Rift Valley Calabash Pipe

Western knowledge of the material cultures of the central and eastern regions of Africa is poor. The region is vast, rugged and diverse. Its colonial overseers, the British and Portuguese, took a largely haphazard approach to documenting and identifying its traditional art and artifacts. This beautiful and richly surfaced pipe arrived in the United States from Tanzania around 2003. Its precise origins are not known but an old Nyamwezi (Tanzania) staff from the William Brill collection depicts a man puffing on a pipe of similar form. The British Museum on the other hand houses a small number of African gourd and ceramic pipes, the most analogous of which to our pipe is one collected in 1909 in Zambia/Malawi and identified as Bemba. The Bemba are a populous Bantu ethnic group related to the Luba. The British Museum pipe features a ceramic bowl of similar form as well as nearly identical wire work in the area where the bowl and calabash meet. It should be noted that neighboring and not necessarily culturally related peoples, may well have used essentially identical pipes as many cultural artifacts are not strictly tribal but may be simply regional in style. 14″ long, mounted on a hardwood base.

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