Articles & Reviews

The Pottery of Northern Ghana continued

Anna Craven, ethnographer/independent researcher (Africa, SW Pacific)
annacraven@totalise.co.uk

Pots as furniture

To see the many uses to which pots are put, it is essential to enter the various rooms in a compound. The term ‘compound’ itself implies that households are not made up of single families, but are a complex mix of relations with interconnected groups of rooms belonging most commonly to a man, his brothers, their wives and children, and possibly widows (more common than widowers), as in a Dagaaba compound of potters in the village of Bogda north of Bole, NR. The compound had been established by the brothers’ father, now dead; the head of the compound is the senior brother. Each wife has her own sleeping room, kitchen and bathing area. These lead out from an entrance hall in which are kept bicycles, large mud grain stores, bits and pieces; such a large covered space might also have a mound of dry clay for use during the wet season when the clay source is flooded, as in Baale, west of Bole (a Dagaaba-Birifor compound of potters). (Fig.32b)

A woman’s first room (she might have more than two for herself and her younger children), is the kitchen. This has a hearth for cooking, with, in Bogda and Baale, two pottery hearthstands. The third ‘prop’ can be the wall, a stone, or other object such as a bicycle fork leaning against the wall. (Fig.41) On one side of the doorway is a row of three beautiful decorated black water storage pots or coolers sitting in hollows on a cemented earth base. Unless they have been broken and replaced, these will possibly date from the time of marriage, when a girl is expected to bring with her into the home a set of pots, for water and storage. In the Dagomba area of central Northern Region it was explained by traders in Tamale market that the very large storage pots they were selling, made to the northwest by the Builsa people, were bought by a bride’s mother with money provided by the groom, to set up the household on marriage. It was expected a woman would be provided with at least two, but preferably more: two or one would imply that the couple were extremely poor.⁵ Such storage pots can be used for water, for brewing or storing pito (beer), or storing grain. (Fig.42)

An impressive collection of pots of different sizes can be amassed and used for general storage like a chest of drawers in the European world. They can contain all a person’s possessions: clothes, plastic containers, other smaller pots, odds and ends. If the wife is a potter, she may well have made most of these herself. After the first room with the water pots and hearth, the second inner room contains towers of these storage pots grouped into different sizes, standing on old pots of a similar size partially buried in a cemented clay shelf (or on movable clay potstands as in the Konkomba and Dagomba areas). (Fig.43a) More water storage pots line another wall, and if the occupant is a potter, there may be a mound of unfired pots drying out before being fired. Being kept indoors protects them from drying out too quickly if the weather is hot and dry which makes them more likely to crack during firing, or from drying out too slowly during the rainy season. Rooms can also house musical instruments (drums, xylophone), dried vegetables hanging along with tools in the rafters, and other valuable possessions. (Fig.43b)

Uses for old pots

Apart from potsherds being ground up to form grog, they can be used to form a mosaic laid into a compound floor (e.g. Kimoatek, Konkomba village near Saboba, NR). Sizeable segments are used to hold potting tools, animal feeds, for covering water jars and holes in wall bottoms. They provide rough turntables for pot construction. Likewise a wide pot mouth broken off the main body provides a frame for modelling a base-less pot; the base is added later to the upturned pot once it has dried out slightly and become firm enough to turn upside down.

Where larger quantities of pots are fired in a shallow dip in the ground, old pots are sometimes used to surround and support the pieces of timber on the outside e.g. Sankana, Upper West (Dagaaba). Some pots that break during firing are left at the firing site: Jekariyili’s (Dagomba) wide communal site is littered with cracked water pots. Large cracked pots that still have storage capacity, or may merely be holed, are used for storing cow-dung for replastering buildings, for ash, grog, clay, for use as door-stops, nesting sites for hens, and for drying vegetables.

Innovators: a case study of Afia Pariba, and SWOPA

An example of a potter introducing innovations to her work is Afia Pariba of Charia, not far from Wa (UWR), who is a single woman in her mid fifties. Along with her twin sister Agnes, when they were about ten years old and in Class Four at school, Afia learnt potting from their mother Puosaah Tizaala, now retired as she has Parkinson’s disease. (Fig.44)

Charia, a Dagaare-speaking community, is well known as a potting centre: Afia is one of over twenty-five women who pot in the scattered compounds. The claypit lies in a very wet area about half a kilometre away, a ten minute walk, and is a shared source of fine clay. (Fig.32a) The clay is valued for having no stones to be removed during preparation, and is used to make smaller pots in contrast to the clay in Loho, near Kaleo about ten kilometres north of Wa, where the clay is coarse and used for larger pito (beer) and water storage pots. Similarly Dagaaba villages such as Puffien and Gwalior around the market town of Nandom further north are also known for their specialised production of huge pito-brewing pots.

Charia potters put a small amount of money in a lidded pot kept at the claypit whenever they go to collect clay, and occasionally a fowl is sacrificed. In Jekariyili, a Dagomba village close to Tamale, another centre of potting, fowls are sacrificed when it is noticed the quality of the clay dug out is deteriorating. When the claypit in Charia is waterlogged, Afia uses her store of dry clay kept in her compound: this is a common practice which enables potters to pot throughout the year, mounds of clay being kept in an outer room of the compound, or protected with plastic sheets in the open.

The women formed a potters‘ cooperative which meets at Afia’s compound, Matan Tudu, ‘Women of the North’ started in 2002. It has support from the Agricultural Development Bank but they are still waiting for stalls to be built where they can sell their pots. Pots are sold to individuals from home, some pots on commission, some to traders who buy in Charia and truck the wares to Wa about six kilometres away where there is a 6-day market, or the women take their own pots to the market. (Fig.45)

Afia, who teaches two local girls, is remarkable in that she has a deformed wrist on her right arm so that her hand faces backwards, but this does not hamper her skill in any way. She has displayed her work at agricultural shows in Bolgatanga, which has enabled her to see pots from other cultural styles. She was recruited in 2001 to teach on a part time basis at a government secondary vocational school, but for remuneration was expected to take a third from sales of pots made by the children while two thirds went to the school. This was not enough as she is responsible for supporting her mother and aunts, and for this reason she would have found it difficult to leave home. Her second income is from brewing pito. She also makes various ritual pots, for instance ‘twin’ pots (duogu kpara) like the ones their mother had made on her and her sister’s birth. These pots stay in their mother’s room. The pot is two conjoined bodies with separate lidded mouths. (Fig.46) Such pots, commissioned on the birth are the same for boy or girl twins. In a Nchumru example from Salaga (Northern Region), the two pots are separate. The 1964 collection includes a single twin undecorated round pot made by a Kusasi man in Zebilla, the only form of pot in which he specialised.

A different form of twin ‘pot’, seen in Kajokpere (Isala), is built inside an inner room, of unfired mud mixed with dung, leaning against the wall, similar to mud grain-stores but smaller. The lids on the separate mouths are shaped like breasts; the contents were not visible. According to a 1964 Kusasi informant in Zebilla, millet from the most recent crop would be stored in a twins’ (single) earth pot, and fowls sacrificed.

Afia also knows how to make anti-thief pots (nanyige kuunyoo ) which have serrated lids cut out of the top. The lid is made with an uneven edge which fits into the pot mouth in only one position, difficult to find in haste by anyone wanting to conceal their pilfering. Afia says they are not made now (I collected several in 1964 from different areas but did not record their manufacture) as potters do not have the skill and the general public has forgotten their significance. Afia did have one which we purchased, but sadly that was the only one from the whole of the north: elsewhere the elderly knew about them but said they were no longer made and were unable to produce any old examples. (Fig.47a and 47b) ⁶

Afia is not affected by the taboo against making pots with holes before a woman is past the menopause or widowed. The making of such special pots is seen as a threat to the husband, or to future pregnancies. In Afia’s case, born in 1952, she is unmarried with no children, so can make any kind of pot commissioned. This perhaps has encouraged her innovative creativity, along with suggestions from the Cooperative, which advises on quality control. The regular visits of a busload of foreign tourists in June has encouraged her to take risks and time making ‘European’ utility objects: flower vases, flowerpots, ashtrays, kettles, teapots, mugs, and candlesticks. They are decorated with a red dye made from a plant of the Ficus family soaked in water, and some non-traditional incised designs. Afia is also innovative in her use of tools which include, in addition to the standard building tools, anything found useful for decoration of surfaces: coins, a battery, a disc with a filigree coat of arms, a snail shell, all used for impressions. (Fig.48, Fig.49)

We asked Afia about handles on clay pots. She felt they were an idea taken from metal pots (‘cauldron’ shaped, commonly sold in most markets) as the pointed profile is similar. However, old pots with handles (not pointed) we recorded in other areas of a form which probably predate metal cooking pots. The handles are to facilitate the moving of hot cooking pots, but on pots which are not for cooking they are of a different form, e.g. for steadying a large pot on the head.

A very different example of innovation is the Sirigu Women’s Organisation for Pottery and Art (SWOPA www.swopa.org ) started by Melanie Kasise, now in her seventies, whose mother Akanvole was a leading potter in the community, a position she retains though over ninety. Examples of her work are kept to inspire younger members of the cooperative which was formed in 1997 and has over a hundred members from surrounding villages. It was not explained whether the potters worked on commission or were paid by the organisation. Now it has a centre which they are still developing, consisting of a gallery, offices, store and guesthouse within a large compound, a kilometre outside the small town of Sirigu. (Fig.50) It is a point of call for tourists to the Upper East Region who have their own transport or can afford taxis: public transport is erratic and can take an hour to reach Sirigu from Bolgatanga, the nearest large town. Visitors to the centre are offered craft classes and homestays, and villagers are encouraged to keep their compounds decorated for the tours conducted around the area. The centre is a source for contemporary art exhibitions in Accra, for example; items sell well.

Pots on sale are based on traditional forms but many have been elaborated since members have been encouraged to be creative and embellish their routine designs. The organisation has encouraged the making of kemaninga, a tower of five storage pots tied together with kenaf string traditionally associated with marriage, all with slightly different storage functions. They were not seen for sale in Sirigu market in 2007, though their local significance is still valued and it is possible to find old ones in villages, sometimes incomplete. They would more likely to be made in the village on commission, as with ritual pots. (Fig.51) At SWOPA, prices for pots, ceramic smoking pipes, paintings (some based on traditional wall decoration) and basketry are high, but the centre’s existence does not seem to have impacted on the standard functional household ware on sale in the market at, for local people, affordable prices. It does, however, help to preserve the skills needed to produce more elaborate pots. (Fig.52) And in acknowledgement of the need to innovate to assist potters expand their market, SWOPA plans to build a kiln.

The decline in pottery production

In comparison with 1964 and 1970s, there were in 2007 noticeably fewer pots on sale in all markets visited (though it was not the dry season), and fewer varieties of pots. Potting has died out in certain areas for a range of possible reasons: formal education of girls and their lack of interest in potting; the movement away of daughters on marriage; the ageing and death of individual potters, both women and men, who have no relatives in the extended family compound to continue the skills; lack of transport to distant markets; the source of clay deteriorating, becoming harder to extract, or running out altogether⁶. Komi, an elderly Vagala woman in Soma east of Tuna, a distant village where transport to the nearest market was a problem, was unable to continue when she became deaf as she found it difficult to communicate with people. She was the last potter in the village and had not trained anyone. Potters getting too old to walk has meant that potting is dying out, or has already died out, in more isolated areas (e.g. the Isala village of Kajokpere, northeast of Wa), where a potter is not part of an extended household of related women potters.

The potting profession is not one that brings in great wealth, whether potters are women or men. But the small income from potting gives a certain financial independence to women, who are otherwise farmers along with their husbands. None of the potters interviewed said they were married to blacksmiths as in some parts of West Africa.

The cash is used by the potter to help with the cost of food for the family, for clothes, and sometimes to pay school fees if they have children. Some potters supplement their income by brewing pito. If potting skills were recognised nationally and internationally, and the most expert potters employed to teach and to exhibit, a knock-on effect might mean that potters in general would be encouraged to demand more, and villagers would be unable to pay the higher prices.

What has changed in the forty years is the decrease in production of the more ornamental (though still functional) pots, which in the 1960s and ’70s had been encouraged by the various exhibitions of women’s handcraft and agricultural shows, in Tamale (NR) and Bolgatanga (UER) for example. In 1964 several complex creations, though still following ‘traditional’ distinctive local forms and decoration, I bought for the Department of Archaeology, and are celebrations of potters’ skills. It is possible that some older senior women potters are still able to build such pots if commissioned, but the younger generation is not aware of the forms and significance of, for example, pots that were designed to deter thieves or pilferers.⁷ (Fig.53)

Although it was not explicitly stated by any informant, it was suggested that the influences of Christianity and Islam might have had a part to play in the demise of potting generally, or of certain products, or when potters convert. There are many more Moslems in the north in 2007 than there were in 1964. Ritual pots have to be commissioned from the potters. Smoking pipes have almost disappeared because it is easier to buy cigarettes. SWOPA encourages their manufacture, but we did not find any pipes on sale in the markets.

The significant comparison and one that warrants further more detailed research, is that between areas where single potters represent the last of their generation and skills, and areas where there are thriving dynamic compounds of several related women potters. Both exist where there is a market for basic pots and a smaller limited individual demand for various ritual pots on commission. (Fig.54)

It would be a good thing to bring potters from all over the country to demonstrate and talk about their work, to centres such as the Art Department at the university in Kumasi, the Legon Department of Archaeology which has a museum and the pottery collection, and the National Museum in Accra which houses Barbara Priddy’s collection. Such dedicated skills need applauding, and individual leading potters deserve to be recognised.

Questionnaire

For the purposes of collaboration (the alternative would have been for me to conduct all interviews through a local interpreter), I designed an extensive questionnaire for interviews with individual potters covering personal history, techniques, sources of materials, range of pots made, local terminology, marketing, and teaching, administered by my graduate assistant Daniel Torbi. In the questionnaire I omitted the processing of clay before use, but it is shown in my videos and photographs. This illustrates one of the disadvantages of using a questionnaire, as although questions are standardised, it does not encourage further exploration of information as issues emerge, especially when time is limited.

Vernacular terms

For the most part these have not been given here, as there are many language groups in the three northern regions, and even within one broad language group there are dialectical differences, on top of which the orthography differs. Words can also be heard and written down differently by each researcher.

Acknowledgements
The research in September and October 2007 was made possible by a Small Research Grant from the British Academy, for which I am grateful. That I was fortunate in having two significant academics as referees I am sure played no small part in my being awarded a grant, and I wish to thank Professor John Picton, SOAS Emeritus Professor of African Art, and Professor Daniel Miller, UCL Professor of Anthropology.

The project is a collaboration with the University of Ghana Department of Archaeology and I wish to thank Dr Kodzo Gavua, head of department, and in particular my two graduate assistants, Daniel Torbi and Eugene Akuamoah. Thanks too to our careful and uncomplaining driver, Seth Awetepey, who completed our touring team.

I am hugely grateful to Barbara Priddy for forwarding all her research reports and sharing information and thoughts about the northern Ghana pottery production; I used her Latin identification of certain plants. How we re-established contact after so many years (we were at Cambridge University together and coincided in Northern Nigeria in the late 1960s) was an extraordinary story of chance links. Copies of her reports have been passed on to the Dept. of Archaeology, along with copies of various offprints kindly forwarded by authors and researchers working in the same field.

I wish also to thank Francis Balfour Agurgo, Head of Information of the Forestry Commission’s Resource Management Support Centre, for help with equipment and maps; Aberewa Braimah of Kpembe, my dear elderly friend, who donated two old Gonja pots; Dr Naab-Kakora of the Art Department, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, for offering to analyse our clay samples; and Dr Juliette Tuakli for hospitality.

References

Jane Bandler and Donald Bandler, ‘The Pottery of Ushafa’, African Arts, vol. X, no. 3, April 1977, pp.26-31.

Barley, Nigel, Smashing Pots: Feats of Clay from Africa, London, British Museum Press, 1994.

Barbara E.Frank, ‘Ceramics as testaments of the past’, Chapter 13 in Museums and History in West Africa, eds. Claude Daniel Ardouin and Emmanuel Arinze, Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press (for The West African Museums Programme), and Oxford, James Currey (in association with the International African Institute), 2000.

Berzock, Kathleen Bickford, For Hearth and Altar: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, [New Haven and London, Yale University Press], 2005.

Bognolo, Daniela, Visions of Africa: Lobi, Milan, 5 Continents Editions, 2007.

Fagg, William and John Picton, The Potter’s Art in Africa,  London, Trustees of the British Museum, 1970.  

Frank, Barbara E.,  Mande Potters and Leather-Workers: Art and Heritage in West Africa, Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.

Frank, Barbara E., ‘Marks of Identity: Potters of the Folona (Mali) and Their “Mothers”’, African Arts, Spring 2007.

Gosselain, Olivier P. and Alexandre Livingstone Smith.  ‘The Source: Clay Selection and Processing Practices in Sub-Saharan Africa,’ (unpublished paper? - no further details).  

K. Bickford Berzock and Barbara E. Frank, ‘Ceramic Arts in Africa’, African Arts, Spring 2007.

L.B. Crossland, ‘Pottery from the Begho-B2 Site, Ghana’, African Occasional Papers No.4, chapter IV: ‘Modern Potting Traditions in the Begho Area’, Calgary, University of Calgary Press, 1989, pp.51-82.

Leith-Ross, Sylvia,  Nigerian Pottery, Ibadan University Press, 1970.

Priddy, Barbara, ‘Some Modern Ghanaian Pottery’, Papers Presented to the 4 th Meeting of West African Archaeology: Jos, 1971, pp. 72-81.

Priddy, Barbara, ‘Pottery in Upper Region’, National Museum of Ghana Occasional Papers, nos. 6-8, 1974, pp. 41-52.

Priddy, Barbara, ‘Pottery as ‘Documents’ of Cultural History of the Peoples of the Ghana-Ivory Coast Border Regions, Sankofa, 1, 1975, pp. 74-8.

Smith, A. Livingstone, ‘Processing Clay for Pottery in Northern Cameroon: Social and Technical Requirements’, Archaeometry, vol. 42, I, 2000, pp. 21-42.

Smith, A. Livingstone, ‘Bonfire II. The Return of Pottery Firing Temperatures’, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 28, 2001, pp.991-1003.

Smith, Fred T.  ‘Gurensi Basketry and Pottery’, African Arts , vol.XII, no.1, November 1978, pp. 78-81.

Smith, Fred T.  ‘Earth, Vessels, and Harmony among the Gurensi’, African Arts , vol.22, no.2, 1989, pp.60-65.

Notes

© The copyright of all the images in this article rests with the author unless otherwise stated