JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center and Regents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts.The hollowed-out gourd is used as a container throughout sub-Saharan Africa.1 As the fruit of one of the continent's earliest cultivated plants, the gourd or calabash, as it is commonly if imprecisely called, has long been exploited and selectively adapted by both nomadic and sedentary peoples.2 The remarkable number of shapes and sizes in which it grows has made it suitable for a host of purposes ranging from the obvious to the ingenious. Simply opened and cleaned, gourds are used for storage or for serving food and drink. In combination with other materials, they become musical instruments, smoking pipes, fishing floats, or ritual regalia. The gourd's high versatility is essentially due to its inherent properties: it is light, durable, portable, tractable, and watertight. The medium also lends itself to a rich and varied array of decorative enhancements-ranging from surface dyes and patinas to complex patterns of incised or burned designs to the addition of elements as basic as fiber or as precious as beads and cowries.The most elaborate traditions of gourd decoration are confined to particular areas of the African continent. Of them, northeastern Nigeria can be singled out as a zone of outstanding achievement, diversity, and inventiveness. Some peoples of this region who decorate NORTHEASTERN NIGERIA, SHOWING STYLE AREAS AND DISTRIBUTION OF DECORATIVE TECHNIQUES. calabash containers, such as the Fulani, Kanuri, and Hausa, are well known. Other groups are less familiar, yet their work has received some attention in the literature-the Ga' anda, Tera, Hona, Bata, and Yungur, among others (see B. Rubin 1970, Hodge 1982, Konan 1974).3 This article seeks to introduce a number of peoples whose creative skills are little known, but for whom gourds, both decorated and undecorated, are the focus of a remarkable range of domestic, social, and ritual activities.The diversity of calabash decoration in northeastern Nigeria is matched by the complexity of its geography, ethnography, linguistics, and history. North of the Benue River, five geographical style areas can be delineated: the Ga'anda Hills, the Gongola-Hawal Valley, the Uba Plains, the Potiskum Plains, and the Benue-Gongola Valley (see map). While the region lies within the broad belt of savanna grassland extending across sub-Saharan Africa, its topography varies considerably, ranging from extremely rugged upland zones east and north of the Gongola-Hawal confluence to gentle, undulating plains in the far northeast and northwest.4 Most of the peoples of northea...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center and Regents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts.
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