Batammariba Takienta (Tower-House)

The takienta (plural sikien) is the earthen tower-house of the Batammariba people, whose homeland, Koutammakou, straddles the Kara Region of northern Togo and the Atakora Department of Benin. In the Ditammari language the people's name is usually explained as "those who shape the earth", and the house is the clearest expression of that skill. The landscape was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2004 and extended into Benin in 2023.

Form and use

A takienta is built on a circular or elliptical plan and reads from outside as a cluster of linked earth towers. UNESCO describes it as a family dwelling that is at once technical, practical and religious: it also serves as a shrine for the ancestors. The ground level is given over to animals, while the family's granaries stand on the roof terrace above. Many of the houses have two levels, and some have flat roofs.

Materials

The houses are made almost entirely from what the surrounding land provides: earth for the walls and terrace, timber for the structure, and straw. Because every element is organic or unfired, the buildings depend on continual upkeep and on a living tradition of builders who know how to shape and repair them. Skills in takienta construction are among the practices targeted by a UNESCO safeguarding programme for Batammariba intangible heritage launched in 2008.

The roof terrace

The terrace is the working heart of the house. It closes the top of the ground-floor rooms, provides a raised, dry platform for storing grain away from animals and damp, and links the separate granary towers. Like the earthen flat roofs of the wider Sahel, it relies on a well-maintained earth surface to shed the rains.

Numbers and condition

According to UNESCO, about 1,716 sikien are still lived in on the Togo side and about 1,400 on the Benin side. Heavy rains in August 2018 damaged houses in Koutammakou, and UNESCO's Heritage Emergency Fund supported a damage-assessment mission that October.

Pressures

UNESCO lists several threats to the houses:

• Over-use of the local environment, which makes suitable wood and straw harder to find near villages.
• Declining interest among younger people in building and maintaining the houses.
• Semi-urban growth and new detached houses roofed with metal sheet ("tin roofs").
• Changing ways of life and climate change.

The shift to metal-sheet houses is the same one seen across West Africa: quicker to build and lower in maintenance, but a break with the earth-and-straw building culture that the takienta embodies.

Names

The area is also known as Tamberma country, and the houses are sometimes called Tamberma houses. Spellings vary between sources, including takyenta and sikien or siken.