• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

NOW OPEN Heroes: Principles of African Greatness

National Museum of African Art - Smithsonian Institution

  • Home
  • Exhibitions
    • Current Exhibitions
    • Upcoming Exhibitions
    • Past Exhibitions
  • Learn
    • In the Museum
    • In the Classroom
    • Online Resources
    • Student Gallery
  • Collection
    • Browse the Collection
    • Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives
    • Warren M. Robbins Library
    • Conservation
  • Support Us
    • Membership
    • 2019 African Art Awards
    • Women’s Initiative at the National Museum of African Art
    • Johnnetta Betsch Cole Fund for the Future
    • Corporate Engagement
  • Public Programs
  • About Us
    • Accessibility and Security
    • Advisory Board
    • Augustus Casely-Hayford
    • Further Engagement
    • Museum Store
    • Professional Development
    • Rights and Reproductions
    • Contact Us
  • Host Your Event
  • Museum News
  • Press Room
    • Press Release Archive

Iron’s Material Transformation

Iron’s Material Transformation | Africa’s Iron Origins | Sustenance from the Anvil | Iron’s Empowering Roles | Blades of Power and Prestige | Blades of Value | Sounding Forms | Cosmic Iron | Videos | Home

Striking Iron: The Art of African BlacksmithsAfrican mastery of the technical processes of smelting and forging forever changed human civilizations and ushered in new cultural developments. Iron ore is one of the African continent’s most plentiful natural resources, but one of the most difficult to process into usable metal.

    For blacksmiths’ purposes,

  • workable iron must be extracted from iron-rich deposits through a refining process known as smelting. This removes impurities from iron ore by applying intense heat (2100°–2300° Fahrenheit) to separate unwanted mineral contaminants from the iron bound in the rock.
  • when heated to a semimolten state in a furnace, iron particles coalesce to form a spongelike and malleable mass called a “bloom.” Iron can then be worked by direct forging, which requires heating it to white-hot temperatures so that it can be shaped by the force of a blacksmith’s hammer and manipulated further with punches, chisels, and other tools.

“Birthing” blooms out of iron ore and objects out of blooms is a “procreative” metaphor used by many African peoples to describe these two transformative processes. Ironworking in Africa is a male-dominated technology that also must involve elements of female power to succeed.

By the 1920s, the majority of indigenous furnaces across Africa had ceased their output of bloomery iron, and iron production was eventually outlawed by all colonial regimes in favor of Western equivalents.

Chokwe or Lunda artist
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Ceremonial axe
Early 20th century
Wood, iron, copper
Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, 71.1948.15.29
Expertise visualized. Only a blacksmith with many years of experience and exceptional metal- and woodworking skills could create such a magnificent symbol of authority. In this single work, the artist employed chiseling, punching, inlaying, chasing, engraving, scoring, raising, wrapping, stamping, and embossing, among other techniques. Such a blade added to a blacksmith’s honor and influence in the community, with both owner and artist distinguished every time it was displayed in public.
Unidentified Kuba artist
Unidentified Kuba artist
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Figure
17th(?)
Iron, red pigment
Collection of the MAS, Antwerp, Belgium, AE. 0773
Royal work. A masterpiece once kept in the Kuba treasury, this male figure is among the artworks attributed by oral traditions to the renowned blacksmith named Myeel. Remembered for his uncommon skills in forging sculptures and combining iron with copper and other metals, he is believed to have resided at the Kuba royal court in the 17th century. The figure’s most distinctive and prominent features are its hands, each with separate fingers and thumbs meticulously forge welded onto sturdy palms.
Smelter
A blacksmith/smelter holds a raw, horseshoe-shaped iron bloom produced from local ore in the earthen furnace behind him.
Banjeli, German Togoland, 1914
Still from the film Im Deutschen Sudan (1914) by Hans Schomburgk

Forging | The Blacksmith’s Tools

Exceptional expertise. Blacksmiths in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, require four basic tools and a hearth for a fire. With hammers, anvils, tongs, and bellows, they can safely model iron like clay at near molten temperatures.

Tongs and hammers are hand tools designed in a practical range of shapes, weights, and sizes to extend a smith’s reach and multiply his efforts in coaxing iron into shape. He positions his anvil, made of stone or iron, on the ground near the center of his workshop. Sitting within arm’s reach of the anvil, the smith is a quarter turn from his toolkit in one direction and a quarter turn within reach of the forge in the other. The charcoal-fueled fire, well insulated in the floor, is kept alight with forced air vigorously pumped through bellows by a helper.

The site of awe-inspiring technologies still in practice across the continent, the forge itself and the tools and methodologies employed there are characterized by enormous regional diversity.

Smelting | From Bloom to Bar

Earthen smelting furnaces
Earthen smelting furnaces in the Seno plain below Segue, Burkina Faso, 1957
In Hélène Leloup, Dogon Statuary (Strasbourg: Daniele Amez, 1994)
Transformational technology. African smelters and smiths developed a range of efficient techniques to reach and sustain the staggeringly high temperatures necessary to ensure delivery of high-quality iron blooms. Among their ingenious designs are earthen furnaces constructed to feed the fire by natural draft, creating a chimney effect so that the rush of air from bottom to top intensified interior temperatures. Other delivery systems required bellows fashioned from leather, clay, or wood.

Critical to achieving sufficient smelting temperatures was the selection of slow-growing tree species that provided dense wood for the distillation of long-burning charcoal, but this practice resulted in gradual deforestation. Landscapes with increased sight lines were not easy to defend against conquest by invading armies, and strategic control over iron and resources figured mightily in the political organization of early African communities.

Footer

Sign up for our Newsletter

Follow Us

  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

Mission Statement

To inspire conversations about the beauty, power, and diversity of African arts and cultures worldwide.

Location, Hours, and Admission

950 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20560
202.633.4600
202.357.4879 (fax)
Email
10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily except December 25. Admission is FREE!

Pages

  • Home
  • Exhibitions
  • Learn
  • Collection
  • Support Us
  • Public Programs
  • About the Museum
  • Host Your Event
  • Museum News
  • Press Room

Copyright © 2019 Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Privacy | Copyright | 202.633.4600 | africa.si.edu

stickers

You are now a Member of the National Museum of African Art at the FREE level. Thank you for supporting what we do! You can increase your giving at any point to gain increased access to the museum. Email NMAfAMembership@si.edu with any questions. Thank you!