The original note, as written at the time
Here is the reason why every hut you see today, every African home you see today, is as ugly as the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. The reason is simple. Maintenance, let alone construction itself. The effort of maintaining these huts was always a community task that was driven by the youth. Without the youth anymore in places where the huts are, that is villages, of course these huts are going to be in disrepair. And they will look unsightly, they will look inferior. But the truth is our kind of construction was high maintenance.
Ongoing development
Here is why every hut you see today, every older home in our villages, looks as ugly as the ugliest thing you have ever seen.
It is not the building. It is the maintenance, and the absence of the people who used to do it.
Our kind of construction was high maintenance. That was understood. The materials were transient — rendered, thatched, patched, re-smoothed as the seasons required — and the labour that kept them alive was never a paid task. It was a community task, driven above all by the young. When a season came round, people gathered and did the work together, and in return each household knew that on another day the same hands would arrive at its own wall. Labour was not priced; it was owed and repaid.
Then we saw the white man’s construction and we bought the illusion that it did not require our occasional maintenance, because we watched it for several seasons and it did not visibly demand anything. We concluded that the new way was superior in durability and we stopped organising the work.
But what we were actually seeing was maintenance that had been deferred, postponed, hidden behind a service contract and a cement render, and above all paid for in cash rather than in obligation. The new building does need maintaining. It simply needs maintaining by somebody else, with money, and at a schedule that the occupant cannot see. Maintenance stopped being a season and became an invoice.
And now the youth have gone to the towns, so even the old logic cannot be called upon. The huts stand without their season of repair, the render fails, the thatch goes, and we look at the result and say that our ancestors built poorly, when the truth is that our ancestors built well enough to be repaired and we have stopped repairing.
I am not romanticising the hut. It was cold in the cold and it required more of its people than a modern house does. But it belonged to a system in which upkeep was part of dwelling rather than a service you buy when you can afford it, and the newer building has quietly transferred that obligation onto money that most households do not have.
So when we insist on maintenance being a priced task, we should be honest about what we are pricing. We are not pricing skill. We are pricing the loss of a system in which a community could keep its own built environment alive, and we are asking the poorest occupants to carry that loss in the appearance of their own homes.