The Structure History of Ghana’s Compound Houses

For decades, when people developed on their own new residences in Ghana’s capital, Accra, you could be rather positive it would be a compound home.

These mini-complexes of homes — grouped around shaded courtyards set back again from the street — have been the developing blocks of modern-day Accra, bringing together extended family members that experienced migrated from the countryside. The compound available close kinship connections and semi-private room, even in the heart of the large city.

But more recently, these complexes have knowledgeable a improve in character and standing. As worldwide-design apartments and villas for nuclear people become the chosen housing kind, the compound residences are ever more staying divided into smaller, tighter rooms, mixing strangers together and turning out to be destinations for poorer tenants with couple options.

That was not the intention when compound residences started out to cluster in Accra when the city urbanized in the late 19th century. As Accra grew, pursuing its naming as capital of the Gold Coastline in 1877, new citizens to the metropolis built houses identical to the types they inhabited in their household villages.  

“Rural variations of the compound residence were deconstructed and translated for much more city settings as cities like Accra densified,” said Bushra Mohamed, co-founder of the research, structure and architecture partnership Studio Nyali. 

The compound houses mirror extended-standing developing traditions in the location, with similar layouts observed in Nigeria’s Igbo family houses or the sunken courtyard houses of Tunisia’s Matmata. They have echoes of Ghana’s oldest acknowledged houses, designed beneath the Ashanti Empire that peaked all through the 18th century but was mainly destroyed by the British during the Anglo-Ashanti wars of the 19th century. A selection of surviving UNESCO Environment Heritage-mentioned structures around Ghana’s 2nd urban middle, Kumasi, have been also developed as adjacent units bordering a courtyard, similar to contemporary-day compound homes.

Urban everyday living remodeled the product into a thing new. With the developing affect of European colonization, the typology commenced to borrow from Western-design and style architecture. Compound houses commenced to contain two-tale buildings around their courtyard, instead of just bungalows, even though the road-dealing with wing might undertake pseudo-European functions, for example shifting from timber to stone. Little by little the form started out to undertake a much more urban form, with some compound homes commencing to integrate storefronts. 

The residences in a compound normally deal with about 100 square meters (just more than 1,000 sq. feet), in the type of a few or four blockwork bungalows framing an open up courtyard. The models on their own ordinarily have 10 to 15 rooms put together, with tin roofs extending into the property to offer a veranda underneath which to cook dinner or entertain. When the more upscale compound homes have individual amenities for every single unit, other folks will share a bathing region and kitchen area, and perhaps a bucket latrine.

Initially, these properties ended up crafted by extended households, with the wealthier associates developing a elaborate in which other folks could then dwell hire-cost-free. Historically, a central device could possibly be occupied by a patriarch, who would assign the annexes to every of his wives and their small children.

Communal activities took area in the courtyard in which youngsters played and gals cooked. It would also be a house to socialize and hold loved ones functions, ranging from meetings to Ghanaian funerals. The compound thus became a center for family members and local community business and id, even a religious position. Architect and Ph.D. candidate Kuukuwa Manful recalls her childhood:

We lived in a single of these compound homes in Accra that experienced four structures: one for the landlord, another for 1 of his wives, one for an additional member of the loved ones and one particular for my family members. I cherished that home and actively playing with the kids from the other households. I was a picky eater and sometimes I’d just go and consume in a person else’s house.

This cozy prolonged household composition has been stretched by spectacular urbanization. Amongst 1984 and 2019, Ghana’s urban populace, most greatly concentrated in Accra, has accelerated quickly, rising from just above 31% of the population to almost 57%, swelling the urban inhabitants from 4 million to 17 million, in accordance to Globe Bank knowledge.

This substantial swing inevitably made more cramped situations in the compound residences which, irrespective of nonetheless being deemed safer for households with young little ones because of to the enclosed courtyard, commenced to receive a popularity for loud, crowded living problems. The slum-like ailments that have produced, popular in a country where virtually 50 % of citizens dwell underneath the poverty line, are probable only to worsen.

Ghana’s urbanization is set to reach 72.3% by 2050 and the lack of minimal-money housing stays unaddressed. Inexpensive housing routinely targets the increasing center course instead of reduced-money family members. Mortgages arrive with fascination fees of 20%, even as the govt predicted some yrs again it would need to have 5.7 million new rooms by 2020 to fulfill the country’s housing wants.

“As accommodation will get harder in the city, they preserve chopping these homes into scaled-down and more compact models, and some of the communal truly feel is missing,” said Manful. “The less and less privacy you have, the significantly less you take pleasure in living so close to your neighbor.”

The occasional challenges of getting alongside with neighbors in a compound residence has filtered into Ghanaian well-liked culture, with content articles light-heartedly speaking about conflicts in excess of privacy and routine maintenance cropping up in the media. The shift has been captured in social media parlance, the place arguing Twitter end users, who expose way too several personalized specifics, may be referred to as out for dragging their viewers into “CompoundHouse Twitter.” 

“The modern context of the compound home is that it is fairly transient — for a young particular person just arriving in the city, on the way to a much better thing,” said Nana Biamah-Ofosu, the other co-founder of Studio Nyali. 

Irrespective of modifications in household manner, compound houses are nonetheless extremely quite a few in Accra. As UN-Habitat notes, 55% of all urban Ghanaians still lived in this housing style as recently as 2011. In the long phrase, numerous compound homes are however unlikely to survive demolition.

Allotey Bruce-Konuah, a historic tour guidebook whose ancestral compound is in Jamestown, one of Accra’s oldest districts, suggests the compound household the place his grandfather’s family members after lived is now occupied by people who are not blood relations, and will very likely be demolished once it finds a customer. When even historic landmarks such as the Sea Perspective Resort — one of Accra’s oldest resorts, which at the time hosted the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley — was demolished in 2016, less nicely-recognised structures stand little opportunity.

A lot more and extra, dwelling homeowners and traders are ditching compound housing, preferring to develop Western-design and style single-household villas or flats, lowering cost-effective solutions and shifting the way individuals live, normally away from the communal lifetime that outlined Ghanaian living for the past century.

“It’s a problem of economics but it is also a question of aspiration and what people take into account aspirational,” stated Biamah-Ofosu. “We are cautious not to overly romanticize compound house living but there is a little something at the core of it that is far better tailored to the way we stay. We live substantially extra communally, we help every single other substantially additional.” 

Though no one wants to protect crowded problems or minimal services, the compound properties may still deliver valuable inspiration for a distinctly area sort of housing for the potential. Biamah-Ofosu and Mohamed would like to see architecture that builds on and increases the compound household alternatively than abandoning it entirely.

“The problem is to translate the ethos of it and the spatial ideas powering it into some thing which is ideal for dense urban housing,” Biamah-Ofosu said.