I noticed this little wood carving in my grandfather’s home in South Africa in the late 1940’s. He told me that it had been carved by a prisoner in a concentration camp. I didn’t know what he meant, but I thought the carving was beautiful. The figure was originally holding a long-stemmed pipe, possibly a meerschaum that, together with the apron, suggested a European artisan.

I wondered if the little figure had been carved by an Afrikaner prisoner during the Anglo-Boer War when the British interned 40,000 Boers in 45 tented camps for Afrikaners and 64 camps for Black Africans. About 25,000 detainees, mainly women and children, died of disease and malnutrition. I wondered if something as beautiful as the small carving could come from such harsh conditions.

Then I remembered that during World War I, South African troops invaded neighboring German South-West Africa where German settlers were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Pretoria. Perhaps the carving had been done by a German settler thinking of home in Europe.

And then I remembered reading how, during World War II, the battles of North Africa resulted in about 93,000 Italian Prisoners of War being brought to South Africa. Arriving in 1942, they were employed in the local farming communities as laborers, builders, gardeners, and mechanics. Although they weren’t imprisoned and they worked collaboratively with South Africans, they were far from home and, perhaps, one of these Italians carved the little figure.

One will probably never know the truth behind the carving, but it doesn’t really matter. It is a continuing memento of a beating heart in a foreign land far from home. A memory carved in wood.

There are other carvings in our home and, only now do I see some common themes: Here are two pieces of Navajo folk art created by Dorothy V. Wilson in the style of Antonio Johnson in that part of New Mexico that was the home of the ancestral pueblo people in the seventh century. The figures are carved from cottonwood, using an axe to form a rough shape, and a pocketknife to create the detail. The surface is painted with house paint, watercolors, and a fragile white clay used by the Navajos to paint their bodies.

The Navajo people had been forcibly removed from their homes in Arizona and New Mexico in 1864 and sent on the “Long Walk”, an effort to “civilize” them and assimilate the Navajo into white American culture. The “Walk” was a series of forced marches that included the capture of thousands of Navajos and involved the destruction of crops and the killing of animals. It resulted in hundreds of deaths from exposure and starvation.

And here we have direct descendants of those persecuted people producing something beautiful claiming a long-denied respect.

Another example of recent indigenous art, but with brighter colors and certainly more whimsical designs are carvings by the Zapotec people concentrated in Oaxaca in Southern Mexico.

Known as “ Alebrije”, the carvings they are made from locally sourced copal wood. They are carved using hand tools – machetes, chisels, and knives. The works above are those of Juan Carlos Santiago of Arrazola, a small village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Most Zapotec Indians still speak their own dialect, and many don’t speak Spanish. Their life is agriculture based with some hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild foods.

In a future posting I’ll share a few ceramic, pottery and woven works of art that we’ve collected on our journey over the years.