, 1985), 20ff.Google Scholar

20. Almada, , Tratado, 289Google Scholar, “A terra de Iziguchor que sao Banhus qual ha trata de cero e escravos.”

21. For an excellent description of the Portuguese and Luso-African trading networks see Brooks, , Landlords, esp. 79-113, 260ff.Google Scholar On the changing appellation of Rio San Domingos see ibid., 229.

22. Almada, , Tratado, 304Google Scholar, “Passante o porte de Cacheu…por causa do muito trato que havia nesta terra de escravos, mantimentos, muita cera…”

23. On the “ethnic” origins of slaves from this region see Bühnen, Stephen, “Ethnic Origins of Peruvian Slaves (1548-1650). Figures for Upper Guinea,” Paideuma 39 (1993), 57–110.Google Scholar

24. Brooks, , Landlords, 263Google Scholar, citing Almada. For Almada see Bràsio, António, ed. Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Africa Ocidental [MMA] (13 vols.: Lisbon, 1952–1988), 3:307, 317.Google Scholar

25. Almada in ibid., 307, “[as casas] sao muito boas, e sao mais labirinthos que casas. E fastem-nos desta maniera por causa de um naçao de negros chamados Bijagos…os quais têm continuademente guerra con estes.”

26. Ibid., 4:248 (1 May 1607): “os Bijogozos, os quais têm destruido doze Reinos, que ora estao despovoados…” “Matando e abrasando tudo (ibid., 4:255); see also Brooks, , Landlords, 263.Google Scholar

27. Almada, in Bràsio, , MMA, 4:299.Google Scholar

28. Almada in ibid., 332: “Estes Beafaras nao têm as suas casas aldeadas, como as outros nacoes, senao afastadas algum tanto umas das outras, e as fazem segundo a posse de cada um. E no lugar donde as fazem vivem ami os parentes todos juntos, reconhecendo ao mais velho, a quem dao obediencia.”

29. Climate change on a regional scale is a central theme of George Brooks' recent work.

30. Coelho, Francisco de Lemos, Description of the Coast of Guinea (1684), intr. and trans, by Hair, P.E.H. (Liverpool, 1985), introduction.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., 11.

32. Ibid, chapter 3, paragraph 7.

33. Ibid., 8.

34. Ibid., 18; see also Brooks, , Landlords, 243.Google Scholar

35. Brasio, , MMA, 4:88–89Google Scholar; dated 15 November 1605.

36. Ibid., 4:573; see also Thilmans, Guy, “Le routier de la côte de Guinée de Francisco Pirez de Carvalho (1635),” Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire 32 (1970) 343–69.Google Scholar

37. See Brooks, , Landlords, 243.Google Scholar

38. Bràsio, , MMA, 4:573.Google Scholar

39. Brooks, , Landlords, 243.Google Scholar

40. For a statistical analysis of the ethnic origins of slaves from Cacheu see Bühnen, “Ethnic Origins.”

41. Coelho, , Description, 20.Google Scholar The original fort, built in the 1580s and replaced shortly after 1610, was again rebuilt in the 1660s; see Barbot on Guinea, 166. By the nineteenth century the fort was reduced to “rotten and indefensible wooden palisades and the bastions [to] no more than mounds of dirt;” Brooks, , “Nhara,” 305.Google Scholar

42. Coelho, , Description, 24.Google Scholar

43. In the mid-nineteenth century Carabane, in the Casamance River, exported locally-produced lime to Gorée and to the Gambia; see Hecquard, H., Voyage sur la côte et dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique Occidental (Paris, 1855), 109.Google Scholar

44. For an analogous example of the symbolic association of stone construction with permanence and social standing see Middleton's, John discussion of Swahili architecture in The World of the Swahili (New Haven, 1993), 5, 62ff.Google Scholar

45. Coelho, , Description, 21.Google Scholar

46. Teixeira, Manuel, “Portuguese Traditional Settlements, a Result of Cultural Miscegenation,” in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 1/2 (Spring 1990), p. 29.Google Scholar

47. Ibid.

48. On Barbot's sources see Barbot on Guinea, xxxvi-xlvi.

49. Ibid., 160ff.

50. Cultru, Pierre, ed., Premier voyage du Sieur Jajolet de la Courbe fait à la coste d'Afrique en 1685 (Nendeln, 1973), 191.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., 196.

52. Labat, Jean-Baptiste, Nouvelle relation de l'Afrique occidentale (5 vols.: Paris, 1728), 5:68.Google Scholar

53. Mollien, G., Voyage à l'intérieur de l'Afrique aux sources du Sénégal et de la Gambie (2 vols.: Paris, 1820), 2:218–19.Google Scholar

54. Cultru, , Premier voyage, 196, 201.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., 203-04. This king was himself a Bagnun who often launched slave raids against the neighboring Floups; ibid., 207.

56. Labat, , Nouvelle relation, 5:5.Google Scholar

57. In the trading village of Guinala south of Bissau on the Rio Grande, too, Jajolet de la Courbe remarked the existence of several Portuguese style houses; Cultru, , Premier voyage, 228.Google Scholar

58. Under conditions of high humidity such as are common in coastal Guinea, lime may extend the life of adobe walls (Jan Vansina, personal communication, 13 September 1994).

59. On the importance of host-trader rapport, see Mark, , Basse Casamance, 61ffGoogle Scholar; see also Brooks, Landlords.

60. In the nineteenth century, Diola men who traveled to the Gambia to gather and sell palm produce owed a percentage of the proceeds to their Manding hosts; see Mark, , Basse Casamance, 98.Google Scholar

61. The Diola-Fogny language has a word for such hosts: “ajoeti.”

62. Brooks, , “Nhara,” 296.Google Scholar

63. Labat, , Nouvelle relation, 5:12.Google Scholar

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 5:5. The size of these houses probably permitted the owners to lodge African “gourmets” (grumetes) who purchased wax in remote villages and brought it to the “escales;” see Labat, 5:50.

66. Ibid., 5:7.

67. Ibid., 5:12.

68. Ibid., 5:43. Elsewhere (Mark, , Basse Casamance, 25Google Scholar) I identify “Jame” (as it is spelled by Coelho; “James” is Labat's spelling) with the Kujaamatay, a region now inhabited largely by Joola speakers and extending from the Songrougrou west to Fogny. I find Bühnen's alternative identification of James unconvincing, as his argument presupposes a conscious and sudden switch from Bagnun to Joola identity, which is improbable; see Bühnen, , “Place Names as an Historical Source,” HA 19 (1992), 76.Google Scholar

69. Labat, , Nouvelle relation, 5:50.Google Scholar

70. Ibid., 5:65.

71. See also Brooks, , Landlords, 243.Google Scholar

72. Odile Goerg, personal communication, 20 April 1994.

73. Mollien, , Voyage, 2:245.Google Scholar

74. See, for example, Cultru, , Premier voyage, 251Google Scholar, speaking of the 10 or 12 households of “whites” in Geba; all were merchants.

75. See Mark, , “Fetishers, Marybuckes, and the Christian Norm, European conceptions of Senegambians, 1550-1760,” African Studies Review 21 (1978), 91–99.Google Scholar

76. Boulègue, Luso-Africains.

77. Brooks, , Landlords, 194.Google Scholar

78. For example, for centuries northern Jolas, Manding, and Bagnuns have intermarried and frequently changed their cultural identification; see Mark, Peter, The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest. Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks (New York, 1992), chapter 2.Google Scholar

79. Cultru, , Premier voyage, 251.Google Scholar

80. See Bràsio, , MMA, 4:665Google Scholar, “Relação da Cristandade da Guiné e do Cabo Verde,” dated 1621.

81. See Mark, Basse Casamance,

82. The neighbors of the Luso-Africans clearly understood their religion in this African perspective of “to each his religion.” This is unwittingly indicated in a 1606 report (Bràsio, , MMA, 4:203Google Scholar) by Fr. Baltasar Berreira that the Bijogos “quando vêem nossas imagens de Christo ou de Nossa Senhora lhe chamam China do branco ou China do christao.”

83. Mollien, Voyage, in 1818 describes some residences as constructed of stone.

84. Cultru, , Premier voyage, 39.Google Scholar

85. Coelho, , Description, 21.Google Scholar

86. Cultru, , Premier voyage, 212.Google Scholar

87. Coelho, , Description, 21.Google Scholar

88. It would not be advisable for the historian to extrapolate from twentieth-century building techniques to reconstruct these seventeenth-century structures “with earth on top.” Yet it is worth parenthetical mention that thatched houses in Guinea-Bissau are sometimes protected against fire by constructing an armature over the roof, made of long sticks that are covered first with leaves and thatch and then with clay soil. See Neves, Mario G. Ventim in da Mota, Avelino Teixeira, A Habitação Indigena na Guiné Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1948), 148.Google Scholar

89. Coelho, , Description, 21.Google Scholar See also Brooks, , Landlords, 243.Google Scholar

90. In the dialect of the northern Diola community of Thionk-Essyl, the word for evening, “gurussu,” refers to the evening breeze. “Gurussu” derives etymologically from “eras,” “wind.”

91. This argument in favor of the independent development of verandahs in different cultures closely follows the reasoning articulated by Odile Goerg in her thèse d'état on the history of Conakry and Freetown. I wish to express my debt to Goerg, who has helped me to understand the complex social and economic factors underlying the development of architectural forms in coastal West Africa.

92. See da Mota, Teixeira, Habitação, 443.Google Scholar

93. Ibid., 294.

94. See Thomas, Louis-Vincent, Les Diola (Dakar, 1959)Google Scholar, for an introduction to Jola architectual styles. On Jola-Esulalu impluvium houses see Dujarric, P., “L'habitat diola” in Barbier-Wiesser, F.-G., ed., Comprendre la Casamance (Paris, 1994), 151–67.Google Scholar

95. Cultru, , Premier voyage, 207Google Scholar; see also Labat, 5:7.

96. Cultra, , Premier voyage, 206.Google Scholar

97. Bühnen's statistics for the Peruvian slave trade partially bear out this point. For the period 1548-1650, Floups constituted 8.6% of the 3167 African slaves from Upper Guinea identified in Peru. By contrast, those identified as Bran made up 27.4%, Biafada 17.3%, Mandinga 9%, and Bagnun 10.7% of the total; Bühnen, “Ethnic Origins.” We do not, however, know total population figures for the region for this period.

98. Cultru, , Premier voyage, 259.Google Scholar

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., 260.

101. Ibid., 238.

102. Coquery-Vidrovitch, , Histoire des villes, 151.Google Scholar