Here’s an excerpt from chapter six of landscape architect Mark Steven Smoot’s book, Huts. Huts is an enchanting collection of photography, sketches, and written reflections from Mark’s time in South Africa during Apartheid, with a focus on the buildings and lives of people in rural towns. We find his documentation of this colorful earthen architecture captivating. You can order a copy of the book at www.marksmoot.com and find him on Instagram at @huts.african
I slowly learnt the people’s stories. Mostly, they were Basotho families living on white-owned farmlands. The women I met were the hardworking wives and mothers of labourers who were seldom at home, even on those Sundays: they were off working distant farms or in the gold mines at Kimberley. I got to know that, due to South African apartheid-era policies, these families could never in their wildest dreams own the homes they lived in – mainly built themselves, from sticks and clay – or even feel secure on the land on which they stood. Many of them would have been living on the same piece of land for generations. The problem was that they had no legal right to the land, which meant that the farmer could – and often did – evict them whenever he wanted. For this reason, they had a need to preserve valued building materials for any eventual relocation. If the labourer and his family fell out of favour with their landlord, and were forced to leave, they would take with them every reusable construction item, including the roof. The clay walls would eventually return to the earth. Those gentle women raised children and cared for their remote, lonely houses with patient and admirable dignity. And in spite of the insecurity of their tenure, they still found the heart to express a wondrous pride-of-place in the maintenance and decoration of their homes. Reliant on the landowner’s generosity, labourers would gratefully inherit castoffs: old window frames and doors, rusty stoves and outdated furniture. They fit these prizes as best they could into their modest dwellings. Occupation of rural homesteads could have spanned generations and therefore would have been added to over time. Newer dwellings were nearly always built with corrugated-iron roofs while older huts, with grass-thatched roofs, were usually relegated to being the cooking rooms: smoke from a fire could easily filter through the thatch.
For the roof of the living quarters, corrugated-iron sheeting was the material of choice, despite the way it intensified the heat in summer and did absolutely nothing to hold in warmth on cold winter nights. Once or twice I tried arguing that a traditionally thatched roof would provide far better insulation, only to receive looks of incredulity. It became obvious that the metal product represented progress and status to people who chose to emulate some fragment of a richer man’s circumstance rather than hold on to an antiquated tradition. The tin roof was almost always supported by just one centrally placed wooden beam. The facade of the house was topped with a parapet into which the sheeting was embedded to form a sort of water seal. The roof drained over short eaves at the rear. The girth of any dwelling was limited by the length of the sheeting units, about 3.5 metres. Nails or wire fastenings were impractical as this would mean puncturing the sheets, creating a lifelong source of leakage. Instead, sheets were held in place by setting rocks, or even spare tyres, on top of them.
Because of their fame, the Ndebele, who lived northeast of Pretoria, are sometimes given credit for initiating a trend of mural painting, but Sotho murals were recorded as early as the 1830s when the French missionary and ethnographer Eugene Casalis first wrote of them in the vicinity of modern-day Lesotho. The traditional creativity of the Basotho housewives found expression, and regional reinterpretation, in very appealing ways. The high rectangular walls of these flat-roofed dwellings presented the equivalent of artist’s canvases for the women who maintained them. The clay surfaces were skilfully overlaid with decoration that varied from f inger impressions and relief to inscribed patterns and colourful painting. It was a constantly changing artform, affected sometimes by fashion but more often by the need for regular touching up or redesign: the work would fade or wash away in the rainy season and needed to be restored before national holidays when the family would all come together at home. Most of the pigments used were earth tones found in natural clay deposits on the land, but more exciting blues and greens could be achieved by tinting the clay wash with laundry agents and other products found at a general store. The manganese dioxide from old batteries was sometimes mixed with dung and water to make a jet-black wash. Commercial paints were used at times, but these didn’t allow the clay to breathe, creating eventual damp problems in the walls. The people had age-old traditions for making use of limited available resources: shelves on kitchen walls were moulded by hand from the strong clay taken from antheaps, then painted with exuberant colours. Mud-and-dung floors were packed hard and given patterns and a shine with animal fat. Those Sotho housewives’ beautiful homes, meticulously crafted and maintained, shine in my memories of those happy days. I wonder if they can still be found out there, after nearly four decades of social and political change.
