A strange silence has fallen across the forests of northern Zambia. The trees are missing the songs sung to them by an old man grateful for their gifts. No longer do they hear the rhythmic pounding of his mallet as he turns their bark into fine cloth.
Before European colonists arrived in the 19th century, cloth made from the inner fibres of tree bark was the traditional material worn in this region. Today, this natural material has long been replaced by mass manufactured clothing and, more recently, a thriving second-hand market of cast-off western clothes.
The expert knowledge of the trees, tools, and uses of bark cloth resided until recently with three men, the last makers of traditional bark-cloth. In March 2024, Mr John Mukopa, of Mungwi District, northern Zambia, died age 82. Now an ancient tradition faces extinction with no trainees in the offing.
I came to know Mr Mukopa in July 2022, when he was being interviewed and filmed by colleagues from Moto Moto Museum in Mbala, Zambia*, for a project funded by the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. The Moto Moto team recorded all stages of the bark cloth making process, including the associated songs and ceremonies. The resulting audiovisual archive, available through the EMKP repository, will be a lasting part of John’s legacy.
I was interested in this project, as an archaeologist, not just because I would learn more about an ancient craft tradition, but also in the hopes of resolving a minor puzzle. My research has always focused on tool use in human evolution, and in recent years, I had become intrigued by an unusual tool that occurs in the regional archaeological record, whose function was unknown.
Blunt-edged ground-stone axe blades, sometimes made from hard ochre, feature in the Later Stone Age. Are they blunt from use or intentionally made so to avoid damaging some soft material, such as bark, I wondered?
John did not use such a tool. Iron axe and adze blades did the heavy work for him of removing branches and stripping bark. His tool for pounding the shreds of wet bark into cloth was a flat-headed mallet made of wood. He explained that the cross-hatched incisions on the mallet head channelled away the water as the bark was pounded.
The enigma of the blunt-edged axe remains unresolved, but my eyes and ears were opened by an unexpected observation; one that I can never capture in the archaeological record. Imagine John beneath a canopy of thatch that protects his materials from sun and rain; he pounds rhythmically a mass of wet bark, singing as he works, giving thanks to the tree that provided the bark. The landscape is alive in the world of the bark-cloth maker. In the same song he complains that its wood is too hard, damaging his iron axe blade (replacement blades are available in the nearby market). He praises the team from Moto Moto Museum for recording his work for future generations. I learnt from my Moto Moto colleagues that all three of the bark-cloth makers accompany their work with song.
Away from the workshop, John shared with me some of his knowledge of the sacred landscape and his role as an elder in the spiritual life of the community. He led an annual conversation with the ancestors at a particular place where a spring emerges, and tall natural pillars of stone reach upward, some marked with images in red ochre. Here, issues facing this community of farmers are aired and resolved through the collective wisdom of the dead and living. The approach begins with the words ‘make us earth’. The ancestors can also be contacted at times of crisis, as in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The rock art on the pillars intrigued me. Rock art abounds in this area of Zambia, with the site of Mwela Rocks, near the town of Kasama, recognised on the World Heritage tentative list for its more than 700 paintings in caves and overhangs. Very similar images occur in the rocky landscape above John’s village, and we talked about their origin and meaning. They were painted by the hunter-gatherers who lived here when John’s Bemba speaking ancestors arrived long ago. He pointed to an image and told me what it meant for its makers and how the Bemba continue to use the inherent healing power in the images.
I wonder who else in John’s community shares this rare and precious information, who did they learn it from and is this a body of endangered knowledge in need of recording for posterity? These intangible things, the songs, the art’s meaning, the ritual observances, are lost to archaeologists of the deep past like me. Perhaps another project beckons.
Much is lost with John’s passing, but he left me with a basic understanding of wood working tools and the traces they leave. I learned that the marks left by an axe differ clearly from those left by an adze, and those differences remain even if the cutting edges were of sharp stone, rather than iron. This knowledge features in the evidence used to interpret the extraordinary discovery of the earliest evidence of a wooden structure known (Barham et al., 2023). Artisans living 500,000-year-ago in northern Zambia, near Kalambo Falls, would cut down trees with stone axes and shape them with stone adzes to create a sturdy framework to support a structure. Maybe they too sang as they worked thanking the forest for its gifts. I’d like to think so.
For now, thanks to modern technology, John’s legacy lives on as recorded in the project’s audiovisual archives along with the expertise of the two remaining artisans in bark.
Mr John Mukopa died in March 2024, aged 82. John was the eldest of the three remaining bark cloth makers in northern Zambia and featured in the ‘Last of the Bemba Bark Cloth Makers’, a project supported by the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (funded by the Arcadia Foundation and hosted by the British Museum). The other two bark-cloth makers involved in the project were Mr Simon Chileshe, who lives in Chief Chitimukulu’s chiefdom near the city of Kasama and Patrick Chanda who lives in Chief Chikwanda’s chiefdom, Mpika District.
*The Moto Moto team was led by Ms Perrice Nkombwe, (Museum Director and Ethnographer), and included Mr Peter Chitungu (Audiovisual Specialist) and Mr Stephen Mwila (Interviewer and Transcription).
Authored by Lawrence Barham. Edited by Chrisyl Wong-Hang-Sun.