How often do we think about the necessity of the material of iron? Our everyday speech has idioms that come from blacksmithing, such as: “iron sharpens iron,” “to beat the daylight out of it,” “to strike while the iron is hot,” “too many irons in the fire” and “to catch my drift,” are from the trade. The red cliffs of East Rock, New Haven are colored by the mineral iron. The soil in Uganda, Africa has a bright red color from iron. Humans rely on the essential mineral iron for our health. If our blood does not have enough iron, the sickness of anemia develops. During the 18th century, New Haven was a center of arms manufacturing and produced different types of iron: cast, wrought and pig which supported the formation of the railroad through the city. Artisan blacksmiths like Samuel Yellin used wrought iron. Cast iron was used for large construction projects such as railroads.43
Like art society has form, and like its aesthetic counterpart, social form is complex and difficult for foreigners to decipher...They are chartered by their culture to build, construct, fabricate, create, in a wide variety of materials across a broad spectrum of human situations.44
In African blacksmithing knowledge is embodied and the process is as important as the product at the end of creation.45 “Metallurgical engineers often speak of ‘metal memory’ as a force to contend with…dedicated practice, day after day, is a blacksmith’s only recourse to excel beyond mere proficiency.”46 In Mande blacksmithing, for example, knowledge is demonstrated in the arrangement of information and materials after the completion of many activities.47 Articulation through the sculpting of form is part of the blacksmithing process.48 This sensory experience will be a part of the lessons with students. I want to empower students to feel that their artistic production has weight, durability and strength, like the material of iron.
Almost all African societies use iron technology.49 There is a wide range of iron production in Africa.50 Iron is associated with ritual religious power.”51 There is, for example, symbolism in the iron bracelets that parents who have twins wear.52 West African blacksmiths from Sierra Leone, Côte D’Ivoire, and Ghana used Adinkra symbolism for royalty, in funerary rites and as a bridge to the afterlife.53 Because such imagery can be sacred, it can also be shrouded in secrecy. In the Greek mythical tradition Hephaestus, also known as Vulcan, the son of Hera, is a young blacksmith when he is exiled by Zeus and his workshop “shines like a star in the night.”54 Like Hephaestus, in the context of Mande culture in Western Sudan, there is a legendary figure named Sumanguru who descended from a lineage of blacksmiths and became superhuman.55 Mande blacksmiths, called nyamakala, are considered strange and mysterious.56 In Mande culture people who were conquered or became indebted became slaves, but they could become blacksmiths if they proved capable, so it had a transformative capacity as a skill.57 In African cultures blacksmiths frequently have additional roles. In Kapsiki society blacksmiths were not associated with a specific clan and were known to travel from one village to another.58 Their primary products were farming tools, weapons, decoration and religious objects.59 Blacksmiths bridged the transformation from “earth to iron, from life to death, from sickness to health.”60 Blacksmiths could also be potters, in charge of funerals, music and healing.61 For example, in the Kapsiki/Higi culture “a smith is undertaker, healer, sorcerer, diviner, musician, and potter as well as metalworker...”62
Blacksmithing in the context of Mande culture, which spans the regions of “Burkina Faso, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Ghana” is a complex identity which has “secret initiation associations.”63 Mande blacksmiths also have closely guarded “secret speech” and many social and religious roles.64 Blacksmiths are called upon for ending conflicts because of their power in communities.65 The spiritual and social complexities of African practices of blacksmithing are not necessarily entirely accessible to outsiders.
In an exhibition catalogue on the iron art of Western Sudan the American art historian Patrick McNaughton examines the Mande myths from the Bamana and the Dogon peoples that are tied to the material of iron. The forms created by Mande Blacksmiths included amulets, musical instruments, hunting tools, farming tools, lamps, staffs and figures. The preface of this book about Mande blacksmiths concludes by saying that further study could shed light on other blacksmithing traditions, such as that near Lake Victoria in Eastern Africa which is where the Baganda are located.66 He also refers to the ironworking traditions in sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa as well.
Figure 2, Drawing with a hammer, Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza at the Guilford Art Center, May 2025
The hammer of a blacksmith is a symbol of power and transformation. The book, The Customs of the Baganda, has these following descriptions about the blacksmithing trade: “worn out tools of all sorts were taken to the smith to be remade into something else,” and “the blacksmiths also were exempt from arbitrary arrest and killing, and carried hammers, as emblems of their calling, for protection.”67 Hammers had significance to Yellin as well in production. According to his biography, Yellin said, “There is only one way to make good decorative metalwork and that is with the hammer at the anvil.”68 “He also sometimes said that what he created at the forge he ‘sketched it with the hammer.’”69
Figure 3, A rose by Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza forged at the Guilford Art Center, May, 2025
This Spring during an exhibition walk-through of “Amistad: Retold” at the New Haven Museum with the guest speaker Professor Marcus Rediker I asked how iron may have been used by enslaved captives from Africa to escape and rebel on the Amistad ship. He shared that two enslaved people on the ship were blacksmiths and writes in his new book, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, that the manifold ways they were held in captivity on the ship used iron “manacle, shackles, neck-rings, chains and padlocks,” and were undone in part because “two of the forty-nine enslaved men were blacksmiths, who knew the properties of iron intimately from their work.”70 He goes on to describe how one named Sseei was a blacksmith that “made axes, hoes, and knives from iron.”71 In my past research I was familiar with a dissertation on Baganda culture from Harvard University by the sociologist Ernest Balintuma Kalibala who describes how in times of war the Baganda transformed their farming tools into weapons of war.72 All of the men who could fight were expected to pledge allegiance to the king and fight. In the rebellion Rediker describes the importance of unity amongst the diverse crew which consisted of enslaved people who spoke many languages: “When speed was crucial to avoid detection, getting so many people out of irons was necessarily a communal undertaking. Soon a substantial number of men were free of their chains and ready to fly to action.”73
While listening to the author speak during the exhibition walkthrough, I noticed a wall label about the black abolitionist Pastor James W.C. Pennington. Pennington authored the Fugitive Blacksmith about his experience escaping slavery from the state of Maryland in the United States of America. In a letter to his former owner trying to purchase freedom for his family Pennington points out that he was treated as property from the moment he was born.74 From the age of 7 he was hired out for work and he learned the trade of blacksmithing and carpentry earning money for his ‘owner’ by the age of 10.75 In his memoir he writes that the material and spiritual needs of enslaved people were severely neglected.76 Pennington’s only navigational tool in his race to freedom was following the North Star.77 He manages to find a person who lets him stay in exchange for labour and while there he learns how to read, write, do arithmetic and how to draw maps of the solar system and solar eclipses.78 Around 1822 he also attempts to make a steel pen to write.79 Pennington said: “It cost me two years hard labour, after I fled, to unshackle my mind, it was three years before I had purged my language of slavery’s idioms; it was four years before I had thrown off the crouching aspect of slavery; and now the evil that besets me is a great lack of that general information...”80 He uses the word “shackle” to describe the bondage of his mind and body during slavery as a metaphoric connection to iron production. He writes how his skillful precision as a blacksmith prepared him for his escape from slavery.81
