This flanged snuff container, perched on a small circlet with four little feet and four small legs bent as if ready to leap up, leans slightly to one side. It seems ready to take off like some winged insect or a seed pod caught in a gust of wind. Two interlinked rings at the apex of the form make an attractive finial for the stopper. While the flanged body is a frequently seen form in southern African horn snuff containers, the circlet at its base is unusual but not exceptional. There is a similar container with four feet connected to a circular base in the British Museum dated to 1800–1899. Unfortunately, no provenance is available for it.

More secure provenance comes from the South African Museum, which holds a flanged snuff container in its collection closely resembling this example but without a base or legs. It has a ring of horn at its broad base end and one as part of its stopper. Classified as Basuto, it has been illustrated with its narrow neck pointing downwards, suggesting that the vessel was carried hanging down. Field collector Gordon Crawford has documented a number of similarly flanged snuff containers from Eswatini (Swaziland) that are carried fastened to the end of a decorative tassel attached to a belt. These all have their narrow necks and openings pointing downwards.

Amongst government ethnographer N.J. Van Warmelo’s papers, held at the University of Johannesburg, is a photograph of a flanged snuff container with a U-shaped extension at its base. He identified this as coming from the Ingwavuma region of South Africa, bordering on Eswatini and Mozambique. Müller and Snelleman, the late-19th-century travellers who published a book on the material culture and people they came across in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Swaziland illustrated one such snuff container. It was collected somewhere in the basin of the Zambezi River that flows through Zimbabwe to the east coast, exiting into the Indian Ocean near Quelimane, Mozambique. This is also depicted in an inverted position, with a reed stopper at the lower end and an attached looped cord at the upper end.

With evidence of provenance stretching all the way from Lesotho to Swaziland and the Zambezi River basin, this style of snuff container will need further research to establish whether this spread is accounted for by people moving from place to place, a wide and popular style, or simply because of unreliable record keeping.

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