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Mud is usually considered a primitive building material, but as historian and political scientist Randall Fegley of Pennsylvania State University points out, the use of mud in architecture makes a lot of sense, both environmentally and financially, in many northern African countries. Fegley, who lived in a mud-brick home while studying local government in Sudan, also appreciates mud for its aesthetic qualities.
By Randall Fegley
Only the Nile and Niger rivers and scattered oases break the seemingly endless khaki landscape of northern Africa. In this brown-tinted world, mud is the primary building material. Using little more than the earth beneath their feet, people have created structures remarkable for their sturdiness, inventiveness, and beauty. Mud houses line streets, along with mosques, churches, shops, and schools all made of mud. Within the house complexes are mud corrals for animals, mud food and water storage jars, and mud ovens.
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Mud is cheap, practical, and attractive. It’s easy to work with, and it takes decoration well. Mud is also abundant, especially where other building materials—such as stone or wood—are lacking. In northern Africa, mud architecture evolved from local necessity. No other building material was available.
Although people in damp climates have built with mud in the past, mud is especially effective in dry climates where it dries out and doesn’t face erosion from water.
Several methods of building in mud have developed over time.
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Europeans had wood for building, and their temperate climate is far less hospitable to mud architecture than the dry hot Sahara. Even so, mud and woven stick construction, known as wattle and daub, housed millions of people in Europe. Woven sticks formed a frame, and mud filled the spaces in-between. Many of the pretty thatched cottages found in rural England are constructed of wattle and daub.
Another technique, pisé-de-terre, resembles modern poured-concrete technology. Wooden frames are filled with wet earth, which is compressed with hammers. Sticks, straw, and hair bind the mud and increase the strength of the wall.
A lack of wood in northern Africa makes wattle and daub and pisé-de-terre construction impossible. Adobe (mud bricks) and jalus (strips of wet mud) provide ways of building in mud.
The chief method of mud construction in northern Africa is adobe brick. The mud is formed into bricks in a mold, allowed to harden partially, then gently knocked out of the mold and left to dry in the sun. Adding straw, dung, or cement strengthens the mud mixture. Once dried, these bricks are mortared together and plastered. One problem with adobe construction is the need for a sizable—sometimes huge—area for drying all the bricks.
Extremely sticky mud deposited along the Nile in Egypt and Sudan requires a different technique. There, people form long strips of mud, known as jalus, by hand or in molds, and stack them one on top of the other to form walls. After drying, the walls are covered with a dung-rich plaster that the desert heat transforms into a smooth, odorless finish.
The advantage of jalus is the ability to use them immediately after they are formed. The jalus technique thus requires only one pool of mud and much less time and area than the adobe process. Walls erected using jalus can match adobe walls in strength, thickness, and height.
Mud buildings are usually very sturdy, so long as strong foundations support them. The same cannot be said of many of the shoddily built modern buildings found in some African cities. But using mud for building does pose certain problems.
The chief disadvantage of mud for building is its lack of tensile strength, a quality that limits the height of mud buildings and creates difficulties in roof construction. [Nevertheless, in some places, such as the mud city of Shibām in Yemen, buildings that rise 30 m (100 ft) are not uncommon.] In most of northern Africa, however, low population density eliminates a need to build upward.
Building walls of mud presents no problem, but mud pulls away from a door or window frame as it dries. Builders traditionally worked around this difficulty by creating only a few openings, leading many people to believe that mud buildings could not be adequately lit or ventilated.
Builders in northern Sudan have found a way to provide a mud house with both light and ventilation. They leave a gap between the top of the walls and the ceiling, so that houses appear to have their roofs jacked up on blocks. Even a slight breeze pulls rising hot air out of the house and carries a cool draft through its doors.
Many residents improve this traditional air conditioning by stacking fodder on the roof to provide insulation from the sun and by wetting the dirt floors to cool the rooms and keep dust under control.
Traditional mud architecture erodes, as wind, rain, and other abrasions tear at it. As with any building, maintenance is important. Regular reapplication of coats of dung plaster, whitewash, or paint can protect surfaces and enable mud structures to last. Much of Sudan’s former capital of Omdurman was built from mud more than a century ago.
The major barrier to the increased use and innovation of mud architecture, however, is a perception that mud is a primitive material and mud architecture is “backwards.”
In rural areas of Sudan, for example, mud construction methods remain effective and virtually unchanged. Yet people in Sudanese cities view mud architecture as inferior. Many African governments and Western financiers reject traditional building materials in favor of what they see as universal symbols of progress: buildings made of steel, concrete, and glass.
These materials often must be imported, making these “modern” buildings wastefully expensive. The result, in many African cities, has been a high level of expenditures on small numbers of buildings.
Using wood, concrete, steel, and glass for building construction can waste both money and resources in areas of Africa where mud is available. Because mud is cheap, accessible, and ecologically sound, efforts are underway throughout Africa to overcome negative perceptions of this traditional building material.
The use of machinery and the addition of concrete as a binding agent have breathed new life into the timeless technologies of adobe brick and jalus. Mud bricks can be produced quickly and cheaply, and made almost as strong as concrete blocks.
In Mali local health authorities have built a modern hospital with a Western design out of mud (with a 10 percent admixture of cement) and steel bracing rods. To build a structure in Mali of comparable size and entirely from reinforced concrete would have been prohibitively expensive, yet no more stronger, durable, or attractive. Similar successes have earned Malians international awards for architecture.
The basic structure of new, brightly painted mud houses across northern Africa remains essentially the same as in ancient times, even if now one may see a truck parked outside or a satellite dish protruding from the roof. Although viewed in some quarters as a symbol of backwardness, Africa’s traditional building material may prove to have a future as rich as its past.
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Architecture (building); African Art and Architecture; Art
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