Inside a hut

A typical hut is made up two rooms. One inner room and one outer room. In most cases there are no windows. However there are exceptions. Some have 3 rooms and a window.In this case one room serves as a kitchen. It was always night inside the inner room.
Some also do not have doors. There are mostly no doors in opening that connects the rooms. One trademark of all the huts is a mud bed. This mud bed probably were built at the same time with the mud walls of the building because the grow up from the floor. They are solid rectangles and two sides of the rectangle(lentgh and width) are fused with the mud wall.The mud bed only needs a mat on top of it for someone to sleep. During the dry season when the temperature is hot, it is very cool and someone could cool off lying on it bare. Another type of bed that was common then was the wood and bambo bed. This bed has rectangular like the mud bed but the width seems to be wider and the length shorter. It has four wooden supports each at the four corners of the bed just like the mordern bed connected together by whole bambo trunks. The middle is the formed by the weaving of split bambo trunks that criscross each other at right angles along the whole length of the bed. This kind of bed were good home for bedbugs.lol!

On one part of the hut, a partial ceiling is formed with logs of wood. The wood ceiling and all the other part of the roof are brownish or black due to the smoke that come from the fireplace. These served as storage for most things. This also served as hiding place for rats.
The fireplace is constructed with 3 big stones inbetween which firewoods are inserted under a pot supported by the stone while cooking. You could imagine the colour of the pots-black. While there were metallic pots, some were made of clay. The clay pots had smooth exterior and very shinny interior. Cooking with a clay pot could take 4 times the time required to cook with a metallic pot.
During full moon, the shadow of the triangular roof of the huts provide the dark spot needed for playing hide and seek.

Large compound continued

.... in between the two huts of my late grand uncle is a wide passage that passes by another hut belonging to yet another memberof the extended family and tappers to a narrow winding and descending pathway as one mianders through the farmlands to a stream less than a kilometer away.
Facing my grandmothers hut while backing my house the main road that led to my compound comes into the compound from the left handside.

To the back of my grad dads's hut was a huge barn in which the yam tubers of the whole compound are stored in racks and on raised platform after harvest. The barn is fenced around with small and big trees some of which are economical like the local pear tree. I will not tell you what I did on top of those trees even when there were restrictions. There were two pear trees to the south of the barn. The fruit of both of them were very oily and delicious but the smaller one situated at left hand of the barn as one enters from the north wasextraordinarily delicious and I seemed to be the only one with one of my uncles that could access the fruits. yum!

Before harvest, the gaps between the trees are are filled up with palm fronds and supported with extra logs of wood where necessary mainly to protect the harvests from rampage goats and other yam eating animals.
The fencing is carried out by tying two halves of split bamboo together one on each side of the tree line so that there will be a space in between them. Sometimes, the palm branches devoid of the leaves are used in stead of the bamboos. There are two sets of such setups in the framework. The tying material is a flexible layer scraped out of the inner side the palm branches.

When the tying is over, the palm fronds are inserted through the hollow created by the trees and logs all rounf the barn leaving on one entrance which serves also as the exit. the entrance is guided by a door made of grasses weaved to a wooden back bone.

A large African compound

There were about about houses that formed a circle. 6 out of the 8 were round mud huts thatched with grasses and the remaining one of which was my family house were raffia Square houses roofed with raffia palm. At the centre of the compound is tree at the base of which was a shrine. In those days before a man build his hut, his father usually plants a tree and then transfer a stone diety to which he sacrifices a fowl or a goat at least once a year as the case may be. Opposite my family house was the hut of my paternal grandmother and to the left of her hut, was the hut of her husband. To the right was another hut that belonged to another woman. A member of the extended family.
To the left of of my grandfathers hut was his late brothers hut which was then occupied by one of his wives. Very close to the later was the hut of my grand uncle's second wife. This was very close to my fathers house. Immediately to the left of my house, was the rear of hut that enchroaced into our compound from a neighbouring compound. Passing by it one gets to the second raffia palm house which belonged to one of my uncles.
In between the mid compound tree and my house along the diameter of the circle, were my late grand uncle's thomb which could only be recognised by a two metalic bar which eere driven at right angle across each other into the ground and a semicircular mud kitchen with no roof. The later was directly infrom of my grand uncle's wife house close to my grand fathers hut while the former was opposite his other wife's hut close to my house. The metallic bars were no friends to my bare foots.