Types of settlements

Most Africans still live in villages. A village is not only a group of houses, it is also a complex social organism that lives according to its own rules. Usually, each village has a chief, but this does not necessarily mean that he takes all the important decisions. Besides, there is a council of the family heads. There is a “master of the land”, and a custodian of the sacred grove. There are age groups and secret associations. They all have their shares of power and their own sphere of competence. If one gets to know a village better, it turns out that not all of its inhabitants are equal. There are “first settlers”, i.e. those, whose ancestors once founded the village, and “aliens” or “guests” whose ancestors once asked the first settlers for the permission to live in the village. An “alien”, even if his ancestors came to a village a day after the first settlers, can never become the village chief.

There are large villages and very small ones; their size depends on the fertility of soil, the density of the population in a given country and the safety of life. In the Yoruba land, in the south of modern Nigeria, where yams growing allowed to feed a large number of people, some villages grew so big that they looked almost like cities. Their sacral rulers were surrounded by large courts, and there were areas populated by craftsmen serving these courts, so one can say that they actually were cities, though for the majority of the dwellers farming remained their main occupation. Settlements of the Shona people in ancient Zimbabwe also looked like cities; there are still remains of high stone walls constructed without the use of a building mortar.

But in most cases, emergence of African urban centers was due to the trade with the outer world: along the southern border of the Sahara desert, with the Mediterranean; on the coast of the Indian Ocean, with Arabia, Persia and India; on the Atlantic coast, with Europeans.

Morning in a Sahelian town.  Guinea. The Kanuri. D. G. Bondarev. 2005.		A Maninka village. Guinea. The Maninka. Erman A., 1999.		In a popular block, the life of the people  runs mainly outdoors. Côte d’Ivoire. Abidjan. Erman A., 2007
View of popular residential area. Angola, Luanda. Perekhvalskaya E., 2004