Kiffa beads
They are named after the Mauritanian city of Kiffa, where French ethnologist R. Mauny documented them first in 1949.
[1] Kiffa beads represent one of the highest levels of artistic skill and ingenuity in beadmaking, being manufactured with the simplest materials and tools available: pulverized European glass beads or fragments of them, bottle glass, pottery shards, tin cans, twigs, steel needles, some gum arabic, and open fires.
According to Peter Francis, Jr., the making of powder glass beads in West Africa may date back a few hundred years, and to possibly 1200 CE in Mauritania.
Although the making of Mauritanian powder glass beads appears to be an ancient tradition, no archaeological evidence to establish their age has been found to date.
Glass which is finely crushed to a powder is mixed with a binder such as saliva or gum arabic diluted in water.
The beads are placed in small containers, often sardine cans and heated to fuse the glass on open fires without moulds.
[2] Kiffa beads were made in various shapes: blue, red, and polychromatic triangles with yellow, black, white, red and blue chevron-type and decorations that resemble eyes; blue, red and polychromatic diamond-shaped beads; cigar shaped and conical beads as well as a variety of small spherical and oblate beads.
Colour sequences observed on traditional beads with polychromatic decorations are always the same, i.e. red-yellow-black (dark brown)-yellow-red-white-blue-white.
Often the obverse is decorated as well, and it is believed that different bead making families had their own distinct styles.
The colours, shapes and the many different intricate decorative patterns all having specific meanings, most of them forgotten today.
[3] Diamond-shaped Kiffa beads were traditionally worn on bracelets, sewn onto strips of leather, and arranged in traditional sets composed of a specific ratio of blue to red to polychromatic specimens.
[4] Their patterns are believed to protect and to increase the fertility of their wearers and it has been proposed that some might imitate cowrie shells.
Triangular-shaped and spherical beads were worn as hair ornaments and traditional assemblages could be composed of two complementary sets of three triangulars each, one blue, one red and one polychromatic, worn at temple height.
Many of the small spherical or oblate-shaped beads were hair ornaments or worn in necklaces in various combinations with other glass and stone beads and were made by decorating a red, blue or white preformed glass bead "core".
Glass slurry decorations were applied to moulded 19th century beads possibly of Czech origin.
[5] Western artists have made their own versions in polymer clay or lampworked glass, but none of the modern creations come close to resembling the beauty of traditional specimens.
The same applies to modern imitations made elsewhere, for instance in Indonesia.
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