New Meanings and Historical Messages in the Larabanga Mosque

As a structural manifestation of the ways in which time and transformation have been allowed to act upon the human environment, architectural form is very much a documentary record of the histories, events, influences, and interruptions that make up the cultural fabric of society. Architecture, in essence, is a three-dimensional working through of past and present narratives that collide, contest, and negotiate with one another within a specific context. Such conceptualizations in the contemporary period find ready expression in iconic, heritage-saturated structures like the historic earth and timber mosque of the village of Larabanga in Northern Ghana (Fig. 1), which is one of the oldest remaining earthen mosques in the region. The mosque, whose construction is tentatived dated around the mid seventeenth century in conjunction with the founding of the town itself, has served as both a symbol of regional Islamic faith and in many ways an architectural...