Zbigniew Roman Dmochowski. On Polish achievements in West Africa

Abstract

The article shows the figure of the engineer, architect and academic teacher, Zbigniew Roman Dmochowski, with special emphasis on his career in the territory of Nigeria, where he rendered special services in the field of consolidating the traditional West African architecture.

After he graduated from the Warsaw Technical University Z.R. Dmochowski was employed there as an assistant. In September 1939 he was called up and took part in the battles of the Second World War. After the war ended he remained in emigration in Great Britain. From there he moved to the independent Nigeria, where his work consisted in protecting original works of architecture in that country. Next, he returned to Poland where he was employed at the Gdansk Technical University as an academic lecturer. From the Polish coast he went to West Africa several times to document his earlier work.

Owing to the studies he undertook there exists a rich collection of documents, among which several thousand photographs and 1600 drawings should be mentioned. They are supported with a spatial and geodetic catalogue compiled in the terrain. The objects are made immemorial in this way, as in the next years they were destroyed because of the social change occurring in Nigeria. Parallel to the architectural documentation Z. Dmochowski gained for Nigerian museums priceless exhibits connected with material culture of the most inaccessible areas, which survived until his times. Z. Dmochowski donated all his collection and academic achievements to the Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities, where he was employed. In the town of Jos he established a big open-air ethnographic museum of traditional West African architecture, which has protected old buildings erected by Nigerian peoples.