Wood Carving—An Ancient African Art
By Awake! correspondent in Nigeria
WOOD-CARVERS have been busy for a long time in Benin City, located in what is now southern Nigeria. Four hundred years ago, Benin City was the capital of a powerful and highly organized forest kingdom. Visitors from Europe marveled at the city’s broad, straight streets, its well-arranged houses, and its dignified and law-abiding people. For centuries Benin City thrived as one of western Africa’s most important commercial and cultural centers.
The kingdom of Benin was ruled by a succession of kings called obas. The obas actively promoted art. Adorning their splendid palace in Benin City were sculpted heads, exquisite wall plaques cast in bronze, and masterpieces of delicately carved ivory. Although the ancient carvings in wood have not survived the ravages of time and termites, it is clear that wood-carvers were active in the kingdom. Martins Akanbiemu, former curator of the National Museum in Lagos, writes: “The guild of wood carvers . . . appears to be the oldest to work for the Oba.”
In 1897, British forces sacked Benin City and carried off to Europe its now priceless art treasures—over 2,000 pieces. Today, the largest collections of ancient Beninese art are displayed, not in Nigeria, but in museums in London and Berlin.
Wood Carving Today
Today Benin City is a bustling town much like many others in Nigeria. Yet, traces of its former glory remain. The palace has been rebuilt, and the present oba resides there. You can see evidence of the deep moat that surrounded the ancient city; and if you listen carefully, you can hear the gentle tick tick tick of chisel on wood.
A man named Johnson has been carving wooden sculptures in Benin City for 20 years. In centuries past, wooden and brass heads preserved the memory of those who died; they adorned the altars of ancestral worship. But the heads that Johnson carves do not resemble those formerly used for religious purposes. His are for decoration only.
Johnson works in ebony, a hard, brittle wood ideal for carving. He uses mostly the heartwood, or inner wood, of the tree. Nigerian ebony heartwood is often jet black, though some trees produce heartwood that is streaked or is gray to black in color. He includes some sapwood, or outer wood, in the carving; this adds a pleasing red color, which complements the black. Both red and black ebonies polish to a beautiful luster.
Ebony is plentiful in Nigeria. When an ebony tree is felled, it is often left in the bush for a few months to season. Even after the ebony log arrives in his workshop, Johnson allows the wood to dry out several months longer before he uses it. This is essential, since wood that is not dry can change shape and crack.
When he is ready to carve, Johnson uses a handsaw to cut a piece about 15 inches long. After waiting another week to make sure that the piece does not crack, Johnson marks the wood with chalk to outline the head he wants to carve, and then he sets to work.
First he uses a flat chisel, then a curved chisel, and then a finer chisel. After that, he files with a rasp. The carver’s knife is then used to etch in detail. As Johnson works, he concentrates intensely on the wood. Carelessness can result in a sculpture with a strange-looking smile or an eye looking in the wrong direction.
After the carving is done, Johnson’s apprentices sand the piece with progressively finer grades of sandpaper. Finally, they apply furniture polish or shoe polish and buff it with a shoe brush to make it shine. It takes two days to carve a wooden head like the one in the pictures. It takes another three days to sand and polish it.
When the carving is finished, Johnson puts it aside for a couple of months to make sure that no cracks appear. If the wood was thoroughly dry before the carving began, there will be no cracking. That is usually the case. If a crack does occur, the carving goes back to the workshop for filling, sanding, and repolishing.
Learning the Carver’s Art
Johnson has six apprentices, ranging from 10 to 18 years of age. They learn the carver’s art backward, from the last job to the first. In this order the first thing the apprentice learns is polishing. Then he learns sanding. Later, he is shown how to use a rasp. Eventually, the day comes when he picks up a flat chisel to make the first cuts on a new block of wood.
“Not everyone can be a carver,” says Johnson. “First, you need to have aptitude along with the ability to concentrate. You also have to learn how to be patient with your progress and how to cope with your failures. You need perseverance too, since it takes at least three years to be good at carving. But that is not the end of it—learning never ends. With practice, you improve all the time.”
[Box/Picture on page 20]
The Ant and the Wood-Carver
Some say that African art owes a debt to the white ant, or termite. The wood-carver creates a sculpture, and the white ant (with some help from the tropical climate) destroys it, sometimes within a few days! Over the centuries the white ant has kept the wood-carver busy. It has been an endless yet constructive cycle: The ant destroys, and the carver begins afresh, with opportunities to improve his skill and develop imaginative new styles.
The book African Kingdoms states: “Mold and the diligent white ant substantially removed any chance for older works to fix their details upon the work of subsequent generations. Consequently, along with the recurring need for new works, there was also a greater opportunity for variation in form; there was far less copying, and much more dependence upon individual skill and imagination.”
Some say that this relationship between the ant and the wood-carver helps explain the artistic excellence that has made African art so famous. In his book Nigerian Images, scholar William Fagg observes: “Let us . . . pay tribute to the white ant, which, however unwelcome to man most of its activities may be, has engaged through the centuries and millennia in a continuous and immensely productive dialogue with the tropical woodcarver.”
[Picture Credit Line]
Courtesy of Dr. Richard Bagine
[Pictures on page 19]
Making a carving:
1. choosing the best piece of wood,
2. outlining the head to be carved,
3. using a chisel, 4. sanding, 5. polishing