Calabash Carving

Gourd containers are among the oldest household objects in the region, and decorating them is long established wherever calabash grows. Regional styles are distinct: deep engraving and blackening in the south-west, fine pyro-engraved and pressure-engraved work in the middle belt, and sign-bearing gourds in the Cross River. Calabash remained a normal household material into the twentieth century, and although enamel, plastic and glass have displaced much of its everyday use, decorated gourds continue to be made for ceremony, gifts and sale.

A mature gourd is harvested, cleaned out, dried and cut to shape. Decoration is applied by incising the hard skin with a knife or blade, by burning lines and fields with a heated tool, by scraping away the surface layer to leave a pattern in relief, or by dyeing and staining. Cut lines may be rubbed with soot or dye so that the pattern reads dark against the pale skin. Larger vessels are made by joining a lid to a bowl, sometimes bound with leather or cord.

Decorated calabashes serve as bowls, water and palm wine containers, spoons, rattles and drums, and they appear as marriage gifts and dowry items in several traditions, where the quality of decoration reflects on the giver. Because the object is both useful and displayed, the craft sits between household work and art, and the same motifs often recur on pottery, cloth and walls in the same area.

Signs incised on Cross River gourds belong to the nsibidi system, and the household use of decorated vessels overlaps with the pottery described in Gwari pottery.