Istwa Nou

The comparative evidence on who makes pots in Africa is close to uniform. Except in a few places where men took over commercial production in recent centuries, women have long been the potters, and they have held the knowledge, the practices and the rituals that go with the craft. In the southern savanna belt, potters were specialists who described their work as a calling, and senior potters who had borne children carried out observances at the clay deposits themselves, asserting authority over the whole business of manufacture. Read backwards, that pattern points to women as the inventors of both early African ceramic traditions, the tinkerers who worked out what fire does to clay. This matters well beyond Africa. The first sophisticated pyrotechnology on the continent was almost certainly women's work, and the line of invention it opens runs all the way to modern materials science. The history of technology as it is usually taught is a history of men and machines, and it starts in the wrong place.

The fourth invention of ceramic technology also happened in Africa. During the ninth and eighth millennia BCE, people living three thousand kilometres east of Mali, in the southern half of the eastern Sahara, began making pots of their own. On present evidence this owes nothing to the West African centre. It appears everywhere in country whose inhabitants have spoken Nilo-Saharan languages for thousands of years, and its decorative motifs are arranged differently from those on the older western wares. The spread runs east to west, into the lands between modern Sudan and Mali, which is the wrong direction for a West African origin. So Africans invented a foundational technology twice, independently, in two separate language communities. The Malian potters were working at least three millennia before anyone in the Middle East, and four millennia before the technique started moving from the Middle East into eastern Europe. Both African inventions predate the civilisations most curricula still treat as the beginning of everything.