The term "compound," when applied to human habitats in Africa, refers to a cluster of buildings within an enclosure, sharing a common or associated purpose. This can include houses for an extended family, residences for workers of the same employer, or a collection of homes known as a homestead.
In the United Kingdom, the term "compound" is primarily used in the context of "storage compound" and is less commonly used to describe unfortified enclosures or homes. In North American English, the term typically refers to a fortified military compound.
The use of "compound" to describe an unfortified enclosure was developed by the British Empire in Asia and Africa. In Africa, it initially referred to collections of workers' houses but now encompasses any cluster of related or linked homes, especially those belonging to members of the same family, employees of the same employer, or residents of a farm.
The term can also be applied to establishments such as schools or businesses, as in "the school compound" or "the factory compound".
In some African countries, "compound" may refer to a larger collection of dwellings, synonymous with a homogeneous township or suburb of similar public housing projects, or even a shantytown.
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Compounds can be seen as the smallest and most important political unit in some societies. The Yoruba term "agbo Ilé" (a flock of houses) refers to a compound housing the "idile" (family/clan), led by a "baálė" (the head of the compound).
Compounds, especially during periods of violence, might contain multiple extended families and dependents. The wealth and power of pre-colonial West African groupings were usually based on the control of people, its socio-political institutions developed to incorporate large numbers of diverse individuals.
The post-apartheid government also adopted the 2006 Older Persons Act, which enshrines the rights of older people. The act guarantees them the right to live in an environment that caters to their changing capacities and emphasizes community- and home-based care and support services. Nearly 30 years after the end of apartheid, however, current government policies are undermining the intended remedial impact of the Older Persons Act and are, in fact, compounding apartheid’s legacy.
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Historical Context: Compounds and Migrant Labor in South Africa
Compounds played a significant role in South Africa's history, particularly in the context of migrant labor and apartheid.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, compounds were company-owned accommodation for migrant mine workers in South Africa. The tightly controlled closed compound, where workers were greatly restricted from leaving before their contracts expired, became a defining feature of this system. This originated on the diamond mines of Kimberley around 1885 and was later replicated on the gold mines.
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This labor arrangement regulated the flow of male workers from rural homes in Bantustans or Homelands to mines and urban jobs, becoming a major component of the apartheid state.
An earlier form of compound developed in South Africa in response to copper mining in Namaqualand in the 1850s.
From 1872 migrant labour on the Diamond Fields was controlled by a pass system.
Johannesburg was founded in 1887, following the discovery of gold in a nondescript and land-locked location. Within 10 years a settlement of 102,000 had been expediently built by industrial capitalists and diverse settlers, with migrant miners comprising half of its population.
The Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (WNLA) and the Chamber of Mines’ Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC) were establish in 1900 and 1912 to consolidate a subcontinental recruitment network which hired laborers on 12 month contracts with a single 6 month renewal before obligatory 6 month repatriation.
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First used to control smuggling at the Kimberley diamond mines, the compound was adopted by the Witwatersrand gold mines to manage labor.
At first, each unique compound was built by an individual mine, but typical models were eventually repeated and in 1905 a Health Ordinance standardized the Rand Hut, the minimum living unit.
By 1910, there were fifty compounds housing nearly 200,000 miners, increasing to 300,000 by 1930. While fragmenting an enormous migrant population, each compound was also a point of passage in a vast geographic system that brought together African men, previously divided by language and ethnicity, as confederates.
In early 1920, 70,000 miners went on strike, marching into Johannesburg in protest and halting production on 21 mines at a time when the reef produced 50% of the world’s gold.
The territorialization of the Witwatersrand gold reef was founded on a brand of capitalist speculation in which labor exploitation and racial segregation were inextricable. The utilitarian compound system marked the earliest sign of a profoundly transient and fragmented pattern of urbanization which continues to define Johannesburg.
Map of Apartheid South Africa, showing the division of land.
Living Conditions in Compounds
The Lwandle single sex hostel near Cape Town, now preserved as the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, was established in 1958 as an accommodation facility for workers in the nearby fruit and canning industry. It was like scores of similar hostels around South Africa that were part of the migrant labour system under apartheid, with pass-regulated "influx control," and it typifies the living conditions the system imposed.
The hostels provided very basic accommodation with four to six men occupying a small, confined space, and an entire block sharing rudimentary ablution facilities. Hostels such as this were intended for single men only however women lived in Lwandle hostels unofficially from the 1960s shortly before the hostels were established.
From the 1980s, as poverty in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape increased and the relaxation of pass laws, large number of women and children moved into Lwandle, seeking employment and also to join their partners. There were sometimes between three and five people per bed.
In the 1980s, as the control of the flow of people from rural areas was eased, these hostels became even more overcrowded. Facilities were not provided to sustain the increased population.
Compounds in Contemporary South Africa
In South Africa this week, the word "compound" joined "refugee" as an apparently innocuous word that has become the centre of a debate around racism.
Now, neither compound nor refugee are words with inherently racial connotations. The Merriam-Webster definition of compound is "a fenced or walled-in area containing a group of buildings and especially residences". The Kennedys have a compound. So does the US president. Expats in Saudi Arabia live in compounds, and the word is typically used for military installations.
But context is everything, and anyone who has grown up in South Africa will know that the word has been used, historically, to refer to accommodation for black workers, as this definition makes clear. The compound was as much a feature of the apartheid system as townships and passes.
Contemporary Examples of Compound Housing
Growing up in Kenya, I experienced compound houses viscerally. My home in Nyali - a borough of Mombasa - was my first experience of a compound house. I lived here with my immediate family as well as members of my extended family. I always felt connected to the other people in the house through this central space. Even when I wasn’t outside, I could see my mother, father, uncles or guests coming in through the gate into this central space.
Another experience of the compound house was my grandmother’s single-storey one in Eastleigh, a denser and poorer area of Nairobi. There was a bricolage mix of permanent and temporary shops around its front perimeter. Even though these shops felt completely separate to the house within the gate, they were part of the plot - the shop owners rented their spaces from my grandmother.
One such compound house is the Ejisu Besease Shrine House in Kumasi, central Ghana, now the country’s second most populous city after Accra. The house is the home of an Asante deity and one of 10 shrine houses that make up the Ashanti traditional buildings listed by Unesco as a World Heritage Site in 1980.
The theme of cultural ritual is also present in the compound houses of northern Ghana. Here, the Lobi people - a tribe that spans Ghana, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire - traditionally build its houses using layers of laterite soil combined with water.
While there are distinctions across the compound house type, defined by location, cultural and societal norms as well as traditions, there are elements that are common and recurring. These attributes - in particular the central compound space and the veranda - create a layered range of public, semi-public, semi-private and private space.
It is both a private domain and civic space and shows an example of the house as an institution. However, I believe its potential as a housing type that encourages community, shared social and cultural values is very relevant today.
Accra compound and veranda, 2019.
The Funambulist on Compound Houses
The Funambulist is a platform that engages with the politics of space and bodies. Having grown up in a compound house in Kenya, RIBAJ rising star Bushra Mohamed has researched the use of such multi-generational shared living throughout Africa, and argues that the building type is very relevant today
In Adrinka, a language derived from pattern and imagery by the Ghanaian ethnic Akan people, ‘finhankra’ is the symbol for safety, directly translating as ‘compound’ or ‘house’. It represents a historic model of multigenerational housing found across the African continent, which I have been studying with my research partner Nana Biamah-Ofosu.
A compound house comprises a series of rooms opening to a central open space, or a cluster of buildings or rooms, typically forming a defensive enclosure. They are primarily associated with a shared purpose, such as the houses of an extended family.
Historically, the rooms were used for shelter and sleeping, but often also included granaries to store food, wells for water, and enclosures for cattle and livestock. In some early settlements, compounds would grow as required by the village or town, with four to six compounds per settlement and a total population anywhere between 100 and 300 people.
These kinds of compound houses are ubiquitously found across the African continent. The diverse histories and cultures during the precolonial and colonial periods as well as current urban realities make it ineffective to generalise the African continent. However, the type does form a sort of continent-wide vernacular architecture, and historic examples can be found in parts of Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Tunisia, Cameroon and Zimbabwe. As a type, the African compound house is also similar to Chinese Siheyuan houses, traditional Mexican pueblo houses and courtyard houses found in India.
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