James R. Denbow: Recollections from Africa

Transcript recorded on 14 May 2024 with James Denbow (Recorded and transcribed by Sam Wilson)

Looking at African art and artifacts from James and Josie Denbow’s house.

SW: “Tell me what [photograph] numbers you’re looking at.”

SW: Do you have any idea what kind of wood it is?

JD: Ebony.

They’re carving a story. I thought those things, most of them are quite a different level from what is sold to tourists.

Even if you were looking for Makonde carvings, you wouldn’t find one like this. This one, you can imagine carrying it all the way from East Africa in your lap.

SW: Did they tell you anything about what is being depicted there?

JD: Well, what they said, generally speaking, is that it is like spirits, and that’s why people are so interested. Here’s a very unusual African carving from Tanzania. You see the people on there? You can imagine trying to carve those. It’s just a really hard wood. These are just big blocks of wood. And now, I don’t know if ebony is one of those protected species or something like that. I don’t know if I get in trouble, but we’ve had it for so long, I don’t see how I can.

SW: So what year were you in Tanzania?

Oh, well, we bought that in probably 1970, so it’s already 50 years old, but they were carving it right there, along with a lot of other ones, but mostly people would just buy these little things they could carry.

But that one was always special to us, even the eye on the snake.

SW: Yeah, it’s put in with some other kind of wood. So this is that same one, and it’s 42.

#42

JD: And this one is also a Makande carving, and it’s number 48. And this is not

#48

anywhere near the same quality as that, you know, this is more of a kind of a thing that tourists might buy, and that’s the way it seemed.

So then there’s a series with the spears and bells. It’s a curing tail used by a traditional doctor. That was something incredible, I think.

JD: And this is an ivory horn and it was from central Africa. Most likely Kuba.

#39 # 35

SW: How do you spell that?

JD: K-U-B-A. Tom Huffman and I were wandering around Johannesburg one day, and there… I don’t know if they still do it, but a lot of these people who want to trade things, they take over these parking lots on Sundays, and they just fill them up with things. So we were walking through there, and I saw that, #39. I saw that there, and I was nodding, I just said, I know what this is going to be. And what I liked about this one was it was wrapped with this reed ‚I don’t know what it is, some kind of reed or grass or something to, I don’t know, to hold it together or what. And also the patina on the horn indicated it was used quite a lot.

SW: So that might have been quite old when they decided to sell it.

JD: Yeah. And what would happen there is that people would come down from the Congo to South Africa to sell stuff like that, and so they would hang out in these parking garages and sell what they could, and then they’d go back home and get some more.

SW: And so where, if you had to guess what country it was coming from, what would you say?

JD: Oh, I would say it’s probably coming from Eastern Congo. I was impressed because it was so well-used. It had this [wrapping], I don’t know whether this was patching because it was cracking or whether it was just something that was put on there, but it’s equally old.

SW: [on tusk horn]: Do you have any idea what the context when they would have blown that thing is?

JD: They might have blown it trying to call people together for the chief, they might have blown it to call people together for a meeting or something like that.

SW: When were you and Tom, when would that have been? JD: Around 1970 or 1971

JD: [About the metal bells on a leather strap #36, #37]

#37

That goes with that healing tail [#34, #31, #33] and the traditional ritual around it. You would wrap these around the ankles. You would wrap these around your ankles, and if you look at it, you can see it’s all hand forged, you know.

#34 #33

SW: It’s really clearly hand-wrought then.

JD: Yeah. And it was used in that same curing ceremony that someone had. SW: And where was it?

JD: This is from Malawi.

SW: And what are the folks called?

JD: Well, these would be called the Zulu people. And they were an offshoot of Shaka Zulu. On his raids up in the north. And they just settled down in northern Malawi, and I’m not sure about Tanzania.

[This relates to the Mfecane, a period of political and social disruption that was particularly intense between 1810-1840 but was long-term in southern Africa. “Mfecane” can be translated as “crushing”, “scattering”, “forced dispersal”, or “forced migration”.1 It relates to the reign of King Shaka (1787–1828) who led some conquests to the north and east of the earlier Zulu kingdom, probably all related to the arrival of

Europeans. These conquests also caused other disruptions and warfare between non-Zulu

1 “General South African History Timeline: 1800s”. South African History Online.

groups.2 The Malawi conquests were probably caused by or related to the migration of the king Zwangendaba (1785–1848), who was the first king of the Ngoni and Tumbuka people of Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania. He was pushed out of what was known as the Ndwandwe Kingdom in southern Africa and extended as far as northern Malawi.]

JD: I don’t know, I was so taken aback when I looked at these bells closely, and I could see some [blacksmithing marks, on #36, #37]

SW: And you saw the guy wearing these?

JD: Yeah, and I had a picture of the guy, and you can see that tail. I’m not sure if you can see his legs, but these were bells that were on his legs.

They were called the C-H-I-N A-E-U-T-H-I-N-I. Chin’Aeuthini, from Northern Malawi. And these people are known as the Agoni.

A-N-G-O-N-I. And many of them still are known as the Agoni, these people were known as the Ngoni.

So along with the bells, these were used in the [curing] dance I mentioned, but they were used in others because you can look there. [At the artifact that looks like a thin-bladed axe, #27, 29.]

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mfecane

JD: This is completely useless as an axe.

SW: And those were used by the person dancing.

JD: Yes, and I even saw one time where somebody was dancing and they took that axe and they went ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch like that across their own stomach and cut it, you know. [making cuts across his belly]

SW: And you saw somebody wielding that thing, dancing with it, and actually cutting himself with it? And that spear was part of it too?

JD: That little spear, yeah. [artifact in photo #26, 30]

#30

SW: What’s that stuff around the top? [top of the spear in #26]

JD: That’s some kind of wild animal fur, but I don’t know what. That’s again how you know this is not just an ordinary spear to stick something small with.

Oh, this one’s number of thirty-two or thirty-two, and this one now is #29.

#27

Again, just have another picture of that axe [#29], but here again, if you look at it, the only way anything gets a polish might add on it is if people are using it and using it for quite some time, and if you look at the axe, you can see it’s quite useless for anything that an axe would be used for. And also, almost always, regular axes aren’t this long or have this curve of the back.

SW: Does that strike you as a Zulu thing?

JD: Well, it was used by men, so I don’t know. I don’t know if Zulus have ritual axes like that.

SW: And the ritual where the guy cut his stomach or was waving it around, what kind of ritual was that?

JD: It was some kind of curing rite, and it was at night, and a little spooky, but with again the people all gathering around and everything.

SW: What do you think is the story is behind that metal? Do you think it’s old, or do you think it’s part of a car transmission or something?

JD: No, I think this is old. This is the way it’s always been done.

SW: Where would they get a piece of it?

JD: Oh, well, they would go, I mean, depending on how old this is, but it’s like turn of the [19th] century or something.

JD: They would have got their iron ore, and there were still a few iron smelting furnaces in that area. They weren’t in use anymore, but they were still standing, and theirs was this, you have holes on the side, and then you have taller ones that are maybe 10 feet tall, and they still have the holes at the bottom, but they’re natural draft furnaces, so that you don’t have to have people working the bellows to do it, and there were still remains of those things in that area.

JD: And probably if I had gone around and asked, I could have found men who remember doing it.

SW: I watched some videos of people making that kind of iron, in both forced draft and natural draft things, and it struck me that it needed a ton of charcoal

JD: Yes, it took a lot, and at least reasonable iron ore, and then the smith had to get that metal out of there, and again over an open charcoal fire, that’s where he heated up red- hot and began to hammer it out into the shape that he wanted, and there again, trying to think of how they did that with such a delicacy to make those [ankle] bells. And it’s coming from just raw iron ore.

SW: Just to make sure I got that right, we’re still in northern Malawi.

JD: Yeah, and these two spears here, #28 [and #25], and yeah, these are the ones that I bought from that old man that were brought to Malawi by his great-great grandfather in the 1840s or so.

#28 #25

He was definite about it, and I tell you about these spears, I have never ever before since I’ve seen one with this long iron tang and a small head. Usually they’re like this other one with the wood coming all the way up, and then the head is bigger, but if you look at these, as you can see, they’re all flared along the side of the spear point and the other side is curved like this and the other side goes down like that, so that took a lot of work.

JD: The leather on the outside, usually it’s a monkey’s tail, because it’s long and they can cut it off when it’s wet and then slide it over all this so that it keeps the spear from cracking when they throw it or stab at something with it.

JD: So he told me this one [#28 left tip] was used for stabbing people and this one [#28 right tip] was used for hunting animals, but I, again, I always take those things with a grain of salt, but we all have the same technique with this animal tail, slid down over there [#28 right tip, #25 shows the base]. You look at this and you see, I think it ends about here, starts there.

#25

SW: So you think it’s a monkey tail or something? JD: Well, that’s what they told me.

SW: Any idea what kind of wood it is?

JD: No. All I know is that they showed it to me in the bush but I don’t know what it was, but they try to get it from something straight that comes down to a root or something down here and they cut that off, but the leather thing always goes there and I don’t know if you didn’t take a picture of the other end of the spears.

SW: I did somewhere, there looks like there’s one there.

JD: OK. What number is that? SW: #25.

JD: OK. Now this one should have had at the very end a metal digging stick, it looks like a small box thing, and you’ll see here they wrapped a plain iron wire around, they had probably some more monkey’s tail, just to keep it from splitting while they were digging, so when people would take that spear out in the bush it had two functions, one to stab and one to dig up roots and things out of it.

SW: So it was an all-purpose kind of tool, it wouldn’t have necessarily been just for war?

JD: No, just for hunting or something like that, and I think that’s probably why almost all the time people were carrying these around and went places because they never really had to dig up something.

SW: And you said one time they were on the buses, they were on the…

JD: Oh yeah, they would just slide those spears underneath the seats, you know. Nobody said anything, which is good because that’s how we had to get them back to town where the airplane was.

JD: But even just walking down the street in the bigger villages around, people would always carry around their spears and nobody paid any attention to them.

SW: What’s the number on that one?

#26

JD: Twenty-six, okay, and just making sure this one, the end of the digging stick, what is that, okay.

Yeah, so that’s that one short spear [#30]. That’s the short spear on the left, and that ax is up here in the corner.

SW: Do you see anything else on those spear points?

JD: Well, I mean, here, like on this big one, you can see the bevels there. One side is dished out, and then the other side is dished out to make it penetrate more. And again, that’s all hand-hammered, you know, it’s not a cast spear.

SW: And how far down would you say the metal goes? [on #28, left tip]

JD: I’m guessing about two feet. Something like that. Well, I mean, two feet that’s sticking out.

SW: There’s more inside the shaft.

JD: Yeah, yeah, But I don’t know how much it is.

SW: Oh, and then these are the drums, I think.

JD: Okay, this #20, 21, #24] is a really rare type of drum and it comes from Botswana, northern Botswana. And I think it might have been made by the Bambukushu people who had been forced down by the Angolans into the northwestern corner of Botswana.

#24, #22

And it looks like a drum, but if you look inside, it has a long stick or reed that goes all the way up. And you can slide your hand up and down that reed.

#21

SW: I did that, yeah, I reached inside and, man, even not knowing what you’re doing, it makes a tremendous amount of noise.

JD: Well, I’m trying to make sure whether this came from SW: So you said the Bambukushu, is that…

JD: Well, I’m trying to remember, you know, when I think of it, it might have been B-A- M-B-U‚ K-U-S-H-U ‚ Bambukushu, and the “Ba” is like the “Chi”, or the “Sei”, you know, and it’s decorated differently. Those prefixes denote languages.

JD: Most Africans even have never seen something like that, you know. So you were surprised when it made noise?

SW: Yeah. Well, you had told me about it, but I didn’t have any idea how to do it, so I just kind of reached in there and slid my hand along it, and it made quite a good noise.

JD: Yeah, yeah. They’d usually use that as a kind of rhythm section for the other drums, yeah. Oh, this one was number twenty-four. Oh, and that’s the drum with the little reed inside. #22 Uh-huh.

SW: And it’s some sort of reed that’s, uh… Yeah. It’s remarkable that it’s all held up, you know, it’s held up perfectly in your house.

JD: Yeah. Well, we’ve had it for fifty years or more, so… SW: So that’s the inside of that drum. #21

JD: Yeah, but even a lot of Africans are surprised when you play that thing. It’s got an amazing sound.

SW: There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about this. It’s all carved from one piece of wood, right?

JD: Oh, yeah.

JD: Let me see this one. [big drum, #16, 17, 18] I think this one, the skin that’s stretched over the top, is fastened on there with either thorns or pieces of hard wood that they’ve pounded through, so you can see it.

#20, #16

SW: You can see that.

Yeah.

Does that decoration mean anything to you? [on #24] JD: No.

JD: And there’s this one. That’s the one with the big voice. And I couldn’t figure out how to send it back to the States with us, so I sent it parcel post with just some cardboard taped onto it, and the tape took some of the dirt off. [can be seen on image #20]

Looking at #24

#24

JD: That’s the one that’s got carved on the sides and you have to look close to it. It’s just someone has gone to a lot of trouble.

[Looking at top of big drum, image #17]

#17

JD: Yeah, that was in that ring on the top, that’s beeswax, and that’s what they used to help them when they’re going to play those, they want to sort of tune them, and they do that by holding that near the fire so it heats up, and I don’t know what the beeswax does, but I believe it tightens the drum

SW: I see. This strap around the outside [#18, #20], is that leather or?

#18 #20

JD: Yeah.

There used to be another drum intermediate in size between those two, right? #24

SW [looking at #17] And where did you get this, and what’s this?

JD: This will also show up in that picture of the guy dancing and the person drumming it, and then you’ll see the beeswax circle on top.

JD: oh, and here’s that big drum again, and again you can see the thorns that are used to tack the top on there, rather than nails.

SW: Do these guys have, do they keep cattle? [the owners of the big drum]

JD: Uh-huh, a few. All the people we lived with had cattle, but none of these skins would have come from cattle. Maybe there would be some other kind of animal in the bush, like duiker or impala or something like that. Yeah, and here you can see the circle of beeswax on the top.

JD: Yeah, and just the patina on that, patina on the top, it’s remarkable, you know, remarkable looking stuff.

JD: And this is the same drum from the, oh, that was number 17, number 16, this is just the same drum, but showing the thorns that are from a tree that are used to hammer that and get it, sort of, today, maybe they use nails or something, but none of the ones that I saw ever had nails in.

SW [new pile of photos] You may think you’re done, but of course you’re not! JD; Oh, okay.

JD: Okay, [#15] that’s a pretty common basket from a village where you might store grain or something inside it.

Image #15

[Looking at #19, #14]

#14, #19

JD: This is just a regular old basket, likely sold as a tourist basket or something, that’s number #19.

SW: Where would you have gotten it, or it may not matter? JD: I can’t remember, it’s either Botswana or Malawi,

And this one [#19] is a kind of tourist back basket that takes everything else over because it has more patterning, it’s flatter, so you can stick it inside, let’s see, oh, number 15.

And what’s the next one, the touristy one? JD: #14.

SW: And where do you think, so this was Botswana or Malawi, probably getting them as gifts?

JD: Yeah.

SW: And do you know what they’re made of? JD: Just the local grasses and marsh grasses.

SW: So, you get some fiber and it rolls around like that, with the grass in those coils around the basket?

JD: I don’t know if you took a picture of it or not, but there’s one of these up there that our cook, after he was done with his duties in the evening, people would sit around the campfire and so he taught Jennifer how to make a basket and he’d hold her hands and help her do the stuff and go and find the bits of reeds and grass that they needed and it’s just a small little basket with a handle on it and that was made by Jennifer with very much his help. [Maybe the one small one on #8]

JD: Well, I didn’t see one with a handle unless you see a picture of it in there, but she [Jennifer] should hang on to that one. I think she used it at her wedding for the bridesmaid to carry some flowers and something like that.

JD: These are more Mokonde again. [#Mokonde 1 and #15]

Mokonde 1 and #13

They’re all made out of ebony and it could be that this person here is trying to heal that person there but it’s a small thing that would have been used for a tourist market or something.

SW: Is that a woman trying to heal him or a man? [#Mokonde 1] JD: Let me see, it’s a woman. [#14]

#14

SW: Did you know women healers too?

JD: I didn’t personally, I don’t think so, it’s hard to think back anymore. SW: What about that other little one? #2

#2

I can’t see what he’s holding on to, but they’re so good at carving.

SW: What were they, did you see them carving, were they just using a regular knife?

JD: Oh, a little axe. Yeah, sitting outside they had a sort of encampment outside of town [Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania] and that’s where they’d make these things. Some of them, I think probably, were for their owners and others were selling to tourists.

This is another one of their, I mean they’re so distinctive you’ll never mistake a Makonde carving for anything else.

SW: Yeah, that one reminds me so much of that Picasso sculpture that’s in Chicago [#12], but it, with this sort of headdress or whatever it is, and Picasso went through his period of studying African art.

#12 #11

The Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, Chicago.

JD: Yeah, well it could be, obviously this, whatever this thing is, it’s humanoid, but it’s not human and human and I don’t know if you can see, all of these things are just carved on one solid piece of wood.

[#10] The thing on top seems to have hold of it.

SW: So this is all from that same trip to the Makonde. JD: Yeah, in Tanzania.

This is a different one [#10], and this is here, and I think the top figure is a woman with her head on her back, but she’s all tangled up in this other, this other creature down below.

SW: This is a basket on the wall by the kitchen, what number is that?

JD: #8. They are exquisite basket makers. The ones I’ve seen here [in the U.S.], Otoño Baskets, Southwestern, Navajo Baskets, and stuff, those are so much more money for them, you know, but these are pretty amazing. And it’s usually women that like, oh, here’s some more, okay. They’re all Botswana baskets, except for this one over here [another photo], which is from Zambia.

#8

Sorry, you said they’re all, those are all from Botswana? These are Botswana, the fat ones [#15], from Zambia.

JD: [#7] Okay, now this is a typical Bushman bag for young men, some kind of wild animal skin, you know, and all of these bead designs have some meaning, and I don’t remember what they were, so I’m not going to mention it.

#7

SW: So what group would that have been?

JD: This would have been probably the San or Bushman. Both men and women carried them.

The !San, that’s a different group. That’s an error, but there’s a lot of errors in some of that early ethnography, and I can’t do it [click sound] with this thing [oxygen mask] in my nose, but they generally live a little further north in southern Angola, and they’ve been pushed down into the northwestern part of Kalahari, and this is what they use in their gathering roots and other kind of things.

SW: How long, how far back in time do those small beads go?

JD: Oh, well, these are all European beads, if you went back much before, about 1840 or 1850, you’d be getting some beads made out of ostrich egg shells, although we don’t see any of this one, they often have ostrich-egg shells sticking down here, or porcupine quills.

SW: It’s interesting, they use porcupine, Indians in North America use dyed porcupine quills. They cut them and make beads out of them, and they dye them all different colors. So those little seed beads are functionally the same thing, they’re just shinier.

JD: Yeah, made out of glass, yeah. Okay, [#6] now this is all stuff from my closet, I suspect, and there’s all kinds of things that were stuffed in there.

#6

There are a couple of bows, these long arrows. The arrows used to have, I don’t know still have them, with iron tips, and one of them at least had an iron tip, and they sort of tied it with bark around the end, so if you ever saw any of these arrows, it still had the iron point, and it had a little bit of bark around it, just below the point, that’s where the poison was tied on using bark string.

And those were the Bantu arrows.

JD: Yeah, so that’s what we found here. The one on the left [#2] is certainly a Makonde carving, but I’m not sure what it is, I don’t remember anymore.

#2

I don’t, it looks like a lion or something on the right, kind of touristy kind of thing.

JD: Well here again you can see that the use of this reed [of the arrows] has kind of reinforced a lot of the things so they don’t crack and turn to see, but these are all arrowheads of bows down here.

#6

SW: Yeah, I was kind of afraid to pull that whole [pile of long wooden objects] off the shelf, I may do that though later.

JD: And they were both San and Bantu, both the short bow of the San, and the long one of the Bantu.

SW: What’s that one?

JD: [#4] I was out walking through the Okavango and some poachers had killed an elephant out there, and all the bones were still lying on the ground and I saw that one which was small enough to carry [atlas or axis vertebra]. So I just brought it home and we always used it as a door stop. It’s the neck vertebrae. So this is maybe about the smallest bone in an elephant.

#4

SW: I just wanted to see what animal it was [#3], but yeah, no on there, somewhere there’s an ostrich egg on that same shelf somewhere down below.

#3

JD: I also got my first camera [on #4] and it’s from the 1930s, something like that.

Well, two of these are both, the ones that kind of tapered out a little bit, but this one, I’m not sure what it was, but it obviously split on impact there.

It’s hard to tell from a picture, but what that is, I don’t know. It’s probably a thousand years old or so. Sometimes you just wind up hating yourself.

SW: Yeah, well, don’t be too hard on yourself…

JD: There’s a few of my things with me, that curing tail, I know that that is going to be something pretty unique.

SW: Yeah, I don’t know who would want it, but anyway, I’ll write it up.

JD: And the drummer who played that big drum [#20] It was really interesting the way he would make his rhythms, and sometimes he’d be going like this with his hands and then he’d put his elbow on the top, you know, to stop it or something, I don’t know. It was really interesting the way he played it.

#20

In Botswana we never heard drums, because in part there weren’t trees big enough around it to make them, so they would use rattles made of spider cocoons and things like that instead. But in Malawi and in Congo, you’d often hear drums at night, you know, even 50 years ago you could hear them, you know, playing and so on, it was a fun thing. They’re really designed to make quite a lot of noise. It’s probably 50 years since they stretched, 60 years or more since they stretched that top.

SW: I’m hoping that I have a pretty good recording of what you’ve said. And I’ll type all that up and see what we’ve got, you know, put it into a sort of transcript.

JD: Even though I was writing about Central Africa, I figured I was close enough and doing the same kinds of things, you know. And anything that you can put in somebody’s head as an image, that’s at least relatively close. It’s probably much closer than any idea they can come up with.

JD: [About the drums and dances] And I noticed, I can’t remember in that picture, but a lot of times when I saw people doing these dances, they were wearing just, like, t-shirts, but they always had spots on them. They got them with spots on them. And I thought, well, probably sometime in the past they probably used leopard skins.

SW: I saw, I dug up some pictures from the Zulu Wars, and there is an amazing number of leopard skins involved with those warriors, and they were all wearing something with leopards on there.

From “Natalia: A Condensed History of the Exploration and Colonisation of Natal and Zululand. From the Earliest times to the Present Day”, by J. Forsyth Ingram (1897) published by Harvey, Greenacre & Co. in London.