This museum gives visitors a glimpse of the traditional setup of a Swahili home
Houses are usually oblong and built around a small open courtyard. The houses in the few remaining very traditional (and in the recent past poorer) towns such pate, are single- story building, but in a wealthier and crowded town, such as Lamu, most are two-storied and many have three stories, the structurally safe limit. A story is typically added when the occupying family expands by the marriages of its daughters, residence for the first marriages women being uxorilocal. In some grander houses the ground floor was occupied by slaves and used as warehouses, and the family members lived above. Drainage is an important consideration: houses have flat roofs and house drains send the often heavy rainfall into the streets drains, which empty into the sea. The traditional Swahili stone-built houses are complex structures, and here is the only barest outline, to show the house as part of a wide symbolic schema that lies at the base of Swahili notion of purity, ancestry, and status.
The axis of a typical house runs north and south. The entrance to the courtyard is properly at the north end and the owners private rooms are at the south end. The vagaries of the street layouts mean that a staircase from the front door may twist and change directions so as to end up in the right place. The northern end is referred to as upande wa kibla ( the side of the kibla) , the northern and sacred end of a mosque. Houses and mosque should have the same orientations.
In larger houses, at least there is a well in the courtyard, and a bathroom and toilet in a small room off one of the corners. The main rooms are set to the south of the courtyard: in lamu rain almost never comes from the north. In single- story houses there is a typically a guest room (sabule) directly off the courtyard on the northern side of the inner porch, so that it is far from the main living quarters into which a guest cannot look. In larger houses the sabule is typically at the top of a staircase separate from the main family staircase, and has its own bathroom. In the absence of guests ( who are usually visiting kin or trading partners) , the head of the family may often sleep in the sabule, particularly when his wife has close female kin staying with her; they sleep in the main bedroom, the ndani. There is also typically a staircase leading up the north wall to the roof. Formerly slaves would sleep under the staircases, the space known as sarambi.
Behind, except in smaller houses, is a second area, msana wa yuu, the “upper gallery”. Both galleries have high painted poles at the ends for the curtains of the sleeping alcoves. Beyond the upper gallery is the most private area, the ndani, “inside” (occasionally called the msana wa kati, “central gallery”), where the wife and husband sleep. This is par excellence the wife’s room. In grander houses these galleries are extremely high and cool, and often have small window-niches at the ends, in which are placed pieces of porcelain for show.
Behind the ndani are the choo, the bathroom-cum-toilet of the ndani, and a smaller space or room, the nyumba ya kati (center of the house), sometimes called chumba cha kati (central room). The bathroom is usually on the left side facing from the courtyard, the nyumba ya kati on the right: the left is polluting, the right not. Each may have its own doorway from the ndani. The latter room has (or has had) two main functions.
A father should give his daughter at her first marriage her own separate living accommodation linked to his own: either a story may be added, each story occupied by a separate elementary family or he may build or buy an adjoining house. When this is across a street, a bridge (wikio) is built to link the two houses: women can pass from one to the other without being seen from the street below. The working definition of a separate accommodation for each family is that it has its own bathroom-cum-toilet. water comes from wells and cisterns. The toilets are dry pits, vertical ducts set inside the walls; so long as they are kept dry, they are thick and lime-washed, and the ceilings are very high: these houses are cool and relatively dry even though the coastal climate is often very hot and humid.
The first two galleries are separated by internal walls, each having two door ways; the wall of the ndani has only one central doorway, so that its interior cannot be seen from the first gallery or the courtyard. Walls have rows of wooden pegs for hanging rugs tapestries. Walls pillars and parts of the walls, as well as door jambs and lintels, are curved and decorated in plaster. The back walls of the msana wa yuu and particularly of the ndani are set with rows niches, vidaka or zidaka(diminutive forms of daka, the outer porch of the house), sent into the plaster. These inches are arched and so shaped that their roof are sloped higher at the back, so that the observer cannot see the join between the roof and back; the backs are also slightly angled relative to one another, so that there is only a single central place from which the entire wall panel can be viewed in proper perspectives. The niches are for displaying porcelain, manuscripts and wedding materials, copies of the Quran and other treasures. Beneath the rows of niches, in the center, is typically a blank rectangle where is placed a bed on which a bride is presented on her wedding. The observer stand in the upper gallery, from which they can best see her seated and surrounded by the beauty of the niches and their contents. In the past rooms occupied by slaves were not plastered but those occupied by free persons had to be, even if they lacked niches: plaster is associated with purity.