The Built Environment of the Precolonial West African Coast: Materials, Functions, and Housing Standards

Abstract

Abstract This article studies the built environment along the West African coast as described in European historical sources from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Many early modern European observers believed housing standards in West Africa remained poor over this long period, and attributed this to a lack of development. The evidence presented in this article suggests that most European observers missed several key functions of traditional African architecture, as well as how the architecture in use might have been an adaptation to the socioeconomic context developing in relation to the Atlantic slave trade.