People in Action: Farming & Culture

While agriculture is central to so many African communities as a source of food and income, farming and farm products also play a crucial role in supporting the expressive cultures, religions and art of Africans around the continent. Celebrations and other cultural expressions related to African agriculture are dynamic and always changing. But a close look at just a few of these cultural practices: masquerades, beautifully embellished gourds and vessels, decorated houses, and ritual objects reveals the myriad ways in which farming sustains, and is sustained by, the power of African creativity.

• Painted Houses: A Prayer for “Peace, Rain, and Plenty”
• Nuna Butterfly Masquerades at Planting Time
• Decorated Gourds and Woven Fiber Vessel
• Chi wara Masquerade: Ensuring a Robust Harvest

Painted Houses: A Prayer for “Peace, Rain, and Plenty”

Lesotho

In Lesotho, Basotho women are the farmers. They incise and paint murals on the sides of their rectangular houses, with patterns that evoke cultivated fields and resemble the furrows hoed into the earth. In this way their labor—and their very identity as women farmers—is literally inscribed onto their houses. This women’s mural art is called “litema” from the Sesotho word hi lema, to “cultivate.” But the colorful patterns are far more than decorative; by painting murals, these women honour their ancestors who, in turn, will honour their prayers for “Peace, Rain and Plenty.”

The murals may include abstract pictures of traditional plants used for food, such as maize, sorghum and varieties of pumpkin. Colors are symbolic as well: red, blood of the earth; white, peace, happiness and purity; and black, the realm of the shades, which can connote protection or defilement.

These exquisite murals inextricably link farming, identity and Basotho women’s cultural and artistic expression.

Nuna Butterfly Masquerades at Planting Time

Bukina Faso

For the farming Nuna peoples of Burkina Faso, masks and their dances embellish visually spectacular occasions when the community gathers, including during the changing of the seasons and the yearly cycles of planting and harvesting.

This butterfly mask is danced at planting time. It represents a nature spirit, which appears as a harbinger of the rain that is so essential to successful harvests of crops such as sorghum, peanuts, maize and sesame. The butterflies are symbols of new life drawn to the pools and puddles left by the first rains. The butterfly masquerade is associated with continuity and renewal—and the start of the farming season.

The mask is made of a long carved wooden plank, and its design varies between regions. It is decorated with geometric shapes of red, black and white pigments, and is re-painted yearly. This particular mask features a projecting diamond-shaped mouth, a human head and prominent concentric circles that return the gaze of its audience. Worn with a bulky fibre costume, the masquerader spins in place with a great sweeping motion. At once beautiful and fearsome, the visual power of this mask expresses the important role it continues to play in the cultural life of farming villages.

Decorated Gourds and Woven Fiber Vessel

Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya

Agricultural and pastoral peoples throughout the continent have long made good use of gourds and other natural products to create useful objects of great beauty. Gourds are one of the earliest cultivated plants in Africa and in the hands of African women, can be transformed into visually stunning works of art.

Baby Bonnets

These decorated gourds serve as baby bonnets, shielding the heads of infants as they are carried on their mothers’ backs, often as the women work in the fields or fetch water. Bura women of northeast Nigeria engraved the gourds with the use of hot metal blades. The elaborate, well-balanced patterns and intricate work highlights the value of these gourds as works of art to be seen by all, in the art of everyday life. Gourd decorations range widely, with designs that reflect local aesthetics, tattoo patterns, and the individual creativity of the artist.

Gorfa (milk container)

The pastoral peoples of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya create a variety of elegant storage vessels that are both light and durable, making them ideal for families who must move their homes to graze their livestock in fresh pastureland.

One of the most extraordinary of these vessels is the gorfa, a milk container that is tightly woven from plant fibre and then fumigated with an aromatic wood to seal its inner surface. These vessels are made exclusively by women, who have a deep knowledge of local plants and the environment. The gorfa are also connected to their feminine identity: its form is likened to the womb, and the milk contained within is nourishment for the family.

Chi wara Masquerade: Ensuring a Robust Harvest

Mali

Chi wara is a mythical being that taught the Bamana people of south-central Mali how to farm. Bamana people represent Chi wara with a headdress of intricately carved wood that combines the horns of a large antelope, the body of an aardvark and the textured skin of the pangolin—all animals that dig up the earth. In performances held in the fields, dancers wearing the headdress and long raffia costumes imitate the movements of the antelope, tossing their heads and scratching at the earth with a stick in each hand.

Though changes in religious practices, employment and educational opportunities have led to the masquerade’s decline, some Bamana communities in the Mande Plateau continue to perform the chi wara—not only to ensure a robust harvest, but also as form of commentary on shifting gender relations and other changes in the broader political and economic conditions that shape their lives.

The chi wara historically recognizes the importance of both men’s and women’s contributions to farming. It praises the virtues of hard working farmers and promotes the productivity of their land and labor. Though performed by men, chi wara can take both male and female forms and are danced in pairs, demonstrating the importance of co-operation and harmony between women and men in farming, as well as to produce a new generation.