African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 352
× 21 feet. Assuming that these houses once had thatched roofs, they would resemble not
only the dwelling destroyed by James Couper but buildings that can still be found all
along the Atlantic rim of Africa from Guinea to Angola.
When they were confronted with the pressures of turning a profit from the
undeveloped American wilderness, planters, it seems, allowed their slaves a certain
amount of leeway in their domestic conduct as long as the required tasks were completed.
Expedience on the part of the planters thus provided the slaves with an opportunity to
utilize their African traditions and thus the chance to build what their descendents would
call “ground houses,” that is, dwellings with clay or earthen walls. But once the
plantations were fully operational, say after 1750, planters routinely asserted more direct
control over the daily lives of the slave population. Consequently, from the mideighteenth
century onward, African plans and building techniques (as well as other
African customs) were systematically suppressed, and African American houses became
nothing more than variants of the most typical kinds of Euro-American houses.
While the continuity of African architectural traditions was ultimately disrupted in the
United States, the saga of the ubiquitous houses known as “shotguns” offers an instance
of a subtle, but ultimately profound, African influence on American vernacular
architecture. The shotgun house type, which developed in Haiti as an amalgam of Native
American, European, and African influences and then entered the United States through
New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, has had a lasting impact on the American
South. Today, thousands of shotgun houses can be found throughout the region. The
basic shotgun house is a one-story building that is long and narrow; it is one-room wide
and three or more deep. Unlike most American folk houses, the shotgun is oriented with
its gable to the front and has its entrance in the gable end rather than on the longer side.
This formal difference should be read as a sign of the building’s alternative history.
Shotgun houses in the United States are descended from small rural Haitian houses
called cailles. Known on the island of Hispaniola since the early sixteenth century, they
were generally constructed with walls of woven lath that were plastered with mud; their
roofs were made either of thatched grass or palm leaves. In plan, the house consisted of
two rooms and had its front door located at the narrow gable end of the building. The
gable entrance of this dwelling is a feature that finds its precedent in the houses of the
Arawaks, the indigenous people of Haiti, while its construction techniques show clear
linkages to northern France, the homeland of the colonial class (although parallels can be
found in Africa as well). The aspect of this house that connects most deeply with African
architectural practices are its dimensions; rooms are small, containing, generally, slightly
more than 80 square feet of floor space. This average size compares closely with the
average room sizes in West and Central African houses, which commonly range between
8×8 feet and 12× 12 feet. Since the room units in Euro-American folk houses are
generally 250 square feet or larger, the Haitian shotgun prototype aligns most closely
with the African size spectrum.
The consistent use of particular dimensions indicates that a discrete proxemic code,
the most central element of any architectural tradition, had made the voyage across the
Atlantic from Africa intact. What we see in the intimate spaces of Haitian houses is that
African architectural influences flow directly to Haiti with the trade in slaves. Then, after
a period of encounter with other equivalent traditions, a new house form evolves and
becomes commonplace. One could say that a core concept for an African building is