Tiébélé

Tiébélé is a Kassena village near the Ghanaian border whose royal court is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most striking pieces of vernacular architecture in West Africa. The houses are built of earth, wood and cow dung in three shapes, rectangular for bachelors, figure-of-eight for couples and round for widows, with doorways deliberately low enough to force an intruder to stoop. Every wall is painted by the women after the harvest in black, white and ochre geometry drawn with chicken feathers and burnished with stones. The patterns are renewed each year before the rains.