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Article Excerpt
Steven Nelson. From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa. University of Chicago Press; Chicago and London, 2007. 247 pp., 101 color ills., 8 b/w. $50
The cards were always weighted against Africa, given the European "tradition" producing its modern nationalities. To be British, French, Dutch, or German was in essence an idea produced by positioning Asian India, American India, and Africa especially as (fantastic) foils, and on occasion well before a significant encounter through colonialism with an actual "Africa." (1) Reality, from 1870 onward, hardly stood a chance against so powerful, though fictive, an imagination. Steven Nelson's From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa enters this history by an aspect of it that tends to be overlooked--architecture. This book treats an architectural tradition well known to architects, at least from their days in architecture school, and perhaps to those historians of modern art and architecture who may have momentarily turned their attention to the idea of the "primitive" in architecture. Thanks to the writing of, for instance, Bernard Rudofsky, the architecture of a different African people, the Dogon of Mali, came to occupy this position par excellence in the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the pointy, dome shaped structures of the Mousgoum of Cameroon have received almost as much attention in the same milieus. Mousgoum domed houses or teleukakay (singular teleuk) are domed clay structures whose surface is a highly textured, riblike, self-supporting system of staggered, alternating verticals that recall something of a gigantic peanut shell sliced at its center and stood on the cut. Here at the base of the house is its heavily framed doorway, whose form, like an over size keyhole, marks with some grandeur the entrance to the house.
Over four chapters that are framed by an introduction and an afterword, Nelson explores this enigmatic architecture and its history, but also (perhaps more so, even) seeks to understand the incredible popularity and resilience of this tradition within the discourses of Western (especially French, British, and German) culture almost right up to the present. The first chapter is an in-depth exploration of social and cultural aspects of Mousgoum architecture and space in relation to their culture and history, both through their representation in the earliest European descriptions (from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) as well as via the testimonials of contemporary Mousgoum who explain their significances as far as they have access to them in the present. This chapter also considers the primarily psychological structures through which this house communicates its meaning to its occupants and onlookers, both Mousgoum and outsider, the French and other Europeans included. It does so initially by exploring the well-worn Western theoretical construct of tectonics, seen in European theoretics as the means via which architecture communicates. Nelson nevertheless resists deploying this conceptual frame alone by moving his investigation to other forms of expression within Mousgoum society itself--dance for instance--in order to understand the ways in which meaning...
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