Fan Blacksmiths
These iron blacksmiths worked on an anvil and stoked a forge with bellows. Du Cahillu descibed how “their patience is great… The forge is set up anywhere where a fire can be built. They have invented a singular bellows, composed of two short, hollowed cylinders of wood, surmounted by skins accurately fitted on, and having an appropriate valve and a wooden handle. The bellows-man sits down, and moves these coverings up and down with great rapidity, and the air is led through small wooden pipes into an iron joint which emerges in the fire” (p. 87). A Fang village is in the background. The Fang people, also known as Fãn or Pahouin, are an ethnic group that straddle the southern Bight of Benin and northern Loango Coast regions. The speak a Southern Bantu language called Fang, Pahouin, Pamue or Pangwe. The Fang people likely arrived to this region to avoid violence emanating out of the formation of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804. Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (c. 1831–1903) was a French-American traveler, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first European to confirm the existence of gorillas and the Pygmy people of Africa's Central Interior region.
Image Title
Fan Blacksmiths
RegID
SI-OB-630
Date
1850s
Title
Fan Blacksmiths
Source
Paul B. Du Chaillu, Explorations & adventures in equatorial Africa (London, 1861), p. 91. Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
Language
English
Item sets
Pre-Colonial Africa: Society, Polity, Culture
Spatial Coverage
Africa--West Central North
Reproduced In
Paul B. Du Chaillu, Explorations & adventures in equatorial Africa (London, 1861), p. 91.
Researchers
Jerome Handler; Michael Tuite; Henry B. Lovejoy Graduate Research Assistants: Tiffany Beebe; Travis May
Identifier
DuChaillu-91