Navrongo and the painted houses of Sirigu

What the painted walls of Sirigu actually are

The painted walls of Sirigu are the exterior and interior surfaces of family compounds, plastered in mud and then decorated by the women of the household in bands of geometric pattern using black, white and red-ochre earth pigments. They are domestic architecture, not public art, and that distinction governs everything about how you visit.

Stand in front of one and the first thing you notice is that the pattern follows the building. A band of triangles runs along the base where the wall meets the ground; a broader field of diamonds or chevrons covers the main surface; a line of dots or a zigzag caps it near the roof. Doorways get their own framing. Interior walls of the sleeping rooms and the kitchen area are treated too, often more finely than the outside.

The surface itself is worth looking at closely. The plaster is burnished — rubbed smooth with a stone while still damp — so it has a faint sheen rather than a chalky finish, and the painted lines sit slightly into it rather than on top. Cattle dung is mixed into the plaster, which binds it and makes it more water-resistant. It does not smell once dry.

None of this is ancient in the sense of surviving. Rain takes the surface off every year, so every compound you see has been repainted within the last season or two. The tradition is old; the object in front of you is new. People who arrive expecting weathered antiquity are looking for the wrong thing.

How the painting is done

The work is done by hand, by women, after the rains stop and before the harvest festivities — the annual cycle of repair that keeps an earth building standing. It starts with the wall rather than the paint.

Damaged plaster is cut back and replaced with fresh mud mixed with dung and sometimes with straw, then smoothed and burnished with a stone. The pigments come from the ground: white from a pale clay, red and orange ochres from local laterite, black from charcoal or from a dark mud, sometimes fixed with a wash made from boiled locust bean pods, which darkens and hardens the surface as it dries.

Brushes are improvised — chicken feathers, frayed sticks, a rag, a hand. The linework is freehand and unmeasured, which is obvious when you look at a band closely and see the rhythm shift as the painter moved along the wall. Older women lead and younger ones learn on the less visible surfaces, which is how the tradition transmits.

A compound is a group effort, done over days, with the household's women working together. That collective quality is part of why the practice survives: it is a social event tied to the agricultural year, not a craft performed for sale. The moment it becomes purely commercial it changes, which is a tension the village has had to manage as visitors arrive.

What the patterns mean

The motifs are a vocabulary rather than decoration, and most of them refer to objects, animals and proverbs from daily life in the village. A guide who grew up in the compound will name them as you walk.

Recurring ones include the calabash net, the pattern of the woven sling used to carry a gourd; the broken calabash, referring to a proverb about repair and reconciliation; rows of triangles that stand for the zigzag of a python's movement or for the teeth of a comb; the cowrie, standing for wealth; and representations of the crocodile, the lizard and the cow. Some compounds carry motifs specific to the family that lives there.

The comparison most visitors find useful is with cloth. The adinkra symbols of the Ashanti and the named patterns of kente work the same way — a fixed set of motifs, each carrying a meaning, arranged by the maker into a statement. Sirigu's walls do in earth what a loom does in thread.

Do not over-read it. Not every band is a message, and some of what you see is a painter using a pattern because it looks right in that space. Ask, and you will usually be told honestly which is which. Our guide to kente and Ghanaian textiles covers the southern equivalent in detail.

Visiting through the women's organisation

Visits to Sirigu are coordinated by the Sirigu Women's Organisation of Pottery and Art, known locally as SWOPA, and arranging your visit through them is both the practical way in and the right one. They run guided walks to painted compounds, a craft centre, pottery and painting workshops, and guest accommodation in the village.

The reason this matters is that the compounds are private homes. Turning up and wandering between them photographing people's walls is intrusive in a way that would be obvious anywhere else, and it is the thing that most annoys the village. Going through the organisation means the household has agreed, the guide is someone the family knows, and the money reaches the community rather than one enterprising individual at the roadside.

Fees for guiding, workshops and accommodation are set by the organisation and reviewed from time to time, so ask them directly rather than budgeting from a figure you found online. They can be reached by telephone, and contact details are held by the Ghana Tourism Authority's regional office in Bolgatanga if you cannot find a current number.

The workshops are the part people underestimate. Sitting down to paint a section of wall or to build a pot by hand under instruction takes an hour or two, produces something usually embarrassing, and teaches you more about the skill involved than any amount of looking. Children in particular get far more out of the visit this way.

These are houses with families in them. Everything about how you visit follows from that.

Staying the night in the village

Stay in Sirigu if your schedule allows even one night, because the village at either end of the day is completely different from the village at midday. The guest accommodation attached to the craft centre is built in the local idiom and is honest about being basic.

Expect a simple room, a mosquito net, a bucket for washing, a fan when there is power, and food cooked to order rather than chosen from a menu. Power cuts are ordinary. Sleeping outside on a platform or roof is often possible and, in the hot months, is far more comfortable than a room.

What you get in return is the hour before sunset, when the light goes long and low across the compound walls and the painted bands suddenly read as three-dimensional; goats being brought in; the sound of pounding from several courtyards at once; and children who are curious about you rather than working you. A day trip from Bolgatanga arrives at eleven and leaves at two, in flat light, and misses all of it.

Book ahead where you can, particularly between December and February when the north is at its busiest and the village has few rooms. If you cannot reach anyone by phone, Bolgatanga has hotels and the drive out is under an hour.

The mud cathedral at Navrongo

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows in Navrongo is a Catholic church built in the early twentieth century from mud and earth in the local building tradition, and the interior walls carry traditional Upper East motifs painted by women from Sirigu. It is the most unusual church building in Ghana and the reason to make the thirty-kilometre trip west from Bolgatanga.

The story is about a compromise. Missionaries arriving in this part of the country built with what was available and what local builders knew how to make, which meant thick earth walls rather than stone. Later, when the interior was decorated, the designs used were the ones the region's women already painted on their own compounds, applied to the pillars and walls of a Catholic church.

Walking in, the effect is disorienting in a good way. The proportions are church proportions — nave, columns, altar — and the surfaces are Sirigu surfaces, bands of triangle and diamond running up the pillars in earth colours. The interior is cool and dim, which is welcome after the walk from the car.

It is an active parish church, so times when you can look round depend on services, and a weekday morning is usually straightforward. Ask at the parish office rather than walking in during mass. There is a small museum in the compound relating to the mission's history in the region. Confirm current visiting arrangements with the parish directly, as they change.

Navrongo itself

Navrongo is a quiet administrative and school town about 30 kilometres west of Bolgatanga and 10 or so south of the Burkina Faso border at Paga, and it holds more than the cathedral if you give it a couple of hours. It has a long association with education in northern Ghana and a university campus, which gives the place a different feel from the market towns around it.

The town market runs on the traditional cycle rather than daily, with a much larger gathering on the main market day, and asking which day that is before you plan is worth doing. Smocks, pottery, guinea fowl, shea butter and the enamel bowls that every northern household uses fill the stalls.

Kassena is the local language and the Kassena-Nankana communities extend across the border into Burkina Faso, where the painted compound tradition also continues — Tiébélé, on the Burkinabè side, is the best-known example. The border here is a line on a map through one cultural area, and that is visible in the architecture on both sides of it.

As a base, Navrongo has a few modest guesthouses, and most travellers prefer Bolgatanga for a wider choice and better food. Fuel and an ATM are available in Navrongo, but draw cash in Bolgatanga if you have the chance rather than depending on a single machine.

Earth building across the north

Sirigu and Navrongo are two expressions of one building tradition that runs across the whole savannah belt, and seeing them alongside the region's other earth buildings makes each of them clearer. The common thread is mud construction maintained by annual re-plastering.

The Sudano-Sahelian style — buttressed walls, projecting timbers, conical pinnacles — appears at the Larabanga mosque near Mole, at the Wa Naa's Palace in the Upper West, and at a series of ancient mosques in the Savannah Region such as Nakore, Maluwe and Bole. Those buildings belong to a tradition that runs north through Burkina Faso to Mali rather than south to the coast.

Sirigu's compounds are a different branch of the same thinking: domestic rather than monumental, round rooms linked by walls into a defensible enclosure, granaries on plinths, a single controlled entrance. The painting is the decorative layer over a structure designed for heat, storage and security.

All of it needs constant maintenance, which is the fragility of the form. When a family can afford cement blocks and a metal roof, they often build in cement, because it does not need re-plastering every year and it signals having done well. That is a perfectly reasonable choice and it is also why painted compounds are becoming less common. Our guide to northern Ghana traces the same architecture across the other northern regions.

Visiting respectfully, in practice

The rules here are simple and mostly come down to treating a compound as somebody's house. Ask before you photograph anything, including walls, and accept a refusal without negotiating or offering more money.

Greet properly before you ask for anything. In this part of the country a greeting is not a formality — you say good morning, you ask how the household is, you wait for the answer, and only then do you get to the reason you are standing there. Skipping it reads as rudeness in a way that is invisible to most visitors.

Dress modestly. Shoulders and knees covered is the standard, for men as well as women, and it costs you nothing. Remove sunglasses when you are speaking to an older person. Use your right hand for giving and receiving.

On money: pay the community arrangement rather than handing cash to individuals, which is what the organisation exists to manage. Children will ask for money, sweets and pens, and giving directly encourages a habit that damages school attendance. If you want to contribute, give through the organisation or the school. Buying pottery and painted work at the craft centre is the cleanest transaction of all — you get something made here and the money goes where it should.

Paga and the border, half an hour on

Paga sits on the Burkina Faso border about ten kilometres north of Navrongo and holds two very different things: sacred crocodile ponds where the animals are traditionally never harmed, and Pikworo Slave Camp, one of the most affecting historical sites in Ghana.

At the ponds the arrangement surprises people. Crocodiles are regarded as embodying ancestral spirits, guides call them out of the water, and visitors are commonly invited to sit behind one for a photograph. These are wild animals in a pond, not a managed attraction with safety systems, so follow the guide exactly or decline. Declining is entirely reasonable and nobody will mind.

Pikworo, a few kilometres away at Nania, is the reason to come even if you skip the crocodiles. It was a holding and transit point on the route that ran south towards the coastal forts. What survives is rock: bowls worn into granite where captives ate, a punishment rock, a lookout point, a cemetery. There is no building and no display, and the emptiness does the work. A local guide walks you round in under an hour.

Seeing Pikworo and then, days later, standing in the dungeons at Cape Coast joins two ends of the same route in a way neither site manages alone. Our guide to Paga and the crocodile ponds covers both sites and the border crossing in more detail.

Building a two-day Upper East loop

Sirigu, Navrongo and Paga sit close enough together to make a clean two-day loop out of Bolgatanga, and that is the shape most people should aim for. Trying to do all three in one day from Tamale is roughly seven hours of driving for four hours of sightseeing.

Day one runs Bolgatanga to Sirigu in the morning, with the compound walk and a pottery or painting workshop, lunch in the village, and the afternoon either staying in Sirigu or continuing to the Tongo Hills south-east of Bolgatanga, where the granite landscape and the Tengzug shrine make an entirely different kind of visit. Sleep in Sirigu if you can.

Day two goes west to Navrongo for the cathedral in the morning light, then north to Paga for Pikworo and the ponds, and back to Bolgatanga in the evening. That leaves you positioned to run south to Tamale the following day, or to carry on west towards Wa.

Getting here means Tamale first — fly from Accra in about an hour, or drive, which is the better part of a day and a half with an overnight. Bolgatanga is roughly three hours north of Tamale on reasonable road. A hired vehicle with a driver is the practical answer, because tro-tros run between towns but not out to Sirigu's compounds or to Pikworo on any schedule you can use.

How we put an Upper East visit together

Ghana Travel & Tour runs the Upper East as part of a private northern journey, with an air-conditioned vehicle, a licensed guide and entry charges included. For Sirigu that means contacting the women's organisation ahead of time so the compound visit and any workshop are arranged with the households rather than sprung on them, and so the guesthouse is expecting you.

You can see how the northern routes are built on our tours page. Quotes are itemised, so the flights, the vehicle, the nights and the local guiding each show as separate lines, and one named trip manager handles the booking from start to finish.

Questions people ask