A River Runs Through It

As any travelled visitor to Haiti will tell you, Jacmel is among the country's most beautiful towns. On the south shore, facing the warmth of the Caribbean, this once-booming seaport had electric light before New York City; it was the first town in the Caribbean to get wired. At the time, countless bushels of coffee and other tropical delights came down out of the hills to be stacked in Jacmel's stunning brick-floored warehouses, waiting to be loaded onto steamers bound for the markets of the north.


Now the lone pier jutting out into the sea is moribund, and the once-grand buildings are tattered, the locks rusty. Mangy dogs roam the streets, and the tourist stalls are devoid of visitors. Fabulous pillared warehouses lie empty; some are burnt shells. Tropical loft culture has not yet managed to overcome the bureaucratic stumbling blocks posed by the dozens of squabbling heirs who control these spectacular waterfront properties, arguing amongst themselves for decades as the buildings languish empty, and termites and salt air slowly eat away at a spectacular architectural heritage of wrought iron balconies and high-ceilinged splendor.


This season's four spectacular hurricanes haven't helped spruce up the city (and it is only the end of September). The Haitian president described the devastation, nationwide, as being like Katrina, with no budget whatsoever to help those whose homes were washed away, buried under silt, or flooded to the eaves. The flat, miserable, bayside armpit that is the city of Gonaives, across the mountains in the dead center of the country, is still under water, they say, or under mud, many thousands rendered homeless. Up above, looming over every coastline of this vertical country, the treeless mountains are helpless to contain the torrential rains, and the runoff blasts down the valleys, like a flash flood in a desert canyon.


A dysfunctional, underfunded government, and a donor-fatigued international community, increasingly comfortable with looking the other way, have combined to create a museum of devastation. Jacmel, at the mouth of a river, is always hit hard in the Caribbean monsoon, but in my dozen and more trips here in the 1990s I never saw anything like the streets which today lead down to the sole jetty; no asphalt or concrete surface is left, and where pushcarts and longshoremen once rolled down to the port, there is now nothing but a rutted, riverine wash of gravel, boulders and sand. What was once an important commercial street is now a gully, at the heart of the city.

Rwandan Textures

Rural Rwandan buildings are almost indistinguishable from the landscape in which they sit; in most cases the earth used to construct them is drawn from a hole only a few feet from the house, so they are literally made from their own surroundings. Water is mixed with soil in the pit to make a thick mud, reinforced with straw, from which bricks can be cut. These are then laid out in the sun to dry, mere footsteps away from the foundations of the structure they will create.



The doors and window frames are cut with hand saws from local, fast-growing eucalyptus. Sheathing on the door is invariably a skin of sheet metal recycled from a disused oil drum that has finally become so battered in its various transits that it can serve no other purpose. The top and bottom are cut off and bent into bowls or other vessels, and then the drum is sliced lengthwise, beaten flat into a rectangular panel, and nailed to the door. Although most are pounded to a rust-speckled patina, on some Rwandan front doors it is still possible to read an oil company logo, sideways: Shell, Fina, etc.



From a global warming perspective, compare the carbon footprint of a house like this with the one left by even our most basic structure. Our 2X4s are forested and lumbered with diesel-burning machinery and milled using energy intensive industrial processes thousands of miles, and sometimes continents away from where they will be used. Our steels girders are shipped from South Korea, the gypsum in our wallboard mined who knows where. The fasteners come from China on ships registered conveniently to circumvent any inconvenient niceties regarding emissions and engine efficiency.

I don't mean to suggest that Rwandan vernacular architecture, or for that matter, any architecture of grinding poverty, grew out of environmentalist sentiment. The first improvement a house here will see, given a bit of money coming into the household, is the plastering of the interior and exterior walls with cement, the bottom rung on the upwards ladder of purchases requiring actual cash money, and the first material that will come from outside the community. The next, and in this context an almost middle class progression, would be to build from cinderblock or fired brick, and the owner would feel no nostalgia for the earthen walls of his ancestral village.

There is no doubt that the African mud-brick house springs from an architecture of convenience and necessity, of opportunism and economy, and of realism in the face of extraordinarily limited financial possibilities. But that does not mean that we should not learn from it. So-called "development" remains a goal and an aspiration across the globe, something almost universally accepted to have a positive connotation. (Who is in favor of "underdevelopment"?). The elimination of poverty and corruption, the improving of education, health care, and human rights are all thought to require it. But if development has brought us to the brink of self-sponsored extinction as a species, without even considering the grotesque arrogance by which we have already extinguished so many other "lesser" species in its name, then we need to do some serious rethinking.