The East African Trade in Woodcarvings

Opening ParagraphNo one who has visited East Africa has come away without seeing the wood-carvings made and sold by the Kamba. Sets of salad-servers crowned by Masai or Nandi heads, figurines of warriors bearing spear and shield, and models of elephants and leopards—these are their stock-in-trade which they carry to every part of East and Central Africa, to the Rhodesias and the Sudan, the Congo, and, exceptionally, to England. Their carvings are spread on the pavement outside hotels and at the most frequented corners of the main streets or they are hawked in baskets from door to I door. Like the jewellery sold at Port Said, their carvings have an exotic but suspiciously uniform look about them and at the back of everyone's mind there lurks the suspicion that really they are all mass-produced by machines—in Birmingham, or ‘by the Indians’ or at some remote Mission station.‘We have been unable so far to come into contact with the managing body of this organized and doubtlessly machinery-using industry’, wrote an American firm anxious to buy their carvings direct from the manufacturer. The truth is that there is no managing body and no machinery. The carvings are made by hand with tools that were in common use before this century and they are sold in the first instance either by the men who carved them or, more commonly, by Kamba ‘dealers’, who may have started as carvers but who eventually have found trade more profitable than manufacture. Some of the dealers have built up a trade which yields them incomes earned by few other Africans in Kenya, and in general there has come into being, almost entirely as a consequence of Kamba enterprise, a thriving industry which provides men from one of the most barren parts of Kenya with incomes comparable to those earned in the most prosperous agricultural regions.