Onitsha, Anambra
6.1414° N, 6.8021° E
Hand-built water pots, made the way they have always been made, by women who are candid that nobody young is learning.
Onitsha sits on the east bank of the Niger at the point where the bridge crosses, and it has been a trading town since long before that bridge. The Main Market is a city inside the city. In the 1950s and 60s the town produced Onitsha Market Literature — cheap pamphlets on love and money and how to behave — which is one of the few genuinely popular literary movements the continent has had.
Everything from Onitsha →The clay is dug, crushed, soaked, and then built up by hand — no wheel — into a pot that will hold water and keep it cool by sweating through its own walls. The whole sequence takes days and is done standing.
She is right that it is not enough, and she is right that it is the argument. There is no obvious commercial future here that does not route through the decorative market, which pays better and makes something other than a water pot.
Staff photographer · Jos
Photographs work and weather. Prefers a long stay to a quick assignment, and shoots most of the plateau in the cold months.
Potter · Onitsha
Makes water pots by hand in the way her mother did, and is candid that almost no one under thirty is learning it.
A river port with what is often called the largest market in West Africa, and one bridge holding it all together.
Ugu, tomatoes, peppers and stockfish: the arithmetic behind a stall, and why the price is never only the price.
Two, chosen by hand — usually somewhere else in the country.
Five hundred years of dyeing in Kano has come down to a few dozen working pits and the men who still know the recipe.
Ikot Ekpene has traded on woven palm fibre for a century, and the trade is still organised the way it was in the 1970s.
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