The Missing Women of Sande: A Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization

Abstract

My introduction to the art of Sierra Leone went something like this: Despite the overwhelming presence of African headpieces in the worlds' museums, the masquerade tradition is not widespread across the continent. Of the limited regions in Africa where performances requiring wooden mask headpieces were and are practiced, it is generally a performance of men. Only in West Africa does a different tradition of masked dance take place, where women in Sierra Leone and Liberia are the primary singers and dancers in masquerade as well as the wearers and commissioners of their sculpted wooden masks (Phillips 1978: 265; Boone 1986; Lamp 2014). Among the Mende, Temne, and their neighbors, adults belong to organized societies—the Poro for men and the Sande (Bondo) for women—both of which serve as powerful political, social, and family entities.1 The Sande society organizes and hosts the women's masked performances, which are marked by elaborately carved wooden helmet masks. The masks, stained black, appear as part of a black fiber costume enveloping a woman's body. The whole manifestation of woman, mask, and costume is referred to as Sowo. The Sowo preside over a handful of important public events, the primary being the celebration at the end of girls' initiation into the Sande society, marking the end of their childhood and the beginning of their lives as adult women. Sowo also appear in public at weddings, funerals, and in litigation of cases where men are accused of criminal activity against women.I am sure this sounds familiar to just about everyone who has learned about Sande masquerade arts. Only recently, though, as I was curating a tiny exhibition of African art for the Smith College Museum of Art, did I start to consider what is painfully absent from our visual narratives on Sande art: our understanding and appreciation of elderly women and their position as art patrons and performers of their own objects. Quite separately from the scholarly need to understand their role in the production of art, Sande/Bondo members have now found themselves victimized and disparaged due to the international debate over their initiation practices, which traditionally include genital modification of pubescent girls by female elders. The controversy over genital alteration, understood in Sande tradition to mark the death of childhood and the beginning of adult life, has come to rest on the objects used in public by the most senior Sande women and those appearing most frequently in our museums: their wooden masks.Even though a mask in a museum is long divorced from the mature woman who may have worn it and was never worn while she was operating on girls, the mask has been proclaimed a tool by which elder women mutilated their children, and museums such as the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland and the British Museum in London have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to defend their displays of Sande sculptures, while arguing they are not condoning “FGM.”As most Sande activities are conducted in private, the helmet masks worn by the Sowo are the public face of Sande, viewed by the Mende during public appearances and subsequently by international museum-going audiences. I suspect that because the Sowo is the most important public representative of the Sande society, her mask has become a vector for contemporary concerns about Sande and its women. In addition, the mask wearers (if the mask was in use prior to its collection) are senior members of Sande, that is, older women. In Euro-American cultures—where the vast majority of art museums are situated—the older woman is understood to reside somewhere between the irrelevant and the obscene (Frueh 1994: 66, 70). That older women are empowered through Sande culture to dictate their own femininity and to thwart the norms of Euro-American society by shaping their daughters' genitals renders them out of bounds for acceptability (Silverman 2004: 429). Many Sande women are now refugees residing in Euro-American settings and are therefore subject to nationalistic and racialized condemnation as well.For some time now, Sande has been active worldwide, largely as a result of the vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and Liberia (1980s-early 2000s). Both countries saw mass displacement of populations, horrific violence (including sexual) against women and children, and the forced conscription of child soldiers (Zack-Williams 2011; Coulter 2008; Human Rights Watch 2003). Sande survived in both countries because it moved with its members to large cities, such as Freetown and Bo in Sierra Leone and Monrovia in Liberia, when the countryside became too dangerous. Sande also traveled internationally, primarily to England and the United States, as women and children fled the conflicts as refugees. Just as the two African countries were beginning to stabilize in the early 2000s, the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014 created more devastation. In Sierra Leone, recent initiatives by museums, scholars, and activists at the international level have worked to support heritage projects—including reanimating the Sande and Poro societies—as a means to assist with the cultural and historical losses incurred in the largely devastated country.2 The unintended consequence of these efforts to document and preserve the contemporary activities and historical objects of Sande women has brought the sociopolitical debate about genital surgeries into the art museum.Some women who underwent Sande initiation as children are now coming forward to condemn the practice's inclusion of genital alteration. The international audience has been quick to proclaim its outrage at “female genital mutilation” (FGM) and attempts to ban the practice worldwide are gaining traction (Mgbako et al. 2010; Mohamud, Radeny, and Ringheim 2006; World Health Organization, UNICEF, and United Nations Population Fund 1997). For example, in 2003, the UN declared February 6 to be “International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.” Regardless of one's stance on altering healthy genital tissue in children, the sociopolitical debate runs into its own hypocrisy on a regular basis. Euro-American societies comfortably grant their own mothers control over the genital alterations of their male children through circumcision, yet they have made it illegal for immigrant mothers to alter their daughters (Bell 2005: 127–28; Abu-Sahlieh 2006).3 Labiaplasty has become wildly popular in the United States as older women want to keep their vaginas looking “young” and as teenagers want to sculpt their own genitals. Nonmedical elective vaginal surgeries on teenagers are not prosecuted under anti-FGM laws already on the books in the United States, unless those teenagers are non-white immigrants.4As the highly charged debate has arrived at the art museum, curators and art historians are feeling the pressure to take a stand, as museums are understood as sites of educational, institutional, and frequently cultural authority. Yet if museum professionals use their exhibitions of Sande art to condemn the practice of genital surgeries, they risk repeating the colonial practice of criticizing the “primitive” nature of the colonized in order to prove the “civilization” of the colonizing Empire. To issue blanket positivist support for the Sande society and its art objects discounts the very real testimonies of initiated women who find the process barbaric and have suffered from its effects. To ignore the debate altogether and focus only on the masks as art with a capital A is akin to the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. In all cases, the erasure of women and their bodies (in particular those of older women) from museum exhibitions of Sande art has perpetuated a narrative of youthful beauty, which unintentionally draws attention to initiation surgeries. It furthermore comes at the expense of narratives regarding middle-aged and mature women, the same women whose masks are now in museums.At or slightly before puberty, Sierra Leonean and Liberian girls assemble into cohorts to go through Sande training together.5 The girls are removed from their families and society in general and are admitted exclusively to the company of adult Sande women for an extended period of time.6 Freed from their roles as daughters, sisters, and children, the girls can be literally reborn as women (Boone 1986: 45–79). Older women, therefore, are entirely in charge of defining the roles they hold in society and wish to cede to their offspring in future generations. Day has noted that “the separation of community responsibilities along gender lines assumes that women are the supreme authorities in their own sphere and that this sphere is of equal importance to that of men” (2012: 24). Sande indeed functions as a corporate body, capable of enforcing Sande laws, ensuring correct behavior on the part of men and women, and protecting women's interests (Day 2012: 24). This protection is one reason girls participate in its initiations. More importantly, girls only become adults after going through the challenging educational training directed by Sande leaders. Midwifery, women's health, political advocacy, and judicial oversight were/are the traditional occupations of the head Sowei, the woman who served/s as head of her town or region's Sande society. Women of lesser rank, or Ligba, are dance and voice instructors for the girls and often their surgeons. Ligba and other Sande members are tasked with teaching girls about puberty, sex, childbirth, cooking, and maintaining a household. Training also includes labor performed on behalf of the elder Sande women in order to teach the girls “modesty, diligence, and respect for one's seniors” (Phillips 1978: 267). In addition, Boone once argued convincingly that the physical beauty and sexual nature of women are critical pieces of female power in Mende society, and these attributes are actively taught by the older women to girls before and during Sande initiation (Boone 1986: 45–81). Her statements are echoed today in the work of Dr. Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, who points out that male initiation among the Poro regards the vagina as an object of “awe and deference,” while Sande women are taught to “dominate the penis” for pleasure and for reproduction (Ahmadu 2000: 16–17).The wooden masks commissioned by Sande women depict the entirety of these processes from birth through adolescence, maturity, and ancestry. Commissioned by professional Ligba dancers and also by the head Sowei of each Sande chapter, the masks highlight such abstract characteristics as modesty, integrity, eroticism, and beauty, as well as the Sande spiritual realm. As there is a correlation between rank in Sande and a woman's age, only older women can commission and wear the high-ranking Sowei mask. A dancer's mask can be commissioned and worn by much younger members. As the masks themselves distinguish between old age and youth, they can help museums determine their own collection's bias towards youthful representation.For example, the Smith College Museum of Art has a small but important collection of African art dating from the 1800s to the present, and they always have some of it on public view.7 One highlight is a Sande helmet mask, or sowo-wui (Fig. 1) carved ca. 1958 by Pessima, a master artist from Moyambawo, Sierra Leone. The headpiece is dramatic: parallel striations on the head imply a tightly braided coiffure, while snakes, a reptile, and a moveable bird decorate the top of the headpiece. The mask possesses a high forehead, small facial features, and two small slits carved between the chin and first ring of the neck to allow a wearer to see out. Pessima's headpiece exemplifies the ndoli jowei style of mask made for a professional Sande dancer of Ligba rank. From Phillips's (1995) and Boone's (1986) interviews with Mende men and women, we understand that the designs for the hair on Sande masks are elaborate variations on actual women's hairstyles. Young women prefer hairstyles involving fine, tight braids, often in elaborate patterns. Older women prefer a looser style, where the braids do not cling to the scalp and can number as few as three or four. This style, a sowo-bolo (sowo's cap), produces what Boone translated as “big hair” (Boone 1986: 184). The pattern of tight, V-shaped “braids” on Pessima's mask thus indicates youthfulness, and the mask celebrates the newly born adult Sande woman.Compare Pessima's mask to one at the British Museum (Fig. 2), which displays a very different hairstyle: the “big hair” of an older woman and the eye slits for the wearer located at the center of the mask's eyes. Boone claimed that when a Sowei wore her mask, the “mask-head forms a Janus with the head of the human being inside; she, with her human eyes, has added to her all the power of the mask's eyes to see inside the spirit world” (Boone 1986: 176–77) The more powerful placement of the eye slits, allowing the wearer's eye to align with the mask's (rather than looking through eye slits placed in the neck, for example), along with the hairstyle indicates that this mask is most likely one of the highest rank, belonging only to a senior Sowei leader of the Sande society. Given that only older women achieve the rank of Sowei, this sowowui mask was the property of one of the oldest and most powerful women in her society.I wrote the object label for Pessima's mask to focus on him as the artist, given that the mask was previously unattributed to him. I also briefly described the Sande tradition, but I did not draw attention to the mask's hairstyle as an indication of age or rank, in large part because the mask was carved on commission for a European and thus never worn by a Sande dancer.8 And the object I have signaled as the “older woman type” in the British Museum is not on display. Nothing is necessarily wrong with the Smith installation or the British Museum's mask being in storage; however, a stronger model is offered at the Baltimore Museum of Art.In 2015 the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland completed an extensive renovation of its African art galleries. As the museum was in possession of a uniquely large collection of Sande helmet masks, curator Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch decided to open the African galleries with a display of twelve of them.9 This, she argued, was an important corrective for African art exhibitions that, in order to document the diversity of African art, display one object from each culture in order to represent as many cultural groups as possible.10 Gunsch, like many in the field of African art, is concerned that the “one object from each region” approach presents a skewed view of uniformity within cultures, as if one Sande mask could stand in for all of them over three centuries of creation.11 By displaying a dozen Sande masks of both Sowei and Ligba rank, the Baltimore exhibition introduced greater diversity than had ever been present in a US exhibition.In her otherwise positive review of the new African art galleries for the Baltimore Sun, Mary Carole McCauley, a reporter, found significant fault with the Baltimore Museum's display of Sande masks, stating, “Despite the charming touches, the masks are undeniably powerful and even frightening—as befits their role in a controversial female initiation ritual that has traditionally involved genital mutilation.” McCauley was upset that nowhere in the exhibition did the museum acknowledge that “Sande initiation rites have frequently included the widely condemned practice of female circumcision” (McCauley 2015). Her complaints prompted the museum's PR department to respond: “The curator chose to focus on the visual expression of the Sande society and the aesthetic value of the masks themselves rather than one aspect of the rite of passage for some members” (Anne Mannix-Brown, quoted in McCauley 2015). Gunsch was also concerned that nowhere else in the galleries did the museum deal with controversial anatomical modifications when exhibiting objects (i.e., their display of tiny silk shoes made for Chinese women with bound feet), and she did not want the African art galleries alone to bear that burden.12 A subsequent angry editorial on May 26, 2015, in the Sun, “Masking the Truth at the BMA: Exhibit Leaves out a Human Rights Violation Connection to the Exhibit,” prompted museum action at a higher level. The deputy directors for curatorial affairs and education posted a lengthy response on the BMA's blog, part of which reads:I argue that the museum bears significant responsibility in how they exhibit their material, and they are in a position to actively present the multiple meanings held by their objects. One glaring problem with the FGM controversy at the Baltimore Museum, however, is the absence of older women in the debate. Clearly, girls who have undergone genital surgery have grown up to become women and subsequently senior citizens. And yet, as the case illustrates, the Sun and the BMA are focused on the surgical initiations of young girls. The international condemnation of FGM deals with older women only in order to condemn their desire to maintain initiation traditions and punish them for their roles as surgeons in the practice (Abusharaf 2006: 4, 7–8). Otherwise, the surgically adjusted bodies of older women are completely invisible in the narratives against initiation. In this international debate, the legitimacy of older women's own bodies is being invalidated and erased. The fact of having undergone genital surgery is used to ridicule women's bodies as victims of a patriarchal society, to discount women's ability (and desire) to experience sexual pleasure, and to invalidate the way they choose to bring up their own daughters (Shweder 2000). Very little attention, however, is paid to why adult women wanted or needed to go through Sande initiation. One initiated woman (who had genital surgery) commented, “It's a big shame if you are named as a woman that is not part of the [Sande] society. You need to be a part of it. If not you will just be like nothing.” Her friend (also a woman who had surgery as part of her initiation) agreed, saying, “It's like you're accepted now in certain parts of the society … you can talk where all the women talk, you can go where all the women go. You're allowed to go a lot of places, you're not ostracized” (Kalokoh 2017: 140).14As Sande masks are produced for adult, initiated women like these two, one form of assistance museums can give to West African women is to display their stories in conjunction with their own objects. Museum displays should convey just as much about Sande elders and their bodies as they do about Sande youth. As scholars and museum professionals, we have not adequately confronted the absence of older women in museum displays (and not just older African women), and yet these same women were the patrons, users, guardians, and sellers of the very objects we present to the public. Part of the problem is that all the bodies are missing in our museum displays of Sande masks; we frequently only have the headpieces (not the entire masquerade costume), and those headpieces more often than not are representative of younger, not older, women.As museum collections often limit curatorial choices, we must remember that exhibitions of Sande art are curatorial theses, based on the relatively static nature of the collections that curators are tasked with displaying. We often learn more about the museum's collection history and that collection's relationship with the heritage of the country in which it sits than we do about the cultures/countries that produced the individual objects on display (Arvidsson 2011: 39, 70–71). In addition, the type of Sowei mask at the British Museum was rarely collected, given its spiritual and political importance to the Sande society as a whole. It is far more common to see the ndoli jowei style in museums, as these were more easily obtained by purchasing them from their female owners (who could then commission a new mask for themselves) or else directly from the artists themselves. Of the Baltimore Museum's masks, for example, over thirty are of the ndoli jowei type, while only four can be comfortably identified as Sowei. Fewer high-ranking elder masks in museums translates to the unintentional skewing of displays toward representations of younger women. As collections of historical material are unlikely to change much over time, exhibition of the collections also tends to experience the same inertia: items are locked into the past in which they were collected, leaving little room for the present day, or for present-day needs from certain objects (Arvidsson 2011: 69). In addition, the generally decreasing funding for new acquisitions of current works of art that could represent Sierra Leone, Liberia, or Sande/Bondo/Poro culture today further forces us to exhibit the Sande masks as “timeless,” since contemporary works by these artists is often not being acquired. We have to actively resist allowing a lack of funding to determine our exhibition choices. We know that expecting our nineteenth century masks to explain current-day Sierra Leone aristic (and sociopolitical) practice is unacceptable, and museum leadership needs to be held accountable for allowing stalled collection activity to determine the nature of African art exhibitions.Perhaps the most critical problem for museums in their exhibition of Sande masks is that the Sowo (the entirety of woman, mask, and costume) is absent, thereby eliminating the bodies of the women who served as Sowo from consideration. Almost all exhibitions of Sande masks (or any African masks, for that matter) are therefore contingent on documentary photographs or videos that supplement the incomplete headdress with images of the full costume as worn and performed.In all documented public appearances of Sande masks, the Sowo's mask and clothing completely conceal the woman underneath. This allows the Sowo to act on behalf of the entire Sande society and the ancestral/spirit worlds, not just as an individual. The mask plays only a small part in this bodily concealment. In fact, without the uniform the helmet mask is merely a wooden museum object, unrecognizable even to the Mende. Phillips records how she showed photographs of masks in museums to Sierra Leonean women and “found that the bare headpiece, deprived of its costume, ornaments, and dramatic impersonation, could become virtually unrecognizable as ndoli jowei. People would puzzle over these photographs and then offer a comment that amounted to a kind of disowning: “It might be a sowei, but it's not from here” (Phillips 2015: 19).The removal of the headpiece from its costume is largely a result of nineteenth century colonial practices of procuring masks for display in Europe. As the Sowo headpiece was carved (like a sculpture) in wood (an acceptable artistic medium) and, most importantly, figurative (although far more abstract than European art of the time), colonizers saw the mask as the creative product of an “other” culture. African masks were interesting to nineteenth century anthropologists and art historians (and hence museums) for what they might say about the gods, “fetishes,” “devils,” or even bodies (in the form of portraiture) of the indigenous populations of European colonies. The costumes associated with masks, however, were often made of impermanent materials like raffia, cloth, and seedpods or intangibles like body paint. These posed a problem for transportation, display, and conservation and were usually not collected in the first place.This does not mean, however, that the costume was not of interest to colonial Europeans.15 In early records of the Sowo, the costume, wooden headpiece, and the woman wearer received fairly equal attention, a situation largely different from the subsequent museum fascination with the headpiece alone. T.J. Alldridge was one of the first Europeans to photograph the high-ranking mask worn as part of the Sowo ensemble, complete with a white head-wrap indicating the presence of a high-ranking Sowei underneath (Fig. 3). Alldridge served in various posts for the British Colonial government from the late 1870s through early 1900s and wrote some of the first accounts of the Sande published in Europe. His description of the Sowo, which he calls a “Bundu devil,” appears in all of them:Alldridge stresses his acquisition of the “devil mask,” not the “dress” or “costume” of the Sande medicine woman. While he has correctly determined that the British Museum would be interested in purchasing a wooden mask, he does not even bother to collect the rest of the ensemble, as he knew it would be problematic:Alldridge and his colleague Harry Hamilton Johnston, writing from across the border in Liberia, both remarked their surprise that members of the Sande/Bondo society in the two countries would use men's pants (the “leggings” made of country cloth) as well as European pants, stockings, and shoes to conceal the legs of the Sowo (Fig. 4) (Johnston 1906: 1031). They were also entertained that the European top hat, a symbol of the well-to-do gentleman, was occasionally worn by high-ranking Sande women and even incorporated into the wooden helmet masks of Sande dancers (Fig. 5) (Alldridge 1913: 773). While Alldridge and Johnston both amassed collections of Sande helmet masks, neither made any effort to collect the costumes—parts of which were European and therefore contained no exotic value for museum display. The wooden mask with a European top hat, however, was a different story. The mask Alldridge speaks of selling to the British Museum wears a top hat and also has two identical faces, one on the front and one on the back, making it one of only a small number of Janus-faced Sande masks. While the appropriation of actual European goods was troubling to the supposed authenticity of Sowo costume, the artistic appropriation of European imagery constituted a fine discovery for Alldridge.Distracted by their understanding of Mende women using men's clothing to perform a dialogue between the “African” and the “European,” Alldridge and Johnston missed the more relevant connection between the Sande and Poro, or male and female dichotomy embodied in the Sowo regalia. Mende women did not wear pants in Alldridge's time; their usurpation of men's clothing served as a not-so-subtle reminder of the Sowo's power to defend Sande women against men. By attaching a sculpture of a woman's head on top of black raffia fiber hung from men's clothing, the women in Alldridge and Johnston's photographs were marking their complete control over the spiritual and ancestral realms for men and women alike. Furthermore, as Day reminds us, warrior-chief skills were taught to men and boys in Poro, yet women were believed able to channel these skills in the face of pregnancy, birth, and defense of their families and fellow Sande women (Day 2012: 30). Often, in Alldridge's own time and still today, senior Sande women served/serve as equals to the paramount chiefs in their towns.Alldridge's refusal to collect the entire mask ensemble is symptomatic of what has been defined by scholars as an act of colonial violence: a forced separation of the bodies of the colonized from the artifacts of their own history (Savage 2008: 74). Historians and artists alike have critiqued the staging of a “decapitated” mask isolated in a vitrine or hung from a wall in a museum.16 Arguably, African masks in public collections not only serve as particularly poignant indexes of the historical violence enacted against the colonized themselves, but also the museum's discomfort in examining its own dependence on that colonial violence. As González astutely notes,As a result, the colonial (and sometimes postcolonial) record of collection continues to influence the exhibition and display of Sande headpieces in the present day. The masks in museum collections display the collection history of the late nineteenth century and its conceptions of class, gender, and race (Werner 2011: 15). They record more accurately the views of T.J. Alldridge and his contemporaries than they do those of nineteenth century Sierra Leonean culture, or Sande society today. Therefore, we struggle to find productive means to work beyond, around, or through the colonial histories of the objects on display in order to find their contemporary relevance.17 This legacy has been almost impossible to disrupt, leaving curators and museum educators today in the situation of constantly narrating colonialism in order to arrive at a moment where a contemporary story can exist.A recent exhibition at the British Museum attempted a corrective exhibition by placing Alldridge's top-hat-wearing mask on display, surrounded by information about its nineteenth century collection and documentation interwoven with contemporary videos and photographs from Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leonean diaspora in London. Members of Sande living in London were invited to assist in educational programming, but they ended up contributing much more to the exhibition. The Sande women insisted that the ratty raffia fringe attached to the headpiece be thrown out and new fringe attached to the mask. They further insisted that the mask be properly named. When Alldridge procured the mask, he had not known that all Sande masks are individually named by their owners, so he did not record that information. The Sande women therefore held a naming ceremony and then regifted the now properly named and attired mask to the British Museum (Kart 2017: 896).The goal of the exhibition Sowei Mask: The Spirit of Sierra Leone was to use one single object and retrace its history from its carving to its contemporary exhibition.18 This placed the object in a chronological and temporal continuum, where it could serve as a mediator between past and present, diaspora and homeland. The fact that the