Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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geographer, wrote in the twelfth century about merchants engaged in Trans-Saharan trade between Sigilmassa and Gana: "They went to the Sudan with salt, pine wood, copper jewelry and glassbeads, called nazm, that they exchange against gold." This quote sheds light on Muraqad (the Colorful, in Hassaniya) or Kiffas, the Mauritanian powderglass beads, that this article (and a book in progress) discusses. A thousand years ago glass beads were part of the merchandise sent transSahara from Sigilmassa, Morocco, to the Gana empire, stapled first in Audaghost. At the southern edge of the Sahara, this town was located in close proximity to Gana where emissaries of both sides, Muslim suppliers and animistic customers, did their final negotiations, before the new purchases were transported to Gana's courts and warehouses. Kiffa, a town among several others in southern Mauritania where Muraqad have been crafted for at least two centuries, is only sixty-five miles south of Audaghost. Its location is important to understand the connection between Muraqad from Kiffa (and other villages in southern Mauritania) and the beads Yaqut's merchants transported to Audaghost. A design- and color-comparison between Yaqut's ancient specimens and authentic Muraqad shows that the former are the precursor prototypes of the more recent Muraqad. But why were beads delivered to Gana from Morocco, when we know that the Levant at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was the producer of most of the Kiffa precursors? Between the tenth and twelfth centuries—when Moroccan traders sent their breakable luxury goods southwards across the Sahara—the Fatimid Caliphate controlled a zone of northern Africa all along the Mediterranean, including Egypt and parts of the Levant, from where the fragile merchandise of their glass workshops went to Fes, then Sigilmassa, where it was registered, stapled and carefully packed for the long journey to Audaghost. Muraqad demonstrate several striking and distinctive features: the brightness of their colors; their silky, shiny surface; their shapes, limited to six types; the laborious execution of the minutest design details and the intriguing control of the hand in keeping their geometry in balance. The finished bead—a hair ornament of religious significance— represents the finest of African handicrafts. Mauritanian women create their beads with just a few tools, the most important being their hands. The equipment involves: mortar and pestle—often relics from ancient times, shards of a transparent glass bottle; monochrome beads (or scrap glass) in five different colors; a few little containers to keep the glass powder; a metal needle; a piece of sheetmetal and a bag of charcoal. The rest consists of water, gum arabic, human saliva, and, depending on the artist's experience and secret knowledge, one or two more ingredients, that result in a glass-paste of five to six colors. The composition of the paste is crucial for the master beadmaker. It makes all the difference between the fine lines we see on the best beads and the sloppy work we find on certain old, but with all new specimens made after 1980. Colorful glass is crushed and washed various times, until the powder reaches a purity and delicacy beyond egg-timer sand. [Native Americans also engaged in washing the powderglass for their pendants (Smith 1981).] The colored powders, one by one, are heated to a certain degree on a hotplate, before being crushed to fine powder one more time. Then it is washed again and left to dry, prior to being kept in little containers. Before the beadmaker begins to decorate the surface of the prefabricated, yet monochrome white bead-core, she individually mixes each of the five colored powders with drops of water/saliva and two additives all beadmakers consider to be their holy and god-given secret, not to be revealed to any outsider. One of the two secret ingredients is feldspar, made KIFFA BEADS showing very rare and beautifully executed patterns on some of the classic powderglass shapes made by Mauritanian women. Courtesy of Thomas Stricker collection. Photograph: Alex and Thomas Stricker. 57 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 MAP OF AFRICA, with cities or areas important in the Trans-Saharan trade or of possible influence in development of Kiffa powderglass technology, latter marked by yellow arrows. Dotted lines link cities involved in trans-Saharan trade. Inset: Important towns in Mauritania. Graphic by Nataliya Busch.