Pounding Meal with Mortar and Pestle, Senegal, 1805

Description

Two women, one wearing a long skirt, the other a short one (who also carries an infant on her back) are using long wooden pestles to pound meal in a characteristically West African fashion; conical thatched roofed houses in the background. Captioned, Slaves beating cuscus, the author, a surgeon aboard the Favourite, made this and other sketches from which the accompanying engravings have been produced . . . the drawings and portraits were made on the spot (pp. iii-iv).

Source

Francis B. Spilsbury, Account of a voyage to the Western coast of Africa; performed by His Majesty's sloop Favourite, in the year 1805 (London, 1807), facing p.15 (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

Language

English

Rights

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Identifier

Spil02

Spatial Coverage

Africa--Western Savanna

Item sets

Pre-Colonial Africa: Society, Polity, Culture

Citation

"Pounding Meal with Mortar and Pestle, Senegal, 1805", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed February 2, 2023, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1600
Two women, one wearing a long skirt, the other a short one (who also carries an infant on her back) are using long wooden pestles to pound meal in a characteristically West African fashion; conical thatched roofed houses in the background. Captioned, Slaves beating cuscus, the author, a surgeon aboard the Favourite, made this and other sketches from which the accompanying engravings have been produced . . . the drawings and portraits were made on the spot (pp. iii-iv).
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