Metaphors, myths and making pots: Chewa clay arts.

In this essay I argue that pottery and other clay forms made by Chewa women in central Malawi collectively reflect recurring themes that resonate throughout Chewa society (FIG 1). My approach is to seek relatedness, searching for the likeness of patterns and motifs from one social space (domestic) to another (ritual). This approach is derived from the idea of "connectedness" suggested to me by Philip Ravenhill, that the tiniest detail could be connected to a much wider range of semantics, objects, social realms, and ideas. (1) The seeking of relatedness is more than seeing similarities in objects across media, though this is also evident; it is the metaphorical collapsing of ideas (Ricouer 1978, Sacks 1979, Tilley 1999) as they are presented widely throughout social life.

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Ravenhill wrote, "sometimes that which is at first seen as unusual comes to be accepted as a given. The initial why? is not met with a response, and so the question recedes from consciousness and lies dormant, seeming to disappear" (2000:60). A turning point in Ravenhill's field research was a serendipitous moment when he was told "sheep have lineage," and leading from this, "all things have lineage." During my field research with Chewa potters, I was told "it is our custom," "that is what we do," "it is tradition," and the initial "why" necessarily became dormant until a serendipitous moment when a deeper understanding was revealed. As Ravenhill found connectedness through the serendipity of a man talking about a sheep, so too I found that pottery provided an entree into myth, kinship, marriage, and cosmology.

The ethnography of Chewa pottery described herein is the result of extended periods of field research, revisiting the same potter many times from 1988 to 2005. I was apprenticed to Mai Mpokosa, the Namkungwi, an important teacher and keeper of knowledge. The title of Namkungwi is given to a senior woman in the village, respected by all members of the community and chosen by other senior woman to guide the Chief, arrange initiations for girls, and present issues on behalf of the women to the Chief. She is present at both male and female initiation instruction, being initiated in both. This Namkungwi had the patience to teach me to make a rather unshapely pot, (2) but more importantly allowed me to be initiated in the knowledge of women and the specialized knowledge of potters. My most intensive period of research was in 1992, during field research for my PhD. The focus of my research had been the men's secretive society of masking, Nyau. (3) However, the study of pottery became increasingly important to my work on masks and masked performances as the cosmologies expressed through these arts were complementary: One enhances understanding of the other. My work among the potters revealed as much about Chewa society, religion, cosmology, and art as the more visible and vibrant masked performance (Lawal 1997).

One recurring image or motif related to pottery was a simple mark called mpini that, once recognized, I realized recurred in multiple media, even on masks made by men (FIG. 2; Aguilar 1996). Mpini are marks such as slash marks, crescents, or circles, and could be combined together in different ways to create larger images or figures. Markings such as the repetitive indentation marks around the rim of a pot are connected by the word "mpini" and by a range of cosmological associations that are found across otherwise seemingly disparate arts. I became aware that mpini was more than a mere marking: It was a theme found in art, in language, and in cosmology. In short, it became a metaphor for the connectedness of the Chewa social world.

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In the space of this article, I can only discuss a limited range of material, such as tools to make pottery, markings on pots, and myths that are reenacted in the making of pots. However, the connectedness of clay extends beyond pottery to initiation rituals and objects, house paintings, scarification, and rock paintings. Clay is a substance that is present in all of these arts, and pottery-making is a long, technological process of transformation (through fire) of that substance (Barley 1995; Fagg and Picton 1970; Frank 1998; Roy 1993, 200l). Alfred Gell (1998) describes this process as a magical one, as simple substances are recreated into works of art. For Gell, process is more important than the finished object, as it is the mystery of the technology, the intention of practice, and the metaphorical significance of the actions of the potter that produce the art object and also recreate society. In my field research, the process of pottery-making was the focus of intensive discussion, while the completed object passed from the potter's hands to be sold, burned black in cooking, and eventually broken. In another way of understanding this technological process, the clay undergoes a kind of transubstantiation, a process described by Victor Turner and others (Turner 1967, 1974; Herbert 1993) to explain the role of change through a ritual process. In the making of pottery, the simple, worked clay and water are transformed into a new, hardened substance, imbued with significance from having undergone the ritual process and associated with the divine world or cosmology (Eliade 1958, Fardon 1990; Hinfelaar 1989; Richards 1972). (4)

THE POTTERY PROCESS

Pottery begins life deep in the ground as raw clay. As has been done in these hills for many decades, young women dig the clay, forming small mines in the earth in order to procure the clay needed. (8) The clay is then set in shallow pools of water beside the potter's house, where it is cured and prepared for pottery-making. When the potter is ready to work, she takes a bundle of clay to a dry, exposed stone ledge on the edge of village. There she kneads the clay and removes impurities such as stones and clumps of soil. It is then brought back to the house, where the potter prepares to work. She sets a pot of water beside her and brings out a large pot shard that holds various tools. She adds collected bits of old pottery pieces and finely ground bits of old broken pots to the wet clay in order to give it strength.

While the potter works, the prepared clay is covered to keep it moist. The potter begins the pot by taking a lump of clay, tossing it in the air, twisting and shaping and molding it with her hands (FIG. 3). She punches the clay lump, pushing her fist into the center to create the shape called mimba, 'the womb', and continues to form the pot in her hands. This process takes only a few minutes. She places the emerging pottery form on a large shard of old pottery, which she turns round and round, continuing to shape the pot with her hands (FIG. 4). Then she adds bits of moist clay, covering the remaining unused clay each time. She begins building the shape, working up the sides and defining it as she increases the size of the pot. She frequently moistens her hands from the pot of water and works the moisture from her hands into the clay.

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As she works with the clay, building the sides, she creates the shape and size desired for a specified purpose. Small, wide pots are made for cooking relish and deeper, rounded pots are used for cooking maize meal--nsima--in larger quantities. To shape the pot, she uses various tools whose qualities have associations in Chewa cosmology: Whiteness, shininess, freshness, food, agriculture, and water are all associated with health, well-being, and closeness to God and the ancestors. A cob of maize from the garden lengthens, thins, and smooths the sides (FIG. 5). A smooth, white river pebble helps maintain the rounded belly of the pot, and a curved shell rounds the thinner sides. A strip of white sisal, used in making mats and baskets, is now a tool to trim the top before adding the lip of the pot (FIG. 6), and a fresh green leaf smooths the rounded rim. Finally, the shiny knife marks the unfired pottery.

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The pots are left to dry and harden to the consistency of leather. Often a small fire of twigs and grasses is set in the belly of the pot to ensure the inside is sufficiently dried. Once partially dried, the pots are ready to be trimmed and smoothed with simple metal blades. The potter scrapes the surface of the nearly finished pot, thinning the rounded bottom and cutting away any imperfections in the smooth surface. A knife is used to incise markings (mpini) around the rim of the pot. These markings are unique to a particular potter. One woman marks her pottery with simple slash marks around the rim, and another is known for a simple indent made with the handle of a knife, symmetrically repeated around the neck of the pot. One woman is known for the distinctive shape of her work: dramatically horizontal pots with a sharp edge delineating the belly of the pot from the neck. Some place a mark on the rounded underside of the pot, sometimes rendered invisible in the pottery-making process. Because the pots are sold by traders, few outside the pottery area may be aware of these differences, but for the potter community, these patterns and shapes identify the individual potter.

When thoroughly dried, the pots of a week's work are gathered together in a central spot within the village to be fired. The pots are carefully placed in a pile on cleared ground and wooden branches are arranged around them, followed by dry grasses. The dry grasses are set alight and blaze for an hour (FIG. 7). During this time, preparations are made to mark the pots once they have been fired.

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The women have dug up a special root known as nkunga, with red sap that is described by the women as blood. When I twisted the root, it "bled" and the red sap on my hand indeed looked like a gush of real blood. I was told the sap is acidic, and so it was immediately removed from my hand. The roots are considered sources of fertility and the blood of life, and each living person is associated with a nkunga root. The root is used in medicines used for cleansing a woman after birth by helping to purge any remaining blood from her womb. Roots for pottery marking are carefully selected by an older woman, who chooses only old plants. These can safely be harvested, since presumably they are associated with a deceased person; digging a young root associated with a living person is believed to literally cut short that person's life. The root is beaten against a hard rock, just as the clay was beaten against a hard rock, and the root and its sap are placed in a pot of water and worked through. As the red sap is kneaded from the root in the water, it turns milky white and is then left to rest in the water.

As the fire burns down to glowing red embers, the pots are buried in the ashes. The women use long poles to bring the red-hot pots out of the fire for the final process (FIG. 8). The fired pots are painted with the nkunga root solution. The water and sap form a stain running down the interior and exterior of the pots as the whitish liquid sizzles to a dark brown (FIG. 9). Once the pots have been stained in this way, they are left to dry and cool.

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The incisions and painted patterns of the pots are admired for their beauty: the incisions with the knife admired for symmetry and evenness and the stained patterns from the root drippings for their randomness, chance patterns that seem particularly attractive. The women offer practical reasons for why these markings are made: They are said to demonstrate that the pots are strong, since they do not break when brushed with the liquid while still hot. However, the women also talk about how pleasing the pottery is to look at and admire. There are certain characteristics of well-made pottery that a group of potters all agreed were pleasing and beautiful. The color of the fired clay is important; a clear color is preferred to a muddied one. The pottery is better if it has a sheen and the clay is not dull. The brown stains are also transparent, and this transparency is perceived as a kind of brightness valued by the women. During firing a variety of colors appear on the surface of the pot, such as dark blue, orange, and earth tones, and sometimes a grey-green shade. The way these colors play on the surface with the applied stain can be very beautiful and renders each pot unique (FIG. 1).

Once made, the pottery is taken away to be sold (FIG. 10). The beautiful patterns, clear, bright clay, and translucent stains will soon fade in the sunlight and pots used for cooking will become blackened with fires and ash. In time the pots will crack and break. Eventually, some of the old broken pots will become shards for the potter's wheel, and the dust of old pots will be used again in making new ones.

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POTS AS RELATIONSHIPS: WHOLE OR BROKEN

Pots are useful objects. They are used for cooking, for storage, and for collecting water. Porous pots are used as "refrigerators" for condensing and cooling water. But for the Chewa, these practical uses are only part of a larger, more complex, and cosmological interpretation.

I suggest that, through transubstantiation, Chewa potters create new forms that are life-enhancing. A finished pot enhances the well-being, health, and hygiene of a woman's home. It is a sign of a good life and good food. A good cooking pot is taken as a sign of a good marriage, and in contrast, a broken pot is taken as a sign of a marriage in trouble, demonstrated by a quarrelling couple throwing out a pot and breaking it. A husband should eat from his wife's pot and never from the pot of another woman. A good husband must provide his wife with her cooking pots. If there are marital problems, the wife may show anger by refusing to cook, forcing her husband to find his meal elsewhere. And ultimately, a broken marriage pot is a sign of a broken marriage.

Children, who belong to the mother in Chewa society, are taught when they are very young to eat only from their own mother's pot. Boys initiated into adulthood (5) are told they may no longer eat directly from their mother's relish pot, a smaller pot used to cook precious meat, vegetables, and savories. He can be given his relish on a plate or with his maize meal, but he cannot take it directly from the cooking pot: There is a suggestion of incest when an older son eats from his mother's marriage pot. Young, unmarried men eat from the larger family pot of maize meal, and eventually will need to find their own wives and share food from their own marriage pot. (6)

Other life passages and relationships are signified by pottery. When a woman dies, one of her pots is often broken and buried with her. Broken pots are sometimes scattered over the graves of the deceased. (7) Mbiyazodooka ('broken pot') is the name of a particular masked dancer, depicting an outcast from society, one who has no kinship ties to the village and is often associated with the loss of a mother. (8)

Whole pots, ones that are life-enhancing, are contrasted with broken pots as signs of the fragility of human relationships. Smashed pots reflect broken marriages, broken kinship ties, and other broken relationships, and they also signify separation from society, being orphaned or outcast. Whole pots signify marriage, kinship, family, children, sharing food, life, birth. Broken pots are metaphors for death and breaks in social relationships as whole pots are for life and unity in society.

POTS AS WOMBS, BIRTH, AND LIFE

The Chewa women with whom I apprenticed spoke of pots as being like a womb (mimba), shaped like a pregnant woman. I was told that, just as sexual relations during pregnancy is prohibited, potters in the past could not have sexual relations during the critical stages of pottery-making, such as when pots are being fired, because the technological process of making pots is associated with female fertility, birth, and the creation of new life. The process of shaping the pot, molding it into a womb-like shape, is a mysterious process. Fresh from the potter's hands it is still soft, but over time it matures into a hardened shape that is crafted, marked, and fired into life as a fully formed object.

Among the Chewa, only women make pots, and potters live together in communities of sisters, mothers, and aunts. Most potters learn from their mothers (or "many mothers," referring to all adult women in the village), as the young girls sit and observe the women making pots, sometimes making small pots of their own with the clay. Older girls collect the clay and help with the firing and retrieving of the hot pottery. A woman may become a potter at any age; one elderly woman, who had been married to a Chief, returned to the village where she was born, and her nieces taught her how to make pottery for sale.

Living in the Chewa community, all the women are initiated in female knowledge. In Chewa cosmology, God is in the soil as well as the sky, and the presence of God in the soil is female. There, deep in the soil, the earth is like a womb giving birth to germinating seeds. I suggest that the pots the women make are metaphors of this knowledge of creation and birth.

MYTHOLOGICAL THEMES

As with pottery forms, pottery-making has myriad associations with Chewa myths, relationships, and beliefs about the creation of life, a fact that became evident to me as I learned the process and its significance from the woman potters alongside whom I worked. Following are two myths, a creation myth and the myth of a legendary rain-maker turned snake (Schoffeleers 1992, Schoffeleers and Roscoe 1985; de Heusch 1982 describes similar myths). Both of these are then interpreted in relation to pottery and Chewa cosmology.

So we begin in the beginning, when man and woman first came to earth, falling from the sky to the barren earth [ground/ land] in a cataclysmic torrent of rain with thunder and lightning that made the earth like clay. Rains covered the earth and in low areas rivers and pools of water formed. The rains brought all life with them and imprinted new life in the wet clay on a high plateau that was once hard as rock. Here these first impressions of life remained as the rains dried and the rock hardened again. As if in proof of these origins, the Kaphirintiwa Plateau in the Dzalanyama Mountains still carries the ancient footprints of men, women, and animals and the imprints of various objects including a cooking pot, a mortar and pestle, and a threshing basket.

The living gathered in the savannah grasses, grown tall and green in the rains. All dwelled in the same space together, including God. Humans, though, were not content, and learned to make fire. They were warned about its danger, but one day, the fires ignited the grasses, which then burned out of control. God escaped high into a tree and then into the sky. Some animals, in rage and anger, ran away from man. Others were frightened and ran toward him and became tamed. As the grasses burned, the air became dry. The season of dryness parched the earth, dried up the pools of water, made the clay hard, and the winds became stronger; but then the rains came again after the winds. Finally the fires died into ashes. Life did begin again, as the seed germinated under the ashes. However, as punishment, man and all creatures now had to die to rejoin God.

This creation myth explains the dry and wet seasons, the mountains of the Rift Valley, and the deep pools of water and lakes. The myth explains the objects of everyday life--pottery, baskets, mortar, and pestle--as gifts that came with the rains, leaving imprints with the footsteps of woman and man and animals. It explains the presence of fire, earth, and water. It explains why God is so distant, why there must be death, and why there is renewed life. It is seen in the grasses that grow green and high, then become parched and dry. It is present morning and evening, in the smell of smoke rising through the thatched roof from cooking fires in every village household. It explains why the Chewa burn the grasses every year toward the end of the dry season, leaving glowing red gashes on the sides of hills that are seen for miles at night time. After the burning, the ash is laid over the barren earth where, with the coming of the rains, the green stalks of maize will come to life again. This myth is not articulated very often, and it took a senior Chief renowned for his love and knowledge of Nyau to tell it to me. Yet people are made aware of all that the myth explains about their lives as part of initiation into adulthood in the village.

There is another important myth that helps to provide insight into the deeper significance of pottery and the pottery making process. In this myth (13) a young man named Mbona had the gift of rain-making. One year when the rains were very late and famine threatened, his Chief called upon him to help make the rains come. Mbona agreed to perform the rain ritual, but warned the Chief that all the people must remain inside their houses for their safety. Mbona flashed his dagger and called upon the lightning and the thunder, and by the end of the dance, the rains were falling. However, a little boy who ran out of his house was struck by lightning and died. The boy's mother, a sister of the Chief, was so distressed she inflamed the Chief with fears that Mbona would take the Chief's power. Eventually the Chief agreed to kill Mbona. Mbona heard of this plot to kill him and escaped. The legend includes different variations describing how Mbona repeatedly escaped the Chief's warriors, even allowing them to try and cut him with daggers, and they failed. Finally, Mbona told the warriors how he could be killed: with a simple sharp blade of grass.

The warriors cut him with the grass and killed him. Mbona's blood flowed, forming first a river, and then a flood that filled a deep pool of water. When the men realized they had killed a spirit and not a man, they built a shrine near the pool. Mbona called to women from the depths of the water, demanding a good woman to be his wife. He selected a mature, older woman, who took a vow of celibacy to become the wife of the spirit. At night, Mbona came to her in the form of a python snake and whispered to her. The woman, then, had authority from the words of the python spirit Mbona to relate his words, warnings, and demands to others. She became a priestess who interpreted the messages from Mbona to the whole society.

These myths of creation are reinterpreted in the materials, actions, and processes of pottery making. Relationships with the earth, soil, and clay, pools of water, fire, and heat cooled again by water, are metaphors that recreate the world in the making of pots: rain and pools of water used in the curing of the clay, hard stone and dryness in the purifying of the clay. Clay is the substance created in the first rains that brought life to the Dzalanyama Mountains, and the red blood of Mbona is present in the red clay mined from the deep pools of water. Some of the tools used in pottery-making are from streams or farming (associated with the earth), and the knives are the blades of Mbona's dagger, flashing in the light. Pots are made from the clay that created the world, shaping raw earth into wombs that are metaphors of bearing life, the birth of all that lives. The red of the nkunga root sap and the red of iron ore in the deep pools and streams of water are Mbona's blood. The reddish brown stain on the pottery is also Mbona's blood.

The firing of pottery is interpreted as a recreation of the fires that caught the dry grasses in the mythology of creation. In that dangerous moment, pottery wombs may pop, crack, and break. The outcome of weeks of work is decided by the firing, but it is also the moment of mystery, of transformation and transubstantiation from one substance to another, from soft clay to a shaped and hardened vessel. The dry season of fires cools, just as the pottery cools in the embers and ashes. From the cooled ashes, the pots are removed with long sticks and dripped with the blood-red sap, reminiscent of Mbona's fresh blood, turned milky white, which then becomes deep brown-red like earth on the surface of the still-hot clay.

Mythologies relate cosmology of day and night, sun and moon. As the myths explain the cosmology of the Chewa, the women explain how the sun sets into an enormous pot and emerges in the morning as renewed life, giving birth to each new day. The sun returns to the clay womb every evening to be reborn again the next day. Pottery is also likened to the moon, and the various phases of the moon are likened to the various shapes of pottery, from round orb to crescent. The wide, shallow pot made for cooking relish is as beautiful as the crescent moon, similar in shape and with a bright, white-like surface that reflects in the calm way the moon shines.

THE CONNECTEDNESS OF CHEWA POTTERY

From the morning cooking fires that heat pots filled with maize meal to the evening ashes, myths are constantly reenacted. From the dusty red pathways leading to villages to the fields of maize and the seedlings covered in ash from the burned dry grasses, images of creation recur. The smell of the first rains falling with thunder and lightning, the sun in the day and moon at night, ground nut tendrils and the deep rich shades of soil, to the evening fires, crescent pots of relish and rounded bellies storing grain or cooling water, everyday life is filled with metaphors. Moments of great upheaval and change, funeral bonfires, initiations of the young into maturity, harvests and plantings, aging and illness, marriage and births, divorces and separations, the teachers and students, and the Namkungwi guiding a new Chief, these themes recur over and again.

The connectivity of color and form recur over and again, as the world is constantly renewed, pottery is constantly being made, and life is constantly changing and repeating in cycles of life and death. Metaphors repeat, interplay, and layer one upon the other. Recurring images and metaphors connect disparate aspects of society, creating and re-creating understanding of a world. The art of pottery-making becomes the art of creation and the completed pot a way of connecting worlds.

All photos by Laurel Birch Aguilar, Nkhoma region, Malawi, 1988, except where otherwise noted.

References cited

Aguilar, Laurel Birch. 1996. Inscribing the Mask: Interpretation of Nyau Masks and Ritual Performance among the Chewa of Central Malawi. Freiburg: University of Freiburg Press Switzerland.

Barley, Nigel. 1995. Smashing Pots: Works of Clay in Africa. Washington DC: Smithsonian Books.

Eliade, Mircea. 1958. Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture. New York: Harper.

Fagg, William, and John Picton. 1970. The Potter's Art in Africa. London: The British Museum.

Fardon, Richard. 1990. Between God, the Dead, and the Wild: Chamba Interpretations of Religion and Ritual. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Frank, Barbara. 1998. Mande Potters and Leatherworkers: Art and Heritage in West Africa. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Herbert, Eugenia. 1993. Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hinfelaar, Hugo F. 1989. Religious Change among the Bemba-Speaking Women of Zambia. PhD diss. University of London.

de Heusch, Luc .1982. The Drunken King, or, the Origin of the State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lawal, Babatunde. 1997. The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Makumbi, Archibald. 1955. Maliro ndi Miyambo ya Acewa. Nairobi: Longman and Green.

Ravenhill, Philip. 2000. "Likeness and Nearness: The Intentionality of the Head in Baule Art." African Arts 33 (2):60-71, 92.

Richards, Audrey. 1972. Chisungu: A Girls' Initiation Ceremony among the Bembe of Northern Rhodesia. 2d ed. London: Tavistock.

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Schoffeleers, J.M. 1992. River of Blood: The Genesis of a Martyr Cult in Southern Malawi c. AD 1600. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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--. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Notes

The most important resources in this research are my informers: Isaac Chisati, Bobo Yosiya (deceased), Rosemary N'gonzo (deceased), Chief N'gonzo, Mai Mpokosa, Juliet Ngwira, Nicolas Nigwira (deceased), and Davie Guzani among many. Bobo Yosiya offered me the first glimpses into local village life and the Nyau, secretive society of the Chewa people. Bobo died in 1991. After this time, Isaac introduced me to a group of women potters, including Mai Mpokosa, her sister, and her aunt (now deceased); they in particular are responsible for much of the ethnographic data herein. In this journey of connectedness between Chewa potters and the pottery they make, I refer to other works and authors, but I remember the first insights from my academic teachers, scholars in the discipline, and most particularly my teachers in the field: the women who make the pottery and tried their best to teach me. I walked miles to see one such woman, a potter who had declared celibacy and held authority to collect certain substances from pools of water used in her pottery-making and midwifery. Another Malawian woman has allowed me to stay in her home over various field trips in the last fifteen years, and I am honoured to call Juliet Ngwira my dear friend. As pottery is more than an object in relation to other things, the teaching of Christopher Roy instilled the sense of the aesthetic of the object itself. While I believed there was a natural beauty in this particular style of pot, I also learned from Roy a deeper aesthetic appreciation of pottery and African art. Other teachers, John Picton, Allen Roberts, and Mary Jo Arnoldi among them, furthered my learning and I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

(1) As supervisor for my MA degree in African Art and Anthropology, Philip Ravenhill explained his theoretical construction to me as part of my tutorials (individual lectures). I will necessarily draw on the research of others in the field, Matthew Schoffeleers (1992, 1979, 1985) in particular, who published the myths I retell.

(2) This same first pot and others are now in the British Museum collection. Examples of Chewa clay pots collected in periods of field research are presently on exhibition in the British Museum Africa exhibition and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art.

(3) Nyau is a secretive society that is associated with men, but includes all people within the cosmological and religious context. Nyau members perform the Gule Wamkulu (Great Dance) masked dances with women singing and clapping and men wearing masks and dancing. The Gule Wamkulu is performed for funerals, initiations, ancestor remembrance, and rituals for new Chiefs. Nyau is dominant in rural areas of the central region in Malawi, and border areas of Zambia.

(4) Reference to the divine, to religion, cosmology, and ritual are all present in the work of Victor Turner (1967). Transubstantiation is presented by others, notably Eugenia Herbert (1993) in relation to African iron-making. Iron-making was historically the male counterpart to female pottery-making in the central region of Malawi, both involving transformation of the earth to hardened usable forms through firing, and both are associated in historical literature as rituals.

(5) Initiation of boys is generally from about age nine to mid teens, though some are initiated as early as seven and others are full adults before undergoing initiation. Initiation among the Chewa does not include circumcision.

(6) This is also explained in Makumbi (1955), who wrote about Chewa customs in a Chichewa publication stressing that boys should not eat from their mother's relish pot after initiation into the men's society of Nyau.

(7) I have visited various graveyards, new and old, and have seen shards and occasionally whole pots on some of the graves. A woman was buried with her pot in one funeral I witnessed, and shards littered the ground around chasms in Nkhoma mountain around the burial sites during the times of wars, most significantly the Nhoni wars (mid eighteenth century) still in the social memories of people.

(8) In other research by Philip Ravenhill (personal communication, 1990), if an elderly person can recall a relationship that is still distant enough to be acceptable as kinship, the couple undergoes a ceremony where the families break a pot to indicate that the kinship tie is broken, and the couple is allowed to marry.

Laurel Birch Aguilar received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She is currently in University of Edinburgh development and involved in the University Centre of African Studies. Her publications include Inscribing the Mask and, as co-author, Women's Organizing, as well as articles based on her field research in Malawi. As chair of MAFAM UK Trust, she continues to work on relief of hardship and famine in the villages where she did her research. [e-mail]