Engraving by Amedee Forestier.
“On the upper Aruwimi or Ituri there is a medley of house building styles. Besides the ever-recurring Pygmy hut, there are the continuous street-like plank dwellings of the semi-Bantu peoples, allied to the far-distant Ababua (Bagboro, Balese, Iyugu, Babundi). These are either erected in straight rows, face to face, with a narrow passage between, or are arranged in a horseshoe shape. The roof has a single slope, penthouse fashion, like the house of the Bateke people, twelve hundred miles away to the west. These steeply slanting roofs of a single pitch are neatly tiled with huge leaves, the points of which overlap with precision, and give to the tile-like thatch the appearance of a pangolin's scales.
Stanley, in his In Darkest Africa, thus describes these continuous plank dwellings . —
" The architecture [of the Balese country] was peculiar. Its peculiarity consisted in a long street flanked by a long, low wooden building, or rather planked building, on either side, 200, 300, or 400 feet long. At first sight one of these villages appeared like a long gable-roofed structure, sawn in exact half along the ridge of the roof, and as if each half-house had been removed backward for a distance of twenty or thirty feet, and then along the inner sides had been boarded up, and pierced with low doors, to obtain entrance into independent apartments. The light wood of the Rubiacece affords good material for this kind of house. A sizeable tree, one foot, eighteen inches, or two feet in diameter, is felled, and the log is cut into short pieces from four to six feet in length; the pieces are easily split by hard wedges, and with their small, neat adzes they [the Balese] contrive to shape the plank smooth, tolerably even, and square. They are generally an inch or an inch and a quarter thick. For what is called the ceiling or inner boarding the boards are thinner and narrower. When a sufficient number of boards and planks are ready, the inner ceiling is lashed to the uprights, frequently in as neat a fashion as a carpenter's apprentice might do it with saw, nails, and hammer ; on the outer side of the uprights are lashed the thicker planks, or broad slabs. The hollow between the inner and outer frame is then stuffed with the phrynia, or banana leaves. The wall facing the street may be nine feet high, the back wall facing the forest or clearing is four or four and a half feet high, the width of the house varies from seven to ten feet. Altogether it is a comfortable and snug mode of building, rather dangerous in case of fire, but very defensible, with trifling labour."
Often as at Iyugu, on a tributary of the Ituri, each set of plank houses was built in a horseshoe or semicircle in such a way that the two extremities nearly joined. Two doors closed this curious concentric village, which then formed a perfect circle ; in the middle a large space was left. This formation was adopted for purposes of defence, but was of no avail against Manyema guns“
-George Grenfell and the Congo
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