Re-evaluating the Role of Vision in African Architecture

Emeka Ikebude

Western concept of architecture suggests that history can be embedded in material

form. In traditional Igbo, this history can be made present through an engagement
with nodes in a larger network of spiritual and temporal motions and dynamics.
This paper shall, therefore, propose a need for alternative visuality, one that is
based on an African ontology, to complement the present trends of discourse on
African architecture. It offers the changing status of the object and architecture
as proofs that embedding history in a material form has it problems. Igbo
communities, for instance, have used their architectures for masquerades to show
how they are less interested in the buildings as material culture than in what
occurs at the sites and memory of these buildings. For the Igbo, the material
forms of such architectures serve as mainly sites of projection, or framing device
for enacted history, but not intrinsic to the history itself. This paper proposes
an engagement with oral thought (in relation to visuality) as an alternative
because it produces a notion of architecture that is considerably more
performative, dynamic and ephemeral.