Wire Toys in Africa South of the Sahara

Abstract

Black children of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and in some of the neighbouring countries are keen makers of toys constructed from a variety of materials, mainly from either clay or iron wire. The former is the traditional material and is used for moulding, for example, figurines of cattle, humans and household utensils. The latter, which became available during recent decades, poses special problems to makers of toys that I shall discuss below. The essential difference between the two media lies in the different approach required by manipulators of wire to give an illusion of the solidity of real objects. Toy pots and cows in clay have the same physical characteristics of bulk and of surface as a utilitarian pot and a real cow. This is not so for toys that are to produce the illusion of solidity by using only lines of wire. The way to produce the illusion also differs from that used in line drawings, since the application of perspective is not necessary. Furthermore, in a drawing one may resort to shading to indicate external surfaces of solid objects. Therefore, the task of makers of wire toys, as well as of artists who have used this technique in the past outside Africa, is to select linear information provided by solid objects, that is, essential contours that will produce recognizable facsimiles of the objects. In the case of forms such as a cube an indication of the edges of the surfaces is sufficient, although one still cannot tell if the real cube was either solid or hollow. Evidently, it is much more difficult to make a recognizable facsimile of a cow or of an automobile. In Fig. 1 is shown a child of a suburb of the city of Salisbury, Zimbabwe, pushing a toy automobile made of wire.