People of the veil

by Baron Francis James Rennell Rodd Rennell of Rodd

PLATE 29

TIMIA: “A” AND “B” TYPE HOUSES AND HUT CIRCLES

TABELLO: INTERIOR OF “A” TYPE HOUSE

The big rooms of these “A type” houses in all the village groups examined varied but little in size, the largest one I measured being 29 ft. × 14 ft. inside. The small rooms varied rather more, ranging between 9 ft. and 12 ft. in length, the breadth being the same as for the big room. The head room was in all cases remarkable, one house I measured being as much as 12 ft. from the floor to the underside of the dûm palm rafters of the roof. In every instance the height was more than sufficient for a man to stand upright, a feature which does not obtain in the later houses. The large room was usually provided with three doors, the east and west ones being of similar dimensions, the south door rather smaller. In two cases in one group at Tabello and in other instances in the north I noticed that the east doors of the old houses had small buttresses outside as if to enhance their importance, though in one house the east door had been reduced to a small aperture; but this was exceptional. Buttresses were not observed on any of the west doors. In two cases I noticed here there was no south door, an omission which also occurred elsewhere among the later houses. The east and west doors, varying slightly according to the size of the house, were 4 ft. or more in height by 3 ft. 6 in. to 4 ft. in breadth. In all the Tabello houses the door openings were recessed on the inner side to take a removable wooden door some ten inches broader and taller than the opening itself. The recess was continued for a sufficient space laterally to allow the frame to be pushed to one side without taking up room space. One side of the recess was provided with an elbow-hole in the outer wall of the house about 2 ft. from the ground for access to a latch for securing the door frame. In the later houses, but not at Tabello, the sliding frame door gave place to one swinging from stone sockets in the threshold and lintel; these doors are in some cases over 3 ft. broad and cut out of one piece of wood: they also were provided with a latch or bolt fitting into a catch in the inner part of the elbow-hole by which the door was secured and sometimes locked with a rough padlock of Tripolitan or Algerian manufacture. No doubt the door frames of the earlier houses were provided with a similar latch and lock, but none of the woodwork has survived. The neatness of design of the sliding door recess was particularly striking in these dwellings.

The threshold of the doors in the older houses was on the floor level, which was a few inches above the outside level. The larger rooms had quadrangular niches of different dimensions at odd points in the walls, as well as certain peculiar and characteristic niches in the partition walls. The inner rooms were provided with small niches made of pots built into the walls; in many cases there were four shelves across the corners some 3-4 ft. from the ground made of heavy beams, evidently intended to carry considerable weights. The surfaces of these shelves, like all the inner walls of both rooms, were carefully plastered with mud mortar whitened or coloured with earths similar to those used in the washes on houses at Agades. In one case a dado or wainscot of a different colour had been applied with a finger-drawn zigzag border of another shade. The stucco surfaces were brown, earthy crimson, ochre, yellow or white.

One characteristic feature was observed in all the “old type” houses which still had walls standing of sufficient height for something more than the mere ground plan to be seen. On either side of the doorway in the partition or north wall of the large room there was a niche of very peculiar shape. The top was rather like a Gothic arch, and a recess was cut out in the base. The niches and the door in some cases were ornamented with an elaborate border, in other cases they were entirely unadorned. The shape of the niche, however, was constant and the size generally uniform. The style of decoration will be seen in Plates [29] and [30.]

The later houses in Air are clearly an adaptation of the earlier type, for they have many common characteristics. These houses I have called the “B type” to distinguish them from the “A” or “Itesan type.” The “B houses” also are rectangular but single-roomed; for the most part they too are oriented north and south. An Imajegh whom I questioned on this point at Iferuan said he did not know why this was so, but that all the correct houses of nobles were built in this manner, including the one in which his own family had always lived. He added that the three usual outside doors were called Imi n’Innek, the Door of the East, the Imi n’Aghil, the Door of the South, but the west door, instead of being called the Imi n’Ataram, was called the Imi n’Tasalgi, which properly means the Door of the North. When I asked him to explain this curious fact, he told me that it was because the Tuareg came from there, a statement which seemed inadequate, albeit significant. The confusion of west and north is especially curious; and the explanation of the house oriented E. and W. at Tabello is probably due to a misunderstanding on this point in the mind of the early builder. The problem is not unconnected with the varying sense of the word Ataram. Analogies between the “A” and “B” types of house are not, however, confined to those peculiarities of orientation and doors. A door in the north wall of the “B type” houses is very rare; on the other hand, in the majority of examples of this type I noticed that there was a long, very low niche on that side of the room. These recesses were not more than four or five inches high by eighteen to twenty-four inches long; they were used for keeping the Holy Books in and for no other purpose. The position of these niches, it is true, was not absolutely constant, nor was the type of niche for the Holy Books in the north walls always that shape, but the conclusion I reached from their frequent occurrence was that they in some way correspond to the ogive niches of the earlier houses, which I conceive had an indisputably ritual or religious significance. In a “B type” house at Assarara in Northern Air I came across two rectangular niches in a west wall which were obviously developments of the ornamented ogive niches of the “A type” house, and may also have been used for Holy Books, but this example of displacement with the varying and fortuitous practices adopted in the later dwellings convinced me that the use which had prescribed the earlier fashion was in process of being forgotten as modern times were approached, and that no explanation was therefore likely to be obtained by consulting local learned men. In the “B type” houses, as in the earlier dwellings, there was usually a profusion of other niches in the walls serving different household purposes.

The niches and the style of ornamentation of the “A type” houses of Air occur in the Sudan, but the formality of planning, the constant orientation and the ritualistic properties of the recesses, so far as I know, have no analogies outside Tuareg lands. I am not aware that attention has hitherto been drawn to these points either in the accounts of Air prepared by the French or in descriptions of dwellings in other parts of Africa, with the exception of one reference in Richardson’s account of his travels in 1845-6 in the Fezzan. He describes the houses at Ghat as having niches, and, from sketches he made, some of them are evidently of the same type as those in the Air houses of the first period.[220] They afford a problem which requires elucidation and which might throw much light on the cultural contacts of the Tuareg, among whom they seem to be traditional.