IN COMPARISON with west and central Africa, the southern part of the African continent is noted for the paucity of its indigenous sculptural art. It is taken for granted by most art historians that this has always been the case. The well-documented pastoral and hunter-gatherer way of life of the country’s historic people, has hitherto been regarded as responsible for the lack of this art form. It is therefore no wonder that there still seems to be only one comprehensive, published study available on the sculptural arts in southern Africa (Holy, 1967).

However, the evidential position is slowly beginning to change. Iron Age archaeology in South Africa has in the past two decades produced evidence which suggests that sculptural traditions were much more widely established in pre-colonial Iron Age southern Africa, than we have hither-to realized.

Within recent years a number of papers have appeared in one of the country’s archaeological bulletins, which are of outstanding significance to the study of the sculptural arts in south of African continent. Three particular types of indigenous sculpture have come to light, from a number of sources, the survival of two being primarily due to their material’s resistance to decay, the other possibly due to its uniqueness:

Fig. 1 Distribution of some African sculptures

Terracottas – Stone Carvings – Double Headed Figures
One of the papers is a comprehensive report on the discovery of eight terracotta heads in the Transvaal (Inskeep & Maggs, 1975), first announced some years ago in MAN (v. Bezing & Inskeep, 1966). Three papers deal with a number of stone carved heads and half-figures. For years they had been kept unrecognised in some museum collections (Rudner, 1971; Rautenbach, 1973; Derricourt, 1974). A short note (Gess 1973) reports the existence of a double-headed wood carving in South-Africa, a hitherto unheard of discovery. It too remained unrecognised for years in a museum collection. It is intriguing to speoulate how many more pieces of indigenous African art linger in obscurity in this part of Africa. May they all be rediscovered!

Fig. 2 Terracotta head from Lydenburg, South Africa (after Inskeep & Maggs 1975)

Terracottas
The earliest use of Terracotta as a sculptural medium in Africa is of course best known from Egypt. The Nubians already had a culture of their own at least as far back as the 6th millennium BC, when the indigenous arts of this sub-saharan, black people was already well developed ( Gillon. 1984). A great variety and wealth of early female, fired clay figures, symbolic of life and fertility, can be dated to the 3rd millennium BC. In the 7th to 6th centuries BC Kushite rule in Egypt shaped the arts, best exemplified by the finds from Napata and Meroc. They represent the period of acculturation in Egypt.

West African terracotta sculptures, and heads in particular, date back to between the 5th century BC and the 2nd century AD. The western part of the continent seems to have been supreme in this art form with the magnificent sculptures of the Iron Age Nok culture, succeeded by the somewhat later lfe culture. The Djenne-Mopti culture extant in Mali and the old Ghana during the 11th and 13th centuries, produced particularly sensitive terracotta figures. The lands south of Lake Chad were occupied by the Sao, between the 10th to 16th centuries, who made terracotta figures of extremely unusual quality, both in human and animal forms. They also made pottery masks with exaggerated eye lids and lips, an art form also known elsewhere. A terracotta mask, depicting an African face and found in Sicily, dates to the 6th century BC (Snowden, 1970). The modern Fali of northern Cameroon may well have inherited their knowledge of this form of sculpture from Sao quarters. A fried clay figure near Djimon, Cameroon (home of the present day Bamum) was dated to the 14th or 15th century (Laude, 1971).

The tradition was carried on in these parts of Africa by the Asante, some of whose funerary terracotta heads date back to the 17th and 18th centuries. The Anyi, Krinjabo and Lobi of the Ivory Coast produced remarkable figurines in this medium; so did the Dogon of Mali, the Bini of Benin and the Koro, as well as the Goemai, the Ibibio and Abiri of northern Nigeria. All of them contributed an astonishing wealth to this art form, while some like the Minianka of Mali do so to the present day.

However although the concentration in west Africa is overwhelming, terracotta sculpture is by no means peculiar to this part of the continent. Elsewhere in Africa the art form found similar echoes. E.g. in east Africa, although sculptures here may have been less intricate compared with those from the west. The Galla of Ehiopia are the most northerly of these people who practiced terracotta sculpturing. Then came the Shambala of Kenya, the Para from the Kenyan-Tanzanian border, as well as the Nyam-wezi and Hehe of central Tanzania.

Neither did this sculptural form end here. Pottery figures are known from Iron Age sites in east Botswana, South Africa and Zimbave (Summers, 1957). The finest examples amongst these, however, are no doubt the eight terracotta heads from Lydenburg in South Africa. They are proof that well developed forms of the terracotta tradition in Africa was not unknown in the continent’s south. Figure 2 is only a token-representation of the very impressive photographs in the original report (Inskeep & Maggs, 1975; Gillon, 1984). The heads were tentatively dated to the 5th century AD. This places them in the era of the early developments in terracotta sculpture in west and north/central Africa, a very important factor in considering South Africa’s achievements in indigenous sculptural art. The authors suggest that the heads were probably made like pots and features such as eyes, nose, mouth, ears and coiffure were added by applying clay studs, a method not unknown elsewhere on the continent.

Two of the heads are large enough to have been used as some kind of helmet mask, although it is not certain that they were put to such use. However, the suggestions  is not novel. Apart from the mask made by the Sao (Lebeuf & Masson-Detourbet, 1951) the Toma of south-east  Guinea still use poetry helmets as bases for a certain feather head dress(Huet, 1978). Similar terracotta head dresses with feathers made by the Dan of the Ivory Coast (Segy, 1975:76).