Decorative Arts

Rimless pots made from fine brown or black clay are produced by women throughout the KwaZulu-Natal region. Pots of this kind are characterized by a smooth, glossy black finish achieved by refiring the already baked pots in a dry grass fire, before rubbing their surfaces with animal fat, usually with the aid of a small pebble. The use of incised lines or protruding mammillae to decorate such pots is widespread, although the practice of adding raised amasumpa, or "warts", is by far the most common decorative technique adopted by the Zulu potters. Pots of this kind are intended principally for serving and drinking a sorghum-based beer that is brewed in larger, comparatively roughly-made clay vessels. The drinking of this beer is associated, not only with the living, but also with the dead, to whom it is offered whenever ritual dictates that the ancestors must be remembered and appeased. Drinkers commonly spill small quantities of beer from their pots in what some people claim is an act of homage to their forebears. Generally speaking, these beer pots are similar in style and decoration to the much smaller drinking-pots into which beer is sometimes decanted for individual consumption. But unlike the latter, their openings are usually covered with woven grass lids, many of which are decorated with beads.