Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach. Nothing more. The woman scraped with the shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine sand of the soil, and, when an active young girl had filled the calabash with water for her, she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it gradually assumed the shape of a rough but already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted a little touching up with the instruments before mentioned. I looked out with the closest attention for any indication of the use of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The embryo pot stood firmly in its little depression, and the woman walked round it in a stooping posture, whether she was removing small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They became much softer and more palatable than they had previously been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel. This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man, roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children, flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is, characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and (sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot, put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it. My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by, most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire, from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel, which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished, but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN BARK
