From bauxite to cooking pots: Aluminum, chemistry, and West African artisanal production

The history of aluminum’s transformation from a precious to a commonplace metal over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has frequently been told as a narrative about intrepid western chemists, whose discoveries made it possible for industrialized manufacturers to make the metal global. This paper questions both the singularity of that discovery and the inevitability of aluminum’s global dominance as a ‘modern’ material of manufacture. It does so by considering the history of aluminum in West Africa and the ways in which artisans in that region domesticated the substance to an artisanal mode of production and developed quotidian chemical knowledge of it in the process. Considering aluminum from the perspective of West Africa suggests that aluminum may not have been discovered once, but many times, and that everyday material engagements can inspire forms of chemical knowhow that operate well beyond the bounds of the laboratory and industrial manufacturing plant.