. Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum. Natural history. LOBEDU \LATERL-\L CULTL'RE 107. Fig. 51. Woman using a wooden monar and pestle for stamping maize. Note the winnowing- baskets used dunng the stamping-process and the grain spread out to in the courr\-ard. Molototsi vallev. 19~5. with a long metal tool often made from part of a ploughshare. The hmshing was done with a small adze and leJwro gouge. Finally a hie or sandpaper was used on the surface. \Miere women still stamp maize by hand, mortars have remained m use and the porridge made from this
. Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum. Natural history. LOBEDU \LATERL-\L CULTL'RE 107. Fig. 51. Woman using a wooden monar and pestle for stamping maize. Note the winnowing- baskets used dunng the stamping-process and the grain spread out to in the courr\-ard. Molototsi vallev. 19~5. with a long metal tool often made from part of a ploughshare. The hmshing was done with a small adze and leJwro gouge. Finally a hie or sandpaper was used on the surface. \Miere women still stamp maize by hand, mortars have remained m use and the porridge made from this meal is much preferred to that made of bought maize-meal. Furthermore, the different stages in stamping and winnowing pro- duce meal ranging from a coarse to a fine texture, which gives variet}' to the staple diet isee p. "S) and the whole-kernel grain is far more nutritious than the refined product sold in the shops. None the less, pressure on land has resulted in most families having to depend on bought maize-meal. The frequency of stamp- ing maize at home is consequently much reduced. Although ubiquitous m the 1930s, the free-standing mortar, lefiidii. was in- troduced into the Lobedu area by Tsonga-speakers. Mortars were widelv adopted but until the 1950s were not allowed to be used mside the capital be- cause of their Tsonga association (Mantwa Modjadji 19S1 pers. comm.). During the 1930s there was a special area outside the capital where women stamped maize in these mortars (Fig, 52). The older method was to stamp grain in a hole in the ground in which a hol- lowed block of wood was set (Krige 19S2: 16). The women worked in kneeling position. This method was well suited to the stamping of sorghum and millet but was not as effective for stamping hard maize kernels. The practical advantages of the lefiidii mortar for pounding maize seem to account for its widespread Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digi
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectnaturalhistory, booky
