inventions: Africa 573 plant, with its bright red berries, originally grew wild in the Ethiopian highlands Its domestication probably took place in the Ethiopian kingdom of Kaffa—hence the name coffee; in Ethiopic the bean is called buna There is, however, a commonly told legend that a simple goatherd named Kaldi first noticed the properties of coffee by observing that his goats begin to dance after eating the distinctive red berries of the coffee plant Despite this colorful discovery story, the domestication of the coffee plant was a process carried out by generations of Ethiopian farmers The beans, however, were eaten raw by native Ethiopians They did not roast them or brew coffee with them Sometimes inventions and discoveries must be made in order to adapt new technology acquired from elsewhere to local conditions Sub-Saharan Africa received the process of iron smelting through cultural diffusion from North Africa and the civilizations of the Nile Valley A very early form of iron technology penetrated into Africa It was centered on a type of smelting furnace called a bloomery The iron ore was smelted inside a large ceramic jar, in which it was mixed with charcoal and clay to produce a pure wrought-iron bloom, a mass of iron that “grew” from the chemical actions of the iron inside the furnace This mass later had to be hammered into shape to make tools, weapons, and other ironware The wrought iron did not have a sufficient carbon content to harden when quenched or to form an outer layer of steel Iron smelting probably did not become very widespread in southern Africa until the Middle Ages African iron technology was for the most part limited to the northern Bantuspeaking region from Lake Victoria west into Nigeria along the equator It was by far the most advanced technology mastered by the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa Although it was an acquired technology (the process was probably developed in the ancient Near East), Africans made certain refinements that can be considered inventions These had to be made to improve the process, which developed in different ways than it did in the Mediterranean or Asia, and to adapt it to African conditions The African inventions in iron-smelting technology begin with the process of finding and processing ore Without a systematic understanding of geology, miners had to look for traces of iron ore on the surface of the ground The Toro people (in the mountains west of Lake Victoria) did this by examining the balls of cow and elephant dung made by the dung-beetle or scarab These beetles often combined soil excavated from their burrows with the soil on the surface of the ground If iron ore was present in the immediate vicinity, the balls most likely would contain small, shiny black granules of iron ore that could be seen easily Once these were discovered, the miners could start digging for iron ore This technique appears to be a unique invention of sub-Saharan Africa A more readily accessible source of iron ore is the black sand that accumulates in riverbeds This consists of particles made up of minerals that have a high iron concentration The particles tend to gather together, especially after floods, because they are heavier than ordinary quartz particles Black sand cannot be smelted in a bloomery furnace It is usually necessary to melt the sand in a crucible so that the impurities can be skimmed off the top, but this is possible only at very high temperatures (Iron melts at 2,795 degrees Fahrenheit, while a bloomery rarely reaches temperatures above 2,192 degrees Fahrenheit.) Thus, black sand ore could not have been used in Africa However, if the black sand contains hematite, or magnetic iron, the mutually attractive magnetic iron particles can be separated and concentrated by washing the ore to produce an aggregate of iron that can be smelted at lower temperatures This process was not known in antiquity and appears to have been an African invention It may have been suggested by the relatively shiny, metallic appearance of hematite particles compared with ordinary black sand ore Although no one knows who is responsible for this process, it is especially common in cultures where the collection of ore is assigned to female family members of the smith, such as the Mafa people in Cameroon An innovation in iron smelting among the Haya who live on the western shore of Lake Victoria was the use of a blowpipe in the production of wrought iron Ordinary iron-smelting furnaces of the bloomery type are given drafts of air from bellows, blown into the furnace through a pipe (tuyere) leading into the bottom of the furnace chamber The bellows used in African ironworking are very inefficient They consist of simple leather bags mounted inside clay pots that are pulled up and down by means of an attached stick This type of bellows goes back to ancient Egypt and was originally designed for working copper, which requires much lower temperatures than iron The bellows must have been disseminated up the Nile Valley before the invention of ironworking For whatever reason, when sub-Saharan Africans began to receive ironworking technology, they did not use the more sophisticated bellows associated with it They instead improvised a system by which the smith would use a second pipe at an earlier stage of the process than the bellows to blow air into the furnace with lung power This preheating allowed the furnace to reach the necessary temperatures for smelting Some anthropologists have suggested that iron smelting was not borrowed by sub-Saharan Africans from the culture of the Mediterranean but was invented independently Their reasoning is that the African practice was culturally integrated into African civilization (meaning that it was ac-