Iron, Gendered Symbolism

One of the distinguishing features of African economic production is the social construction of iron technology. African iron technology is much more than the application of engineering principles to produce economic wealth and well-being. As important as the final products of the smelt are the nontechnical, symbolic processes that the makers use to obtain their final result—often represented as a newly born child or fetus.

The play of tropes that transform iron production into vibrant human reproduction have long engaged anthropologists and historians of Africa: These include the iron smelting furnace as a metonym for a woman's body—featuring breasts and a human womb; the use of bellows symbolic of testes, and blowpipes symbolic of penises; the apotropaic rituals that protect the furnace from witchcraft and displeased ancestors; the healing rituals that ensure the fertility of the furnace as a reproductive female; the widespread taboos against sexual activity linked to industrial production; and, the taboos pertaining to pregnant women and menstruating women vis-à-vis iron production. All of these cultural attributes bundled together are known as the reproductive paradigm that characterized African iron production in the early-twentieth century. Research, however, shows that this characterization is an incomplete and truncated representation, abbreviating the female reproductive cycle by emphasizing the exclusion of menstruating women and portraying menstruation as a stage of infertility.

The embodiment of industrial production in Africa—as reproduction in a female body—is one of the most profound examples of such transformation found anywhere. These transformations unfold during a series of ritual activities in which the furnace equipment is changed from material substance into living human matter. The rituals of transformation are first unveiled at the beginning of the smelting process when the furnace is infused with attributes linked to female identity and physicality. Many examples can be referenced, but one that best illustrates the first stage of the ritual cycle is the excavation of a pit in the bottom of the furnace, a phenomenon dated to the early first millennium ce and continuing into the twentieth century.

Ritual processes among the Barongo iron smelters living south of Lake Victoria illuminate symbolic meanings tied to this activity. They place medicines into a small pit excavated in the furnace floor. Among these are herbs, leaves, and pieces of trees with potent symbolic properties intended to protect the furnace from witchcraft and from unhappy ancestors. Also included are medicinal devices to cure infertility and to enhance fertility—showing clearly the close linkages with curative rituals normally performed by healers. A red bleeding bark symbolizes menstrual blood. Using their exposed genitals, the head smelter and the ritual specialist push earth on top of the symbolic devices in the pit, a ritual imitating sexual intercourse with the furnace. Additional rituals occur before smelting commences; these include the head smelter and his wife spitting beer on the furnace, employing a nuptial ritual signifying and ensuring mutual fertility.

The deepest insight derived from Barongo practices is a blood sacrifice using the pulsing arterial blood of a goat to saturate the furnace prior to smelting. If it were not for the presence of symbolic menstrual blood in the furnace base, then the blood ritual could be interpreted as simply a consecrating sacrifice. The spilling of ritual menstrual blood and the incorporation of symbolic menstrual blood with fertility symbols unveil a more holistic tropic representation of the entire female reproductive cycle—from cleansing of the womb to readiness for conception, pregnancy, and finally birth. These findings indicate that earlier interpretations of the reproductive paradigm were based on incomplete studies of interwoven industrial and ritual cycles.

The widespread belief in taboos relating to sexual intercourse have many interpretive applications, including: 1) the idea that women who have married in from other patrilines will steal important economic knowledge if not barred from iron production; and 2) the notion that power relations between the genders are manifest by excluding women from industrial production, further reifying separation of economic domains—with females responsible for agricultural production and men economic production. This theory collapses when the unity of agriculture and iron production under the symbolic umbrella of human, female reproduction is understood: Production of iron yields tools for agriculture and, hence, the capacity to reproduce society signifies an intimate weave of reproduction, iron, and agriculture.

Gendered iron production is an ancient concept, going back to the early Iron Age shortly after the introduction of ironworking in Africa. Evidence from Gabon dated about 500 bce shows that early symbolic renderings used intense male symbols, for example, a blow pipe made of clay (representing a phallus) standing upright in a furnace pit and filled with kaolin, a substance widely used to represent semen and purity in east and central Africa. By the early first millennium ce, symbolic representations had shifted to those more complementary to the integrity of the female womb, with fertility a primary concern. By the middle of the second millennium ce, increased population and competition over critical resources introduced a new suite of ritual devices, along with those ensuring female fertility, to defend against the use of sorcery or malicious manipulation of ancestors by spirit mediums employed by competing social groups.

see also Africa: I. History; Marriage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Childs, S. Terry, and David Killick. 1993. "Indigenous African Metallurgy: Nature and Culture." Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 317-337.

Herbert, Eugenia. 1993. Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Schmidt, Peter R. 1996. "Reconfiguring the Barongo: Reproductive Symbolism and Reproduction among a Work Association of Iron Smelters." In The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production, ed. Peter R. Schmidt. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Schmidt, Peter R. 1997. Iron Technology in East Africa: Symbolism, Science, and Archaeology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

                                       Peter R. Schmidt