Voania Muba and the European Market for African Goods

African artists have supplied the European expatriate and export markets with merchandise for at least five centuries. Such artistic production began in the 15th century on Africa's west coast, where Portuguese explorers and seamen first encountered Africans. Europeans' curiosity about the voyagers' exotic souvenirs from Africa may have encouraged trade. Whatever the catalyst, in the late 15th and the 16th century, Portuguese merchants commissioned Sapi and Bini (Edo) ivory carvers in present-day Sierra Leone and present-day Nigeria, respectively, to produce objects to sell in Europe. These objects included elaborately decorated ivory spoons, shoehorns, saltcellars, hunting horns, and other objects that found homes in the curiosity cabinets and on the banquet tables of European nobility.

During the late 19th century, when the European presence was constant, a Woyo potter named Voania (Voanya) Muba made figurative vessels exclusively for the European market. Voania was the chief of Muba, a village on the Atlantic Coast and a three-day walk from the towns of Boma and Banana. He became a potter although he lived in a village where pottery had not previously been made.

Men in Muba carved wooden lids with high-relief figures to cover the bowls imported from pottery-making villages. Although the Muba villagers believed Voania had lieya liambu, or talent, and was self-taught because he never left the village to become an apprentice, Voania probably learned how to model clay and make pots from men (who customarily worked in isolation) in a pottery-making village. Whatever the source of his knowledge, Voania created his own formula for the clay body and perfected his skills. Voania's only assistant was a nephew who neither helped to mix the materials or to form the vessels. He served as the middleman in selling Voania's vessels.

Voania's pottery typically depicts Europeans alone, as a couple, as equestrians, or as a family group standing or sitting on top of a globular vessel. He occasionally portrayed an African male or female figure. Some pots have only a human head for decoration. The hollow vessels have an opening, usually in the head of a figure. The figures' hats sometimes have two parts—the hat with an opening and a lid to cover it. None of Voania's vessels ever functioned as pitchers. 

The Dallas vessel (1975.75) depicts a seated European male wearing a hat and jacket with carefully detailed buttons and buttonholes. There is an opening in the top of the hat. The figure holds a flask for liquor in one hand and a drinking cup or glass in the other. During the 19th century, Europeans imported alcoholic beverages that became African symbols of prestige; their consumption was a privilege of rulers, who were the first to be introduced to the foreign imports. 

The Woyo use proverbs to offer a compliment, appeal to principle, or settle an argument. Carved pot lids that visually illustrate proverbs can silently convey messages when covering bowls containing food. Voania's vessels, on which the imagery on pot lids was not duplicated, were clearly not intended for this kind of communication, nor were they sold to Muba villagers. They were meant for European customers, who probably found them amusing. Still the one and only male potter from Muba village, Voania died in 1928.

Roslyn A. Walker, The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 286-288.

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