Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 262
impurities, which they had smashed out of the first bloom before being smelted again with
charcoal.
Unfortunately we do not have data on how this affected tree cultivation. We also wonder how
old this industry was. After all, Kirawa was nearby, and we learned from our chapter on the
historical importance of the Wandala, that it was a centre for iron trade in the late 16th
century, as was reported by Anania (Lange & Berthoud 1972). If we consult our Table of
Contemporaneity and Figure 16, we recognise this as a period of significant aridity and a time
we hypothetically allocated to 'Johode' as an early arrival zone. We mentioned in Part Two
that the iron trade was most likely not trans-Saharan but more regional during that earlier precolonial period, and a pre-Ghwa'a iron industry might well have been part of that trade.
Plate 17a: Charcoal from a sack
These three photographs show an improvised
field forge that I came across in 1995. Our
illustration demonstrates that the men operating
it were familiar with the process of forging a
hoe:
Plate 17a to the left shows that our friends
brought their charcoal along in a sack. Two of
them are about to cook a meal while a third man
watches.
In Plate 17b below, we see two of the men
processing pieces of scrap iron in an improvised
field forge with help of bag bellows. The latter
was operated by the man with the cap sitting in
the upper right-hand corner of the photograph.
Plate 17c shows the anvil consisted of a rock,
and that the three men are using stones to
hammer the red-hot iron into shape. It was held
and turned into the correct position by a fourth
man using a pair of tongs.
Plate 17b: Improvised oven with bellows
Plate 17c: Still smithing with stones
A scenario described above would have impacted the tree population, especially considering
that there might have been a demand for iron bars (É—utsa). If they were also used for tribute
payments to keep the Wandala from slave raiding, we can imagine that producing iron bars
260
