"You people and your steel and glass," Baba Joy said while she was using her legs to match the palm slowly inside a section of mud wall that has been built since before any of us were given birth to. "This thing you are looking at has withstood difficult times, local wars, rain, and harmattan. Come and show me your glass building after forty years."
My mother has sent me to check a section of our old family compound wall in my great-grandmother's village that has been a little bit damaged and cracking so hard near the edge; my sister is contemplating whether to leave it, demolish it, or call a modern builder for a rebuild and give it a modern look. And as the only architect in the family, I was left to make that decision apparently.
I have gone through training in the entirely modern structural methods, poured concrete, and used steel reinforcement and imported specifications from lectures and textbooks that are basically for climates nothing like ours. Walking up to the almost collapsed mud wall with my notepad, I will admit I already had all my recommendations figured out in my head before I had even opened my mouth to tell them to tear down the wall and build something more befitting and modern-looking in its place.
Baba Joy, who has always been the one maintaining this wall his whole time, called my attention to something instead. The wall was not cracking and falling from a not-so-good design; it has been falling because no one has been following the old traditional way that it was built. A yearly maintaining ritual that our forefathers usually do because of the birth of all the modern designs and the younger generation, like myself, doesn't even know about it. Looking and watching closely, underneath the cracking lies the real structure that was mixed with what was called "swish," clay, and straw, with no cement, and it has outlasted some of the modern different concrete mixtures put together that were built in the same compound not so long ago. And the three different concrete additions mixed together are already showing some worse damage than the mud wall they were meant to turn into a modern one.
I was with him, watching closely and running my left hand through the wall surface just the way he was moving his hand. And what I felt was quite different from the modern and factory material texture I used to feel, and right there, immediately, I had a shift in me about how I'd been quietly measuring my own profession. Without ever constantly deciding, I had absorbed what I should've, always thinking that the imported method was the real architecture and forgetting that we have our own indigenous way that should not be replaced by external resources.
The wall never needed a replacement. What it needed was someone willing to learn it already knew. The week that followed, I was with Baba Joy learning the old replastering technique, who had never for once been to an architecture class or known anything about it. I learned a new thing entirely. My sister and mother were a bit confused when I told them it's better to preserve it than to completely pull it all down because, mentally, they had written it off as being outdated.
I don't think I totally understood my own profession until I saw something built without the modern building materials, and it still stood firm and strong and solid more than most buildings today do. That part of the wall I mentioned wasn't cracking and damaged because it became so old. It was that way simply because we stopped paying attention to the inner structure that has kept it all together in the first place.
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