The archaeologists saving Africa’s ironworking heritage

For more than a decade, Tanzanian archaeologist Edwinus Lyaya has been searching for traces of an African technology – and tradition – that he worries is ‘disappearing without notice’. In his home country and neighbouring Zambia, in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, he has often focused his search on the western side of termite mounds. Here, the fat chimneys of iron-smelting furnaces (malungu) once stood up to three metres tall, their walls likely moulded from the termite mound clay itself. In Zambia, Lyaya exposed the bases of three or four per mound, their chimneys now toppled.

These traditional charcoal-fuelled furnaces reached temperatures well over 1000°C and were attended to by smelters who were skilled in feeding the flames and ‘delivering’ the iron ‘bloom’ from the belly of the furnace in a process tied to ritual and representations of childbirth. They are just one example of an extraordinary array of different iron technologies used by Africans for millennia to produce tools for farming and weapons of war, alongside all manner of decorative objects.