Note 3 — Chapter II · FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MASHONALAND

Here for the first time we saw the iron furnaces in which the natives smelt the iron ore they obtain from the neighbouring mountains. This is a time-honoured industry in Mashonaland. Dos Santos alludes to it in his description, and so do Arab writers of the ninth and tenth centuries, as practised by the savages of their day.3 In Chibi’s country iron-smelting is a great industry. Here whole villages devote all their time and energies to it, tilling no land and keeping no cattle, but exchanging their iron-headed assegais, barbed arrow-heads, and field tools for grain and such domestic commodities as they may require. I am told also of villages which, after the same fashion, have a monopoly of pot-making. This industry is mostly carried on by the women, who deftly build up with clay, on round stands made for the purpose, large pots for domestic use, which they scrape smooth with large shells kept for this object, and then they give them a sort of black glaze with plumbago. In exchange for one of these pots they get as much grain as it will hold.