Ghana Life: Ashanti Compound House
Despite the rapid growth of the big cities, Accra and Kumasi, the majority of Ghanaians still live in hamlets, villages, and small towns in rural areas where the bulk of livelihoods still essentially depend on agriculture. In these rural communities, the traditional form of housing is still common and most families live in a single room in a compound house. Although the original adobe walls and thatched roofs have been largely replaced with concrete block and corrugated metal roofing sheets, and the size of the complex has increased, the basic design and lifestyle it supports have essentially remained the same. without changes. What follows is a description of a typical Ashanti compound house in the small gold mining town of Konongo, fifty kilometers from Kumasi on the Accra road, as it existed in the last decade of the 20th century.
The traditional floor plan of the compound house consists of a rectangular courtyard surrounded on all four sides by rows of individual rooms, each with a door and a window opening onto the inner courtyard. The rows of rooms form a wall around the courtyard with a single opening on one side to allow access from the outside. In earlier times, the entrance may have been closed, but compound houses built in modern times, such as the one at Konongo, often had unobstructed access. Each room belonged to a family and was passed down from generation to generation. Almost everyone in the complex belonged to the same extended family or clan, but some room owners who moved or found alternative accommodation may have rented out their room to a stranger.
The compound house in Konongo, like many others in the village, gave the impression of never having been completed. The large central courtyard was not paved except for a few small concrete areas outside some of the rooms. On this hard-trodden and often swept orange-pink bare earthen floor, children learned to crawl and walk while their mothers cooked, did housework, and chatted with other women. The constant sweeping kept the compound free of grass and weeds, but the courtyard was large enough to accommodate three shade trees under which the men could gather to smoke their pipes and air their grievances.
In addition to the trees, the courtyard was read with leftover construction materials from the original construction and subsequent expansion projects. These piles of sand and discarded building blocks had gradually worn away into smooth, familiar contours that no one thought to remove, either to build a new facility or to improve the appearance of the compound. The surrounding walls may have once been white, but had now taken on the color of the ground below. The iron sheets of the roof were rusty and patched; crooked, broken, and unpainted wooden doors hung off their hinges, and shuttered windows had broken and missing glass, some replaced with strips of plywood.
Many of the shade trees in Ashanti cities and towns are mangoes. These were unpopular with adults because the children made a lot of mess in May of each year when the fruit was ripe and ready to eat. The standard harvesting technique of the boys was to throw sticks at the trees which fell accompanied by the fruit and copious amounts of foliage as well. Fortunately, the mango fruiting season was short and the smiles on the children’s faces quickly turned from mango orange to permanent chocolate brown.
