In describing particular tribes, Baker and Felkin tell of smiths of wonderful adroitness, goatskins prepared better than a European tanner could do, drinking cups and kegs of remarkable symmetry, and polished clay floors.  Schweinfurth says, “The arrow and the spear heads are of the finest and most artistic work; their bristlelike barbs and points are baffling when one knows how few tools these smiths have.”  Excellent wood carving is found among the Bongo, Ovambo, and Makololo.  Pottery and basketry and careful hut building distinguish many tribes.  Cameron (1877) tells of villages so clean, with huts so artistic, that, save in book knowledge, the people occupied no low plane of civilization.  The Mangbettu work both iron and copper.  “The masterpieces of the Monbutto [Mangbettu] smiths are the fine chains worn as ornaments, and which in perfection of form and fineness compare well with our best steel chains.”  Shubotz in 1911 called the Mangbettu “a highly cultivated people” in architecture and handicraft.  Barth found copper exported from Central Africa in competition with European copper at Kano.

Nor is the iron industry confined to the Sudan.  About the Great Lakes and other parts of Central Africa it is widely distributed.  Thornton says, “This iron industry proves that the East Africans stand by no means on so low a plane of culture as many travelers would have us think.  It is unnecessary to be reminded what a people without instruction, and with the rudest tools to do such skilled work, could do if furnished with steel tools.”  Arrows made east of Lake Nyanza were found to be nearly as good as the best Swedish iron in Birmingham.  From Egypt to the Cape, Livingstone assures us that the mortar and pestle, the long-handled axe, the goatskin bellows, etc., have the same form, size, etc., pointing to a migration southwestward.  Holub (1879), on the Zambesi, found fine workers in iron and bronze.  The Bantu huts contain spoons, wooden dishes, milk pails, calabashes, handmills, and axes.

Kaffirs and Zulus, in the extreme south, are good smiths, and the latter melt copper and tin together and draw wire from it, according to Kranz (1880).  West of the Great Lakes, Stanley (1878) found wonderful examples of smith work:  figures worked out of brass and much work in copper.  Cameron (1878) saw vases made near Lake Tanganyika which reminded him of the amphorae in the Villa of Diomedes, Pompeii.  Horn (1882) praises tribes here for iron and copper work.  Livingstone (1871) passed thirty smelting houses in one journey, and Cameron came across bellows with valves, and tribes who used knives in eating.  He found tribes which no Europeans had ever visited, who made ingots of copper in the form of the St. Andrew’s cross, which circulated even to the coast.  In the southern Congo basin iron and copper are worked; also wood and ivory carving and pottery making are pursued.  In equatorial West Africa, Lenz and Du Chaillu (1861) found iron workers with charcoal, and also carvers of bone and ivory.  Near Cape Lopez, Huebbe-Schleiden found tribes making ivory needles inlaid with ebony, while the arms and dishes of the Osaka are found among many tribes even as far as the Atlantic Ocean.  Wilson (1856) found natives in West Africa who could repair American watches.