Early Sources of Iron in Africa

Abstract

Iron in its metallic state is known to occur naturally in two ways, either as a rare constituent of the rocks of the earth's surface, or as the material of which some meteorites are made. Neither of these sources of iron, however, has ever been extensive enough to be of more than local importance. Almost all the iron which has been used by man has been extracted from iron ore by smelting and, although the two natural sources of metallic iron will be considered for their historical importance, it is the extraction of iron from iron ores which will form the central theme of this paper. The scientific study of methods of producing iron in Africa has been left dangerously late. Very little careful and understanding work has been carried out on local smelting-methods until quite recently, and, even now, properly recorded processes could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even less has, of course, been published. There are many references to iron-smelting in the travellers' books and in the journals concerned with iron and with anthropology. But very often the accounts are clearly inaccurate in certain respects, and it then becomes difficult to place any reliability on them. A common mistake is to describe how the iron melts and runs into a lump at the bottom of the furnace or even, in some accounts, runs out of the furnace into moulds which are placed around the furnace. The truth is that iron probably never melts in an African furnace, and if it did it would form cast iron, which would be useless to an African smith because he would be unable to work it by the methods at his disposal. The conclusion that one draws from such accounts is that the author either never witnessed what he is describing, or else what he saw was the production of some metal other than iron. Already throughout most of Africa the knowledge of smelting has been forgotten. In a very few isolated places the process is still carried out; and in a few more there are old men who remember accurately how it used to be done. The most urgent need now is for the knowledge of these old men to be recorded and saved for future generations of historians and archaeologists.