Insigne

Staff with a Male Figure

The hieratic pose of this bronze figure sitting on a ceremonial seat is in keeping with the insignia of power he is displaying: the complex biconical headdress composed of a double band of large beads and a crenulated crown, and the sheathed dagger with an openwork hilt on his left hand. In his right hand he is holding what is now believed, after comparison with an almost identical work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to be the handle of a lance that has lost its shaft.

Other articles of finery – the weighty hourglass-shaped pendent, broad belt and incised armbands and bracelets – attest to this person’s importance. The almond eyes depicted in relief with single eyelids, straight nose and parallel lips are unequivocally in the Inland Niger Delta style. The open mouth symbolises the giving of orders.

The torso is naked, with bare breasts and the ribs indicated by thin grooves (they are depicted in relief in the work in New York). The stomach suggests slight portliness. Beneath the protruding belly button, a thin belt supports a trapezoidal loincloth decorated with bands of fabric embroidered with zigzag lines. The fact that there is no other sculpture with identical iconography and in the same style corroborates the interpretation that this object conferred on its bearer the investiture of the central power of the Mali Empire.

Populations know the faces of the chiefs in their local village and clan hierarchy. But they may not know those of the representatives of the emperor’s administration, or the provincial governors (farin) who, according to the Arab historian Ibn Battuta, were juxtaposed on traditional aristocracies since the fourteenth century. This meticulously depicted and executed insignia could have been a proof of office for all to behold.

Editor’s note This (maimed) object and the one very similar, which is now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was in the hands of a New York antique dealer in 1987. The Met acquired the complete one whose head was cast to replace that of our sculpture broken at the neck.