Icons from the end of days: Visual hagiography among Layennes of Senegal

Abstract

Remarkable street paintings in a neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal, depict half the countenance of an African holy man named Seydina Issa and half that of Jesus Christ, the images joined by an interface of golden blessing. Another street painting based upon a photograph of Seydina Issa depicts him with studio lights reflecting from his forehead in the form of a brilliant cross. The man is a saint (wali Allah, ‘Companion of God’) of Senegal's smallest local Sufi order, the Layennes, who live by fishing from Dakar's ocean shores. Issa's father, Seydina Limamou, was revealed in 1883 to be the Mahdi or Great Guide of the End of Days come to lead the righteous, and Issa (‘Jesus’ in Arabic) would complete his apocalyptic mission. While the great majority of Senegalese are Muslims, a small but socially prominent minority are Roman Catholics. The image of Christ in the joined paintings is derived from Adolf Hyla's ever-more-popular depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus based upon Saint Mary Faustina's holy visions of the 1930s. Such dramatic imagery reflects and fosters visual hagiography – that is, ways that pictures contribute to ongoing understanding of the lives of saints, not just in the past but in the present and future. Even as the paintings will be explained historically, then, it is equally important to speculate about what they ‘want’ and may become.