Blacksmith

There is tremendous diversity among African blacksmiths. In a great many societies, they are credited with knowledge, powers, and capacities well beyond ordinary citizens and very much in line with sorcerers, cult priests, herbalists, and soothsayers. In many societies, they also serve as mediators in all kinds of disagreements and advisors to political leaders. In many central African societies, they are even directly involved in chieftainships and kingships. Metalworking grounds their specialness, with its extensive knowledge and expertise, its complex relationships with the spiritual world, its generative orientation and its products, which are in universal demand. Blacksmiths drastically transform matter through extensive and subtly interrelated bodies of technological and spiritual expertise, with the result that a society’s capabilities and power are extended.

Two interrelated technologies are used. The first is smelting, a collection of procedures to garner and prepare iron ore,...