Occasionally in travel articles you see something that really makes you think. In this case it was a series of photographs taken by a photographer and diarist, Rita Willaert and Olga Stavrakis. I would normally dismiss these travel documentary images as yet another example of post colonial travel syndrome, people vicariously gazing into other peoples lives and in recording them making a good living from poor people living on the edge. It could well be that Willaert and Stavrakis are indeed voyeurs and that by poking their noses into a place where they don't belong they may have disturbed the equilibrium of a society that has managed to get on fine without Western interference. But even so, the images I saw really effected me and made me aware of how far we have come in our English towns from a close contact with the ground from which we have emerged.
Tiébélé lies nestled at the base of a hill, and is an African village which was first settled in the 15th Century. Belonging to the Kassena people, their chief, and royal court, this is the home of one of oldest ethnic groups in Burkina Faso. Digging a little further into their history I found that the Kassena peoples belong to a larger subset of peoples, the Gurunsi, that inhabit an area encompassing southern Burkina Faso and northern Ghana. The Gurunsi share common histories, languages, and political structures, but French and British colonial systems differed in their administrative practices, which means that a once united people are now separate. The lines drawn on maps by French and British administrators in the 19th century, still divide populations that had deep cultural connections and of course an affinity with and awareness of the land and its possibilities. It was at the Berlin Conference of 1884, that the European nations agreed upon their respective territorial claims and a border was agreed by mutual agreement between Britain and France on 14 June 1898 and a more precise border was then drawn up by an exchange of notes in 1904, and officially approved in 1906, a border that was later demarcated on the ground via a series of pillars.
Map of Ghana and Burkina Faso
Look at the line that divides the two territories, it looks as if for most of it's length someone simply placed a ruler on a map and drew a straight line. The contrast between the sharp gridded lines of longitude and latitude that divide up the map, and the organic lines of the Kassena peoples' adobe buildings couldn't be more stark, and they point to a fundamental difference in cultures. The Western nations had 'abstracted' themselves away from the world, mathematics and scientific thinking had allowed them to maintain a distance from reality and to believe that they could control things from a distance. The Kassena peoples were living in and as a part of their environment, therefore their constructions followed the contours of the land rather than cut into or through it.
These houses emerge from the ground organically, and are made of local clay, the walls are decorated with various colours of clay slip. The Tiébélé royal residence is made up of a series of small houses that are hand-painted in different geometric patterns and symbols using clay paints. These patterns are one of the visual indicators that differentiate the royal homes from that of the “ordinary people.” While most of the structures are homes, some of the most elaborately decorated are mausoleums, where the dead are laid to rest. The dead living amongst the village people even after death and recognised as an integral part of life.
An altar for animist worship
The fact that the village still has a working animist altar for ceremonies involving milk, feathers and animal blood, suggests that the people that live there still have a close spiritual relationship with their local environment. The recent stains of milk running down the sides of the altar, indicating that cows are still an important part of the local economy. Somehow these people have been able to continue living within a culture that still maintains aspects of pre-colonial traditions. The most visually striking being the powerful decorative surfaces that cover the village buildings. Their resilience is amazing and I would hope that rather than encourage some sort of tourism, that the message goes out about growing architecture out of the landscape rather than flattening it. The integration of people, architecture, and typologies of landscape with sensitive ecological effect is vital to all our futures and our ability to survive.
The Green School in Bali
What this post is also about is a reminder of the power of drawing. Lines drawn on a map of Africa divide a continent between Britain and France. When it was first realised that lines could be used to define a boundary, no one would have predicted that eventually this concept could be used to define the borders of artificially constructed countries. But it is also drawing that empowered the people of Tiébélé in the decoration of their buildings and artefacts. These buildings covered in zigzags and squares, communicate both the sheer joy of making lines and shapes over surfaces, as well as an awareness that these lines mark out differences between the homes of the living and the dead. But drawing can also be a tool that allows us to visualise new futures, the organic structural forms now possible for architects and engineers to use because of the power of computing, are only made visible to us through technical drawings. Drawing allows us to have powerful visions, sometimes so powerful that it would seem that humans have lost contact with the effects of that vision.
Technical drawing of the atom bomb
Drawings of the Nazca people
Nazca lines were made over 2,000 years ago and are most likely connected to water worship. The Peruvian archeologist John Isla points to the Nazca people’s intricate irrigation systems as evidence that these desert-dwellers had developed an intimate and worshipful relationship with water; their sophisticated aqueducts and spiral shaped wells still operating today. Nazca society developed around 200 B.C. alongside a river basin that allowed them to grow cotton, beans and corn. The Nazca River, which often flows underground, springs up at the foot of the remains of an important temple and shells from the coast of northern Peru are found at the sites of ceremonial altars in the mountains. I once read that the indigenous peoples of America visualised thought as 'crystallised air', their relationship with their environment being such that they were inseparable from it. We forget that we 'swim' in air as fish swim in water and that without it we would die; the drawn lines of the Nazca are it would seem a way to 'talk' with the sky. In the 1940s in the USA the Office of Scientific Research and Development, forged an unprecedented alliance between government, academia and industry, to shape a different idea that also emerged in a desert environment, an idea that reminded Robert Oppenheimer at the time of a piece of Hindu scripture; “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
See also:
Drawing Maps. Mapping as thinking. Drawing and politics. The broken line
Signs of life in flowing line drawings.
Walking and drawing
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