Metalworking in Africa South of the Sahara: An Annotated Bibliography ed. by Ibironke O. Lawal

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 241 Metalworking in Africa South of the Sahara: An Annotated Bibliography. Edited by Ibironke O. Lawai. African Special Bibliographic Series, no. 19. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Pp. 270; index. $79.50 (cloth). The study of technology in Africa falls under several academic rubrics, with so-called traditional or indigenous technical knowledge and craft traditions largely the domain of anthropology and archae­ ology, while some historians have investigated what cases there are ofmodern, Western-style technologies and industries. Even so, tech­ nology has been and remains relatively neglected in the field ofAfri­ can studies. So a book such as this one, a bibliography that might encourage more research in an underrepresented area, is most wel­ come. Sadly, it is also thoroughly bewildering and ultimately frus­ trating. Ibironke Lawai deserves thanks and praise for taking on a daunt­ ing task, bringing together 2,741 articles and books on (mostly ar­ tisanal) metalworking in sub-Saharan Africa. They are drawn from various literatures—archaeology, ethnology, art history, his­ tory, archaeometry, cultural anthropology—published in English, French, German, and the occasional Portuguese or Italian. And the topic, metalworking, is an important one. Why, then, put all these titles together into a book that is close to impossible to use? A bibli­ ography is an invaluable tool, but a tool must be helpful. This one is not. One would expect to find occasional errors ofone kind or another in any bibliography, especially when it covers a topic across disci­ plines and languages. But the problems here are major. First, there is the peculiar organizational structure of the book, which disorients the reader at the outset by using idiosyncratic geographical divisions for Africa. It makes no historical sense to leave out North Africa, especially in the case ofmetalworking; and categories such as ‘ ‘West­ ern Guinea Coast” and “Eastern Guinea Coast” are arbitrary and unfamiliar—one does not know which African countries they in­ clude. Second, the table of contents is next to useless. If the reader is looking for information on metalworking in a particular modern African country, she must do as I did and compose her own more complete table of contents, one that shows which countries come under which heading. When she does, she will see that this is really a bibliography focused on Nigeria, not the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, that some countries such as Congo-Brazzaville are entirely missing, and that other countries are oddly grouped geographically. I would never have expected to find Ivory Coast and Cameroon listed together as part of an “Eastern Guinea Coast.” And this is only the beginning. The index will lead even expert readers into traps and dead ends. I tried to find articles by certain well-known authors to test how they 242 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE were categorized geographically—but the entry numbers in the in­ dex hardly ever matched the ones in the text. Some I never did find. When I did, I found substantial errors. For example (to mention one of many),Jan Vansina’s works on western Bantu expansion and Bantu linguistics are listed under East Africa, where they obviously do not belong. Au experienced researcher will go crazy using this bibliography; a student or layperson will be seriously misled. Until these problems are corrected, the bibliography under review here will not replace the older standard resources in this area of study. Walter Cline’s Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa (Menasha, Wise.: George Banta, 1937) is outdated and has serious drawbacks, but it remains valid in many ways, not the least of which is the author’s technical expertise, which allowed him to expand on the data he collected, posing cogent questions and drawing historical inferences about production ofmetals and technology transfer. Den­ nis Spande’s bibliography, A Historical Perspective on Metallurgy in Af­ rica (Waltham, Mass.: Crossroads Press, 1977), is smaller, including 1,052 sources published before 1975. He begins it with a brief but very astute general introduction to the subject, explaining then the layout of the sections, and there is along with the table of contents a handy map that shows how the continent has been divided up into...