African Pottery Forming and Firing

The speaker, a Peace Corps Volunteer and art historian, shares a four-decade fascination with African pottery, initially sparked in Burkina Faso. African potters demonstrate immense skill, creating a vast array of shapes, sizes, textures, patterns, and colors of pottery for various uses, from storing grain to religious celebrations. They possess an innate understanding of clay's plastic quality.

Potters across Africa are skilled at locating good, uniform clay veins. The process of collecting clay, sometimes by children, requires care to avoid collapses. The collected clay is dried, allowed to soak (slaking), broken into small chunks, pounded into powder, and sifted. Old broken pot shards are crushed to produce grog, which is added to the clay to prevent shrinkage during firing. The clay and grog are then kneaded with water, often by foot, to create a workable clay body.

The simplest technique involves using an old jar as a mold. Mrs. Konate demonstrates this by forming a flat pancake of clay, slapping it over the mold, and using a beater to thin and spread it. She then adds a coil for the base, shaping it with her fingers. After careful trimming, the new pot is set aside to dry briefly before being removed from the mold to avoid cracking.

This innovative technique uses a shallow depression in the floor to form fully spherical jars. The potter places a thick round mass of clay in the mold and uses a mallet to pound and spread it, rotating the clay to build a larger sphere. Coils are added as needed to extend the form, resulting in thin, light, and strong spherical jars. The rim is then formed and smoothed with a wet cloth.

African pottery is typically low-fired earthenware, ideal for cooking over an open flame without shattering, demonstrating 'appropriate technology' that suits their needs without consuming precious resources. The video showcases the infinite variations in shapes, colors, and decorations across different African cultures, including examples from the Nyakusa, Zande, Baule, Zulu, Tutsi, Nyanja, Bamileke, Mambila, Lobi, Nupe, Ewe, and Idoma people, highlighting unique designs, textures, and figurative elements.

The coiling technique is ubiquitous in West Africa. Mrs. Konate demonstrates this by scraping the edge of a semi-formed pot, applying a thick sausage of clay from the inside, and twisting it to consolidate the new material with the existing walls. Potters use coils to build the height of jars, often walking around larger pots or holding smaller ones as they add coils and scrape the walls to thin and spread them. The rim is then shaped and decorated.

Maria Kafando from Burkina Faso demonstrates a unique technique. She forms several thick clay hemispheres, places a spherical mold inside each, and uses a mallet to spread the clay almost completely over the mold. She then makes four incisions, removes the mold, folds the edges to repair the tears, and inserts a smaller mold. Using an 'anvil' inside and a mallet outside, she thins the clay while maintaining a symmetrical, spherical shape. She then adds and shapes the rim, all while holding the pot in her lap. After drying, blemishes are smoothed with baobab seeds.

Awa Diabite, a Jelly artisan from Burkina Faso, works with a large mass of clay on a shallow dish. She forms a cavity with her fist and then uses her hands to pull the soft, wet clay upward, thinning it and increasing the jar's height while rotating it. She adds fresh coils as needed to continue building the form. She uses a raffia midrib to scrape away excess clay, thinning the rim and body, and applies a rough texture with a corncob-roulette.

Asante potters in Ghana use a similar technique but form the top half of the pot completely before turning it upside down to finish the bottom. The video captures the initial stages of forming the upper half. African potters exclusively use open firing, creating fires on the ground or in shallow depressions, sometimes with low circular walls. They use readily available fuels like dried manure, grass, bark, or raffia palms.

Women in the community work together to stack pottery for firing, often identifying their own pieces. The fuel is lit and in some areas, water is used to control the burn. Once the fuel reduces to red-hot ash, the pottery bakes until glowing red. While still hot, pots are dipped in a vegetable soup (e.g., boiled Acacia seed pods), a process similar to raku, which drives carbon into the clay, turning it from red to dark brown. This enhances waterproofness and suitability for cooking. The video concludes by emphasizing that African pottery, as a form of heavily used art, challenges Western definitions of art, suggesting a deeper understanding of art as an expression of cultural ideas.