basket;
lid
- Museum number
- Af1991,09.8
- Description
-
Polychrome beer pot lid (imbenge) woven from telephone wire for use as a basket.
- Production date
- 1990 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 6 centimetres
-
Width: 17.80 centimetres
-
Depth: 17.50 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- In traditional, rural Zulu society, labour is strictly divided. Men tend animals, clear lands and cultivate crops and women maintain households and craft traditions of bead-work, basketry and pottery.
Pots are made by building up layers of clay in coils from a circular base in increasing lengths, building up the walls of the vessel until it reaches the desired shape. A small piece of calabash (gourd), a stone or a piece of metal is used to smooth the inside and outside wall of the pot.
Pots are fired in a shallow pit and those intended for cooking or storage are kept in the fire until it is completely extinguished. Pots for eating and drinking undergo a second firing using cakes of dried cow dung. During this stage the fire is red hot after which the pot is covered with the powdered dung producing a black surface. It is then burnished with gooseberry leaves and animal fat using a small flattened stone, imbokode.
The dimples on this pot imitate patterns of scarification on Zulu women's bodies. The cover, imbenge, is of a type traditionally woven from grass. In recent years, Zulu nightwatchmen working in large towns have woven these covers using plastic-coated wire from telephone junction boxes.
R. Levinsohn, Art and craft of southern Africa (Craighall, Delta, 1984)
- Location
- Not on display
- Condition
- good
- Acquisition date
- 1991
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- Af1991,09.8