“Portuguese” Architecture and Luso-African Identity in Senegambia and Guinea, 1730–1890

Abstract

Along the West African coast and in the immediate hinterland from the Gambia River to Sierra Leone in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, a region of extensive long-distance trade, the buildings people lived in, as well as the physical layout of their communities, served as important elements in the articulation of their cultural identity. At the same time, architecture reflected contact between the various populations of the region. These groups included a small number of Portuguese and a somewhat larger population of several thousand Luso-Africans, whose commercial role as traders, declining by the late eighteenth century, was limited essentially to the navigable lower reaches of coastal rivers and waterways.These Luso-Africans, faced by Europeans who contested their efforts to define themselves as a group, were gradually marginalized and ultimately subsumed into the neighboring coastal populations, leaving only traces of their distinctive culture. Among the elements that comprised the Luso-African cultural legacy were houses built in “Portuguese” style: rectangular structures with whitewashed exteriors and a vestibule or a porch. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these houses helped to define the Luso-African community.The local African populations of West Atlantic-speakers (Floups, Bagnuns, Bijogos, and Papels) and, further down the coast, Susus, Temnes and Bulloms, were for the most part organized into small-scale, decentralized societies. Mande-speaking peoples inhabited the small states of the lower Gambia and the more important state of Kaabu in Guinea-Bissau; they, together with ‘juula’ merchants, comprised the western outriders of the Mande diaspora. Further east, in the newly-established Islamic state of Fuuta Jaloo (Futa Jalon), lived the Fulbe.