Statue-pilon féminine

Female Statue

This ‘pestle’ statue was used during funerary processions and rituals enabling the spirit of the deceased to join the assembly of ancestral spirits and celebrating his bond with those who preceded him into the spirit world.

They were used in male and female pairs by one of the two principal poro initiatory societies, in the clearing in one of the sacred groves of the village of Lataha, 16 kilometres from the Senufo town of Korhogo in north Côte d’Ivoire. Such statues are called ‘child of poro’ (pora pia in the Tyebara dialect, piomba in the Fodoro dialect) or ‘spirit of nature’ (nedo, plural ndble). In funerary processions a statue was carried by an initiate of the brotherhood, who swung it slowly from side to side, beating it regularly on the ground to the rhythm of the drums to ward off evil spirits and re-establish a link with the shades of the ancestors. The base is missing, worn down by numerous processions and above all eaten away by termites.

This statue was saved from destruction by Father Clamens in 1951. In the late 1940s, a syncretistic cult, massa, developed in the region, vaguely inspired by Islam (although devoid of any Koranic theology), and for a decade villagers disposed of thousands of statues and masks, burning them or throwing them on rubbish tips or in ditches where they rotted away. Fortunately, some pieces were saved, including this one, which Josef Mueller bought from Emil Storrer in 1952. [1]

Editor’s note: This statue was very nearly the victim of the massa cult. Father Clamens (whose photographic archives have been stored, among other institutions, in the Musée Barbier-Mueller) took photos of the objects there before salvaging them. During field research in Lataha in 1989, elderly men told Tim Garrard and Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller that this poro pia was sculpted by a blacksmith, not by a member of the sculptors’ ‘caste’.

[1] Even more traditional Senufo sculpture would have been lost during this period had it not been for missionaries who, paradoxically, having burnt analogous works in other regions of Africa in the nineteenth century, now cherished them. Europeans today accuse the West of ‘pillaging’ and ‘robbing’ Africa of its ‘treasures’. Yet our museums are full of works, which might otherwise have been lost forever, or destroyed by syncretistic cults like massa.