Creolization or mimicry? A study of British colonial architecture in the Niger Delta

Abstract

This study examines the concept of creolization in colonial architecture based on a discourse of works by Melville Herskovits, Robert Baron and Jay Edwards. It also highlights the influence of the found architectural knowledge of the indigenous peoples on the emergent colonial-built forms. In previously colonized societies, majority of public heritage architecture is an agglomeration of building ideas, spatial arrangement, and architectural features, mimicked, borrowed and indigent from the colonizers and the colonized. This article argues that creolization in the context of this study is simply reversed mimicry based on found architectural knowledge. Using a combination of archival data, discourse analysis and actual case study research, this paper examines some selected colonial buildings in the Niger Delta which are of British authorship but with noticeable indigenous attributes. This article presupposes that in some settings reversed mimicry masked as creolization thrived by reason of found architectural knowledge, resulting in a distinct stilt architectural style found during the colonial era in the study region.