Statuettes

Statuettes

The style of the two statuettes on the right is that of the coastal region inhabited by the Sherbro, who called them nomolisia (sing. nomoli). [1] The one on the left, depicting a man with a trilobite hairstyle, riding a minute animal, guiding it with huge cabled reins, must have been found inland, where the Kissi called them pomda (sing. pomdo). All date from a period earlier than the sixteenth century. Their use is unknown. They were unearthed during agricultural work. [2]

Editor’s note: Josef Mueller acquired a dozen of these figurines from Parisian antique dealers between 1920 and 1939.

[1] The comparison of these figures with enormous globular eyes and spatular noses, with the men depicted on the saltboxes made by the Sapi for Portuguese seafarers in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leaves little doubt as to their sculptors. We do not know whether this was the end of a tradition or whether the Sapi still sculpted stone heads and statuettes for macro-religious purposes. No chronicle mentions having seen a monolithic object among the communities along the coast.

[2] Some were considered by their discoverers as ‘objects of the past, things of the ancestors’. Among the present-day Kissi and Bullom, pomda have been seen on domestic altars, where they were offered libations.