beer pot, unrecorded Zulu artist

This pot from South Africa was made by a Zulu artist to hold beer made from sorghum. Sorghum beer is considered to be a food of the ancestors, and its creation and consumption were governed by gendered social norms; historically, beer was brewed and served by women but enjoyed by all members of the family regardless of gender. The treatment and manufacture of beer pots was likewise guided by gendered practices. Pottery was typically a woman's vocation in Africa because of its association with cooking. In some regions, men are forbidden to touch unfired clay. There were also social restrictions in place in the Msinga region of South Africa, where a woman could not begin to make pottery until after she had children. When potters married, a diffusion of style occurred as they learned new techniques and styles from a different region.

There are four main styles of beer pots: the imbiza, used for brewing; the ukhamba, used for serving; the uphiso, which has an elongated neck and is used for transportation; and the umancishana, which is usually undecorated and is also used for serving. Based on its form and size, this coil-built pot was most likely an ukhamba. The v-shaped band of raised bumps falls into a broad category of embellishments known as amasumpa. Zulu potters used multiple methods to create amasumpa: adhering smooth slabs of clay to the body of the vessel and carving designs, applying individual conical bumps, or pushing out raised dots from the inside. Regardless of method, raised amasumpa designs were originally used to keep the pot from slipping out of one’s hands.

Written by Eva Philpot

This large beer pot featuring a zig-zag band of raised bumps, or amasumpa, represents an established Zulu art form found in many museum collections. However, the history of the amasumpa motif reveals how African art and modes of decoration developed within racialized systems of classification. Before colonial rule, Zulu women created ceramics characterized by diverse decorative techniques that revealed the robust, multi-directional exchange of artistic knowledge among various individuals and communities. By the mid-1900s, however, apartheid educational policies in South Africa forced the “retribalization” of rural black communities into segregated racial and ethnic groups. Mapping this policy onto women’s art, Jack Grossert, a white arts administrator and educator, promoted the exclusive use of amasumpa design to Zulu potters through textbooks. Zulu artists have since engaged with Grossert’s prescriptive teaching in negotiating demand for this art form.