6. Bellows
Ceremony
During an early pilot trip to Goudoubo the research team was invited to take tea with Meddur, a Tuareg man living in the camp with his extended family. Taking tea is a common occurrence in the camp and this was an important way of fostering trust and good relations with informants. But as they sat down next to a small decorative stove heated by coal, it become evident that something more than tea was being prepared. Meddur was sitting proudly with a set of bellows, a rather antiquated piece of equipment, and using them to tend the fire.
As explored earlier in this paper, life with a traditional cookstove involves many different objects: from the cooking pot (see Chapter 3) to firewood (see Chapter 4). As researchers mapped the network of objects involved in cooking, they brought additional, supplementary technologies – like the bellows – into focus. The bellows were not standard issue equipment for displaced households. So where did they come from and how were they made?
As refugees in Goudoubo described their desire for a more convenient, more efficient and less labour-intensive cooking fuel, like gas, they often complained about the work involved in keeping air circulating through a fire.
Cooking with biofuels is labour intensive as fires require constant attention. As refugees in Goudoubo described their desire for a more convenient, more efficient and less labour-intensive cooking fuel, like gas, they often complained about the work involved in keeping air circulating through a fire (see Chapter 9). As one Tuareg woman said, ‘when you cook with gas you can even go inside your house and take a rest while cooking, you don’t even need to blow on it.’
Tools to control the circulation of air and the temperature of a fire, allowing people to extend their ‘blow’, are a vital part of energy systems. In Goudoubo the bellows play a pivotal role in everyday life, establishing a rhythm and a ritual that gets the fire started and keeps it alive. They offer important insights into processes of creative construction and modification.
Efficiency
During further investigation on return trips to Goudoubo, the research team came across another set of bellows: a double-bag design, with two skins attached to dual windpipes joined through a central block of wood. The use of this larger piece of equipment appears frequently in the historical record across centuries and continents, demonstrating a significant trajectory in practice and knowledge, shared across generations and time.37
These double-bag bellows were owned by a nineteen-year-old Tuareg blacksmith, Oumar, who learned the trade from his father. He and his father showcased the family’s craftsmanship. They used the bellows in a makeshift forge, as a tool to make the coals red-hot. The heat makes metal pliable and allows them to fashion or repair a range of useful tools.
Oumar began by creating his makeshift forge in the sand by carving a small groove where the bellow pipes are laid out, the end coming to meet at a small pit where some cold coals are deposited. He covered the coals with a handful of wood shavings. Finally, he deposited some hot coals from the tea stove over the shavings. Then he began pumping on the bellows with rhythmic oscillation. One hand rose up to fill the left skin with air and the second-hand descended, closing the skin and pushing the air into the coals. Then, like the revolving pistons of a steam engine, his hands moved up and down, one skin feeding the fire while the next took its breath, readying itself for its turn to heat the coals.
Within seconds, the wood shavings were alight, smoke quickly rising, then gone, followed by a burst of flame. The shavings disappeared, the flames too, but the glow grew brighter, as the coals took the heat with each breath of air from the bellows. Within three minutes, the coals at the top of the pile were moved aside with a large machete, revealing a white ember coal fire hot enough to heat steel for shaping. The machete was left in the coals while Oumar readied his improvised anvil: what appeared to be an oversized railroad spike embedded in a piece of timber. As the machete reached its optimum temperature, Oumar’s father gestured at him to pause, preventing the bellows from overheating the fire needlessly. Oumar’s father now took up his file, grinding the edge of the hot machete, and finishing the edge with his hammer.
Practical knowledge
As the research team asked more detailed questions about the bellows it uncovered details about the blacksmith’s life history and specialist knowledge. Oumar’s father, Ousmane, had been working as a blacksmith since childhood and had made the bellows himself. A pair of double-bellows, he said, were simply the best way to get a fire hot enough to work metal better than a fan or simply fanning the flames with cardboard.
Ousmane described how he had made the bellows from goatskin, since sheepskin is not strong enough. The goat, he explained, needs to be skinned from the rear. The skin around the throat needs to be preserved as a skilled maker uses the goat’s windpipe to connect the sack to a wooden block, which holds the pipes leading to the fire. The skin at the throat, he explained, needs to be strong since any reduction in the pathway through to the tubes results in increased air pressure, causing a faster flow of air through the pipes to the fire, and requiring a strong connection in order to remain intact with repeated use.
Ousmane explained that he had had this particular bellows for more than two years. As he told his story to the researchers, his son sat patiently in the background, waiting for his father’s cue to resume his gyrations, and breathe life back into the coals, generating heat to get the iron hot again. Tending the bellows is the first task every blacksmith apprentice learns. Oumar expects his son to begin by the age of four and by the age of 12 to have learnt the craft of hammering metal.
But, as any blacksmith knows, bellows are good for more than forging metal. As Ousmane explains, his bellows are put to other uses in their family. He sometimes lets his wife, Nene, borrow them to get the cooking fire going; particularly when the firewood is wet and difficult to light.
More than air
Historians and social anthropologists working in West Africa offer some insights into the social and cultural significance of the blacksmith, and the nature of the two-bag bellows at work.38 Such accounts move beyond purely technical and practical dimensions to highlight the spiritual and emotional dimensions of blacksmith practices, and role of the blacksmith in community life.
Getting a fire hot and to be able to forge, strike and mould steel over an anvil in order to shape and temper tools, ornaments, farm implements and often weaponry has been revered across West Africa’s Mande ethnic language groups since at least the early 15th century. Mande blacksmiths have been described as a caste – a group that has sought to retain specialist occupational knowledge and bloodlines through marriage within the community. Blacksmiths have also been described as figures of awe and fear, associated with the possession and control of nyama, a life force that in many Mande traditions is associated with power, knowledge and creation. The blacksmith’s alchemical ability to shape hard metal ores into forms useful for cultivating life and material culture offers a quintessential display of nyama. Such ideas present Ousmane and Oumar in a fresh light. The bellows are more than a technology for making fire efficient; they are also a medium through which a practical knowledge of fire is exchanged between master and apprentice, father and son.
The blacksmith’s alchemical ability to shape hard metal ores into forms useful for cultivating life and material culture offers a quintessential display of nyama.
In the context of forced displacement, such practices are subject to rapid transformation. In Goudoubo, for example, the UNHRC made blowtorches available to metal workers in the artisan centre, in the expectation that this would catalyse activity. The blowtorch is a standard piece of equipment in many metal-working industries – highly efficient, clean and portable – it is an ideal tool for heating metal quickly and easily. But what the blowtorch gains in ease of use it loses as a vehicle for the transmission of practical mastery, craft traditions and culture. Rather than simply providing him with the tools to forge a livelihood in the camp, the blowtorch presented Ousmane with a new challenge: how to pass on and showcase his skilled knowledge with dignity.
Fire practices
Firewood and charcoal remain the fuel of choice for most humanitarian agencies and their distribution remains the norm in many humanitarian settlements. As the humanitarian energy community pays closer attention to the impact of burning biomass on air quality, however, these fuels are increasingly presented as a ‘dirty’, ‘primitive’ and ‘inferior’ to alternatives like liquid petroleum gas or solar. Framing biomass as dirty may be a necessary means of securing resources and new initiatives aimed at enhancing the provision of energy services in complex humanitarian environments.39 But this is also a narrow frame that erases the understanding of what makes fuel dirty.
‘Dirtiness’ is not an intrinsic quality of biomass; it is also an effect of materials, practices and systems. Dirtiness is an effect of burning poor-quality materials, like wet wood. Dirtiness is an effect of inefficient combustion, with poor air circulation in and around a fire heightening pollution. Dirtiness is also an effect of failure in infrastructures of fuel distribution. When dry wood or ‘clean’ alternatives like gas are unavailable, people seek out and make do with the fuels they can find (see Chapter 9).
Such an analysis does not imply the need to be content with fuels that have negative impacts.40 Rather, it suggests that the range of possible interventions around humanitarian energy can be widened by examining what people do when they seek to improve the efficiency of fire.
In this chapter the focus was adjusted to better account for and learn from the social and cultural context. A deceptively simple technology like the bellows reveals the heterogeneity of practices that take place around a fire. Bellows are an artefact of cottage industry as well as a tool of ritual and ceremony. They are important vehicles for the inter-generational transmission of artisanal skill. They are also vital technologies for the controlled circulation of air in a fire and thus temperature control and efficiency.
As this chapter suggests, humanitarian energy practitioners have much to gain from approaching material cultures around fire as a source of knowledge, practice and innovation rather than as impediments to change.41
37 For example, there are similarities in bellows technology between Goudoubo refugee camp, historical records of blacksmith practices in West Africa, and practices from rural Ireland.
38 McNaughton, P. (1993), The Mande blacksmiths: Knowledge, power and art in West Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
39 Law, J. (2002), Complexities: social studies of knowledge practices, Durham: York University Press.
40 Goffman, E. (1974), Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience, New York: Harper & Row.
41 Khandelwal, M. and Lain, K. (2018), ‘The Humble Cookstove’, in The Limn 9, https://limn.it/the-humble-cookstove/ (accessed 21 Aug. 2019).