HOW THE YORUBAS PRODUCED GLASS - THE YORUBA TECHNOLOGY

 

        As a result of the misconceptions about Africa, local innovations were not given enough recognition and they were always erroneously attributed to foreign origin. It appears as though anything considered exceptional or complex in the view of the world, could not have been invented by the African continent. However, historical researchers and scholars have helped in genuinely rediscovering Africa. This article will discuss an African technology that has until recently been discredited. 

        This particular African technology has to do with the Material Science known as glass making. The material science of glass making is complex. According to one African scholar; Abidemi Babalola, it has been excluded from the consideration of indigenous African inventions below the Sahara. According to an African researcher, Akinwumi Ogundinran, he writes that it was the Yorubas who "attained the expertise that enabled them to develop a unique recipe for glass manufacture. They mined and processed feldspathic, pegmatite (granites), cobalt, titanium, rubidium, and nickel among others, and combined these with powdered snail shells. The ancestral Yoruba material scientists were fully aware of the elemental properties of these materials.  They then transformed this recipe through precise pyro-technology (firing). To produce glass and glass beads that served as the currency for negotiating political power, economic relations and cultural/spiritual values." 

       The archaeological evidence of the Yoruba glass-making industry dates back to the 11th Century centred at Ile-Ife in the Yoruba land. The locally produced glass beads expanded throughout West Africa. Ile-Ife was even said to have had a monopoly in the development of this Material Science. This contributed to the elevated status of the inclusion of glass in beaded crowns and staffs of Yoruba rulers. Akinwumi Ogundinran writes that, Previously, "many scholars  had thought that this industry was a secondary one, using recycled and reheated glass obtained from medieval Europe and the Islamic world."

          An analysis of the glass in Ile-Ife has given Chemical evidence of a manufacturing site. Akinwumi Ogundinran writes "These studies have shown that the glass objects from archaeological sites in Ile-Ife and in a forty-kilometre radius of the city have unusually high lime and high alumina contents (HLHA), higher than the proportions of alumina and lime found in ancient Islamic, European and Asian centres of glass production.  This has led to the conclusion that Ile-Ife spearheaded a glass-making technology that was unique to the Yoruba culture." W J Langton et al captures this history about how the invention of Glass technology may have naturally developed in the Yoruba region. "In or near Ile-Ife the ready availability of local raw materials, the tradition of high-temperature technology in the form of copper, iron or iron working and local and regional demand for glass beads combined to stimulate primary and secondary glass technologies that would continue for many centuries." 

         The Yorubas may not have been the only Africans to produce glass technology, but research into this regard is necessary, regardless the invention of glass was a complex endeavour as it has become part of human civilization.