Gold Coast Negroes make gold rings and chains, forming the metal into all kinds of forms.  Soyaux says, “The works in relief which natives of Lower Guinea carve with their own knives out of ivory and hippopotamus teeth are really entitled to be called works of art, and many wooden figures of fetishes in the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin show some understanding of the proportions of the human body.”  Great Bassam is called by Hecquard the “Fatherland of Smiths.”  The Mandingo in the northwest are remarkable workers in iron, silver, and gold, we are told by Mungo Park (1800), while there is a mass of testimony as to the work in the north-west of Africa in gold, tin, weaving, and dyeing.  Caille found the Negroes in Bambana manufacturing gunpowder (1824-28), and the Hausa make soap; so, too, Negroes in Uganda and other parts have made guns after seeing European models.

So marked has been the work of Negro artisans and traders in the manufacture and exchange of iron implements that a growing number of archeologists are disposed to-day to consider the Negro as the originator of the art of smelting iron.  Gabriel de Mortillet (1883) declared Negroes the only iron users among primitive people.  Some would, therefore, argue that the Negro learned it from other folk, but Andree declares that the Negro developed his own “Iron Kingdom.”  Schweinfurth, Von Luschan, Boaz, and others incline to the belief that the Negroes invented the smelting of iron and passed it on to the Egyptians and to modern Europe.

Boaz says, “It seems likely that at a time when the European was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or adopted the art of smelting iron.  Consider for a moment what this invention has meant for the advance of the human race.  As long as the hammer, knife, saw, drill, the spade, and the hoe had to be chipped out of stone, or had to be made of shell or hard wood, effective industrial work was not impossible, but difficult.  A great progress was made when copper found in large nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by melting, and when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life did not begin until the hard iron was discovered.  It seems not unlikely that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ores by smelting were the African Negroes.  Neither ancient Europe, nor ancient western Asia, nor ancient China knew the iron, and everything points to its introduction from Africa.  At the time of the great African discoveries toward the end of the past century, the trade of the blacksmith was found all over Africa, from north to south and from east to west.  With his simple bellows and a charcoal fire he reduced the ore that is found in many parts of the continent and forged implements of great usefulness and beauty."[44]