Potter · Nigeria
Ladi Kwali
Ladi Kwali (c. 1925–1984) was a Nigerian potter from the village of Kwali, in what is now the Federal Capital Territory. A master of the hand-built water jars of the Gbari tradition, she joined the Abuja Pottery Training Centre in 1954, learned the potter's wheel and glazes, and became internationally celebrated in the 1950s and 1960s. She was appointed MBE, and her portrait appears on the 20 naira note.
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A potter of Kwali
Ladi Kwali was born around 1925 in Kwali, a Gbari village in central Nigeria where pottery was women's work, taught within families. She learned from her aunt to build large water jars by hand. There was no wheel: she built each pot from coils of clay, standing and walking around it as it rose, and beat the walls into shape from the inside with a flat wooden paddle. She decorated the jars with incised animals — lizards, crocodiles, chameleons, scorpions, snakes, birds and fish — and fired them in the open. Her jars were admired enough that the Emir of Abuja (today's Suleja) collected them.
The Abuja Pottery Training Centre
In 1954 she joined the Pottery Training Centre that the British potter Michael Cardew had set up at Abuja two years earlier. She was the first woman to work there. She learned to throw on the wheel, to use glazes and to fire stoneware in a kiln, while keeping her own forms and decoration. The combination produced some of the finest ceramics of the century.
How to look at her pots
Her best-known works sit between two worlds. The shape is the Gbari water jar she had made since childhood, still built by hand from coils. The surface belongs to the kiln: stoneware, coated in slips and a glaze, fired far hotter than an open fire allows. The animals are cut and pressed into the clay before the glaze goes on, so they show through it. And despite the name, such a jar was not necessarily meant to carry water: the Fitzwilliam Museum notes that its "water jar" of 1957 was made as an exhibition piece for European collectors, not for use. Seeing one in a museum means seeing a village form turned into a modern art object by the potter who knew it best.
International fame
Cardew arranged most of her exhibitions and demonstrations. Shows of Abuja pottery at the Berkeley Galleries in London from 1958, and tours in Europe and the United States, made her famous; her works entered museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was appointed MBE in 1963, and in 1977 Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria awarded her an honorary doctorate.
Legacy
Ladi Kwali died in 1984. Her portrait is on the Nigerian 20 naira note, and a street and a conference hall in Abuja bear her name. The training centre was renamed after her, but it has stood largely unused since the 1990s; in 2021 the Niger State government announced plans, with World Bank support, to rebuild it. Her influence reached further than the building: in 1974 the Kenyan-born potter Magdalene Odundo went to Abuja to learn the hand-building methods of Gbari women potters. In 2022 Body Vessel Clay, an exhibition of Black women ceramicists at Two Temple Place in London, was built around Kwali's work, shown alongside Odundo and younger potters working in Britain today; an American edition opened at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York for the centenary of her birth. Google marked her life with a Doodle in 2022.
Where to see her work
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge holds a stoneware water jar from 1957, with incised decoration under green and white slips. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired a water jar of about 1962 in 2024, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta has a green water jar from 1972. Her pots also come up in sales of Abuja pottery, such as Bonhams' auction of 2023.
See also
Read more in African pottery, see Twins Seven-Seven and our guide to African women artists, and see our list of Nigerian artists.
