Water pipe in the form of a seated female figure

The Portuguese introduced tobacco (Nicotiana tobacum and Nicotiana rustica) to West Africa in the seventeenth century after they discovered it in the Americas.(27) Tobacco usage in sub-Saharan Africa is recorded on an elaborately decorated Ifa divination tray that originally belonged to a Yoruba king of Adra, in present-day Benin, and was taken to Ulm, Germany, before 1659. Among the motifs is a standing male figure smoking a long-stemmed pipe that was probably made of terracotta and is an example of the earliest type of pipe that has been excavated.(28) Other explorers and merchants, including the Dutch and Arabs, reintroduced tobacco at different times and at various points along the west and east coasts from which it spread to the interior of the continent.

Access to tobacco, whether in the form of leaves or snuff, was a prerogative of African rulers. Chokwe sculptures, for example, portray rulers holding snuff containers, other tobacco paraphernalia, and beautifully carved containers for storing the substance; for an extraordinarily large terracotta pipe belonging to a Bamum ruler, see p. 95. Because imported tobacco was too expensive for ordinary people to obtain, they resorted to substitutes. According to a late nineteenth-century visitor, it was not unusual to see the Chokwe smoke lighted charcoal in place of tobacco.(29)

Tobacco usage inspired artists to create pipes for their patrons, who may have been African or European. These two pipes are excellent examples of this type of object. The Ovimbundu pipe (cat. 105, 1980.44.A-B) in the form of a seated female figure is carved in the characteristic light colored wood used by sculptors. Her head was constructed separately and serves as a cover for the pipe bowl. The details of the figure's coiffure, facial scarification, and hands are pyro-engraved. The stem, which is missing, fitted into the hole in the figure's abdomen.(30)

The rare Kanyok water pipe (cat. 106), of which only three are known, is carved in the form of a seated woman with a swollen abdomen, which serves as the water chamber in which the smoke is cooled before being inhaled. The large covered hole at the center originally held the pipe stem.(31) Water pipes were used by bilumb women who were possessed by ancestral spirits and functioned as diviners. They sat on the chief's stool while performing the divining ritual.(32)

The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art, cat. 106, pp. 282, 284-285.

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NOTES:

27. Laufer, in Laufer, Berthold, Wilfrid D. Hambly, and Ralph Linton. Tobacco and Its Use in Africa. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1930. pp. 16-38.

28. This divination tray is reproduced in Sieber, Roy, and Roslyn Adele Walker. African Art in the Cycle of Life. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of African Art, 1987. p. 73, cat. no. 30.

29. Walker, Roslyn A. “Chokwe Snuff Mortars.” Journal of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society 23, no. 1 (Spring 1991). pp. 21-33.

30. Comparable examples of both types of pipes are reproduced in Jordan, Manuel, ed. Chokwe! Art and Initiation among Chokwe and Related Peoples. Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 1998. p. 180, cat. no. 139; and Petridis, Constantine, ed. Frans M. Olbrechts 1899–1958: In Search of Art in Africa. Antwerp: Ethnographic Museum, 2001. p. 178, cat. no. 85.

31. Smet, Peter A. G. M. de. Herbs, Health, Healers: Africa as Ethnopharmacological Treasury. Berg en Dal, Netherlands: Afrika Museum, 1999. pp. 114-121 describes design of water pipes:
“Real water pipes are employed for smoking tobacco and hemp in many parts of Central and Southern Africa. Basically, these pipes consist of a large container holding water or some other liquid, a bowl with a stem dropping into the liquid, and a stem from the large chamber from which the smoker draws the smoke. One of the main reasons for using such pipes is that the process of bubbling the smoke through the liquid makes it cooler and less harsh. This latter effect is particularly useful when there has not been enough time to remove the harshness of tobacco by sun-drying.”

For two anthropomorphic water pipes by different sculptors in the collections of the British Museum and the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, see:

Cache, Jacques, Jean-Louis Paudrat, and Lucien Stéphan. L’Art Africain. Paris: Éditions Mazenod, 1988. p. 450; and Petridis, Constantine, ed. Frans M. Olbrechts 1899–1958: In Search of Art in Africa. Antwerp: Ethnographic Museum, 2001. n.p., cat. no. 83.

32. Petridis, 2001. n.p., cat. no. 83.