Peter Hutchison wrote:
> Having found out who made the video I would have been happy to accept what
> it said. I believe I have seen this video from your description, but I
> couldn't have put a name to it, or a source. It could turn out to not be the
> one he is looking for, but I doubt if there is a better one
If you want futher information on the video "Dokwaza: Last of the African Iron
Masters", including ordering information, go to Nic David's web site at
http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~ndavid/index.html and look at the section labelled
"videos"
Other recommended videos on African iron smelting include "The Tree of Iron" by
Peter Schmidt (58 minutes, VHS, colour, sound) distributed by Indiana University
Press (ISBN 0-253-33284-2) which is about Tanzania, and "Inagina: The Last House
of Iron" by Eric Huysecom and Bernard Augustoni (52 minutes, NTSC or VHS, color,
sound - http://archeo.unige.ch/inagina/) which documents smelting by natural
draft among the Dogon of Mali. Both of these were made for TV and have superior
production values to the home-brewed "Dokwaza", but are less informative about
matters metallurgical.
These are lots and lots of old black-and-white 16 mm silent movie clips on
African iron working, some of them very interesting indeed; for a select
annotated listing see Eugenia Herbert and Len Pole, African Iron Working on Film
and Video, Nyame Akuma 31, pp. 47-49 (1989). (Nyame Akuma is the newsletter of
Society for African Archaeology and should be in major university libraries).
Many of the older clips (1914 to 1965) are in the collections of the Institut
fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film in Gottingen, Germany. I suspect that the clip
to which you are referring may be one of these. They have a catalog and are a
lending library.
> I am interested in the dearburisation of the cast iron. Was this a
> traditional process or was it devised for this particular circumstance? I
> cannot remember reading about it anywhere.
It's a long-established process in the Mandara mountains of North Cameroon, but
we don't know how old it may be - our work has been essentially all ethnographic
to this point, and the archaeology of the process remains to be done. Nor was
this the only area of Africa where cast iron was regularly produced in the
furnace as spherical pellets. A few years back I was looking through the
Cameroon collections of the Swiss photographer and ethnographer Rene Gardi in
the Bern Museum when I came across another collection from northern Cote
d'Ivoire. In this was a bag of a couple of kilos of the same iron pellets, which
Gardi's notes identify as having been bought at a local market in the 1960's,
where they were on sale to local blacksmiths. I was permitted to section a few
of these, and sure enough they are grey and white cast iron (sometimes both in
the same drop). How this was processed I don't know.
Dave Killick
|