• The new owners of the house must continue to protect and promote African Heritage
Image: PAUL EKHABA
African Heritage House, a Kenyan national monument, is on the block.
As the owner of African Heritage House, I hope to pass on the house with all of its rare and valuable contents collected over the last 50 years to a buyer or buyers who will preserve the house as a national monument. I find that having a board of trustees for the house will not be enough. It must have permanent ownership by people who will nurture it. I hope to find compatible buyers with whom I can continue working on a museum and Pan-African Studies Centre near the house.
The new owners of the house must continue to protect and promote African Heritage as I have done with the late former Vice President Joseph Murumbi and his wife, Sheila. When it closed in 2003, the African Heritage Pan-African Gallery left behind a staff of 510, 51 outlets worldwide and several thousand suppliers from across the African continent. It spawned the Maasai Markets we know today, which had started as the African Heritage Tuesday Buying Day.
African Heritage House is based on indigenous pre-colonial mud architectures from across Africa. It was the first house in sub-Saharan Africa to be featured in the prestigious Architectural Digest (Nov 1996). The house has also graced the cover of Marie Claire in Paris (April 2000) and has been featured in many leading international magazines, even on the cover of the leading décor magazine of Russia, and magazines in a score of other countries worldwide.
The original inspiration for the house was the towering mud mosque of Djenne in Mali, the largest earthen structure in the world, and a leading example of precolonial African architecture. The “tower” of the house is based on the Emir’s palace in Kano, Nigeria. I had seen these awesome structures and other “lost” mud architectures of Africa when I first crossed the Sahara Desert in 1969. Much of this architecture has been washed away and never replaced. The other main inspiration for the house was drawn from the Swahili architecture of the East African Coast, Zanzibar and Lamu, from the mud palaces of Morocco, and the painted houses of Northern Ghana.
The house was threatened by demolition by the Chinese SGR railway at the same time it was being considered for national monument status. It was finally gazetted as a national monument in January 2016. It is now open to the public for daily tours, lunches, dinners, events, weddings, conferences and overnight stays.
Where will I go? I shall repatriate a collection of African art to Kenya from my home in the US after I sell it. I plan to build a smaller house nearby, based on African precolonial architecture. The house will be both ultratraditional and ultramodern, proving the irreducible modernity of African design and architecture.
For more information, visit https://africanheritagehouse.info/ or contact the writer via [email protected]