In the decolonial era, a graphic such as this cover picture sends a powerful message. It critiques the question of what sorts of materials are most appropriate or why the preference for cement, zinc, asbestos and so on may not necessarily have been because those stuff are inherently better than grass woven into a model as in the picture.
And then the subsequent argument that the foreign building materials became the builders’ choice not because they are more appropriate but only because those whose innovation the thatch house is were successfully inferiorised along with the product.
Thereafter, the increase in sophistication that the thatch house would have seen by now if not interrupted by the coloniality of architecture was halted. Instead, the thatched house became a symbol of primitivity, notwithstanding that it was an experiential response of those who produced it.
That is the sense in which this cover picture is not an innocent picture but a statement in decolonial critique of housing. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any observable defects but that it is not the tradition today because of what happened in the course of history. The picture point at its potentials by now if it was not underdeveloped within the logic of colonial warfare.
But, as Femi Taiwo, the Nigerian professor at Cornell University warns in a recent book, it is not everything that is fit for decolonial interrogation. In that case, the debate about the thatch house here is whether it is a ‘proper’ or ‘improper’ subject of decolonial analysis.
Over to the believers in Decoloniality in our universities, research centres, civil society, think tanks, media, political parties, the professional groups in the building industry and the policy mill!
