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ART on view The vast expanse of the Sahara,
FIG. 1 (left): Female body, known as the Venus of Thiaroye. Senegal. Before 2000 BC.
the world’s largest desert, has been likened to an ocean. Arab travelers crossing this immense body of sand thought of the lands on the Sahara’s southern rim as a distant shore, or sahel in Arabic. That landscape, which extends more than 900 miles from the Atlantic coast to the Niger River bend, is a region of ecological transition from desert to grassland. As a crossroads of cultural exchange, the western Sahel, in particular, was also the birthplace of singular artistic traditions.
Sandstone. H: 7 cm. Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal. Photo: Antoine Tempé.
FIG. 2 (below left): Megalith. Kaolack region, Senegal. 8th–9th century. Lateritic conglomerate. H: 210 cm. Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal. Photo: Antoine Tempé.
SAHEL Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara
FIG. 3 (right): Staff with seated male figure. Dogon or Bozo; Mali. 16th–17th century. Copper alloy, iron. H: 76.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Edith Perry Chapman Fund, 1975, inv. 1975.306. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Peter Zeray.
By Alisa LaGamma
Its earliest settlers adapted to the region’s delicate ecology, farming lands in river basins or herding between those harvested fields and the desert’s edge. In the late seventh century, Berber caravans expanded the Sahel’s already thriving trade networks to encompass trans-Saharan routes, which became a major axis of the world economy. Self-governed for all but sixty-five years of French colonial rule, the peoples of the western Sahel formed a succession of storied empires and kingdoms, from ancient Ghana (c. 300–1200), Mali (c. 1230–1600), and Songhay (1464–1591) to Segu (c. 1712–1861) and the Umarian state (c. 1850–90). As these shifting centers of political power rose and fell, distinct visual forms of expression evolved alongside them in a variety of media, from mud to precious metals. The early accounts of foreign visitors to glittering Sahelian courts captivated the world at large with the lure of new sources of gold. Islam’s arrival in the seventh century introduced literacy and the scriptural translation of regional languages. Over the ensuing centuries, the rich traditions of the peoples of the Sahel expanded to encompass that new faith.
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The original artistic creations that endure in fixed forms ranging from rugged stone monuments to portable altars assembled from organic matter constitute the most immediate points of connection to these earlier epochs in Sahelian history. The exhibition Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until May 10, 2020, draws from the national collections of Niger, Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania, as well as key works now in Europe and the United States. It breaks with precedents to introduce a survey of a diverse Sahelian visual culture developed over the course of a millennium in concert with those watershed events that shaped what has been a global nexus. SAHELIAN NARRATIVES PAST AND PRESENT Media coverage of the Sahel tends to focus on the challenges faced by the region today: increasing desertification owing to climate change, security threats from extremists, and perilous desert and ocean crossings faced by migrants. These headlines, however, ignore both the complexity of the region’s multilayered past and the dynamic vibrancy of its cultural traditions. Our principal sources of information on the deep history of the Sahel include the epic tributes intoned by traditional bards, Arabic texts by foreign and indigenous authors, and physical traces of settlements unearthed by archaeologists. The Sahelian past that is evoked through song and the written word has, however, been for the most part detached from the material creations of its visual artists seen as manifestations of timeless cultures. Sahelian oral traditions, early accounts by Arab visitors, archaeology, and regional forms of visual expression are each furthermore informed by perspectives that may present contradictory narratives rather than a unified understanding of events that shaped the region. While epic poetry extolls the heroic feats of larger-than-life Mande ancestors and the earliest written chronicles describe “empires” and “kingdoms,” archaeological evidence suggests instead that alternative forms of governance developed there, such as confederations of relatively autonomous, self-governing communities
that lacked a fixed capital and paid tribute to a central authority. Beginning in the eleventh century, the adoption of Islam by the leadership of major Sahelian states led to the sponsorship of important civic structures in urban settings such as Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne, including many of the region’s famed adobe mosques. At the same time, visual traditions shaped by earlier nonscriptural religions and beliefs continued to flourish and evolve in affiliated rural communities across the Niger River valley of present-day Mali. Among these are the powerful figurative representations produced by Middle Niger, Soninke, Dogon, and Bamana sculptors. Those artistic landmarks represent Sahelian cultural ideals and prayers for divine intercession by individuals whose specific life experiences are otherwise unrecorded. The works assembled in Sahel are introduced in this presentation both through the lens of an array of thematic perspectives that inform this legacy and in terms of the series of states and periods significant to the definition of the western Sahel. BUILDING WITH MUD Mud, or banco, is a major Sahelian idiom of expression. Combined with sand and water, hand-formed into sundried bricks, banco gives shape to structures ranging from humble granaries and intimate shrines to royal residences and grandiose mosques. An inner armature of poles, or toron, that protrudes from a building’s exterior at once contributes a distinctive aesthetic and constitutes scaffolding that allows workers to scale them in order to annually renew the façade. The quintessence of semipermanent construction, rains cause the inexorable melting of banco. Resurfacing is not simply a process of literal replacement. Instead, every intervention contributes to a building’s evolution as a continually reshaped living structure (fig. 4). Among the key extant landmarks in this tradition are fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Timbuktu mosques, the underlying design of which has been interpreted as anthropomorphic. Despite their longevity, the Sahel’s fluid landmarks are a perpetual reflection of the present. In the
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FIG. 4 (below): Map of the Sahel region of West Africa. Cartography: Adrian Kitzinger. From Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara, exhibition catalog by Alisa LaGamma. © 2020 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Reprinted by permission.
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FIG. 5 (left): Edmond Fortier (1862–1928), Ruins of the Great Mosque of Jenne, published 1906. Photo postcard. 14 × 8.9 cm. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Heather Johnson.
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early twentieth century, this legacy of mutable banco structures became the inspiration for a Neo-Sahelian style in which the ancient aesthetic was translated into industrial—and unalterable—reinforced concrete structures in urban centers from Dakar to Niamey. EPICS Notable Sahelian events and collective memories have been imparted across generations through the spoken word. Born into their vocation, Mande griots, jeliw (sing. jeli), have served as narrators of oral traditions as well as poets, genealogists, praise-singers, diplomats, public spokespersons, and orators (fig. 6). While Homeric epics have been frozen in time since their transcription twenty-seven centuries ago, their West African corollaries were not recorded until the late nineteenth century and remain living narratives that continue to absorb topical content. The most celebrated of these recounts the genesis of the Mali Empire and follows the exploits of its founder, Sunjata Keita. Extolled as “the lion-thief who takes his inheritance,” its hero begins life as the crippled son of a Mande district chief and a physically deformed but spiritually powerful woman to become a formidable war leader who vanquishes the blacksmith sorcerer Sumanguru Kanté and his occupying Soso army. The deeds of such larger-than-life forbearers have been mined as reflections of deeply held cultural values and lyrics celebrating Sunjata adopted as the Malian national anthem. Jeli performances remain the animating force of any ceremonial or festive occasion, from weddings to child-naming ceremonies, national holidays, and political rallies. Since the 1980s their audiences have expanded globally to include the international concert circuit.
FIG. 8 (below): Mecià de Viladestes (active Majorca early 15th century), maritime map of the Mediterranean, 1413. Manuscript on vellum. 84.5 x 118 cm. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Sold by Mr. Bihourd to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1857. Photo: Bibliothéque Nationale de France.
FIG. 6 (above): Louis Hostalier (French, active c. 1890–1912), Native Griot with His Guitar (Griot Indigéne avec sa Guitare), c. 1900. Photo postcard, published by Metharam Bros. et Cie., Dakar, Senegal. 14 × 8.9 cm. Visual Resource Archives, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
FIG. 7 (below): Bala. Mandinka; Guinea or Mali. 19th century. Wood, gourd, hide, membrane. L: 44 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889, inv. 89.4.492. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Paul Lachenauer.
TRADE: THE SAHARA AS A SUPERHIGHWAY OF EXCHANGE The perilous crossing of the Sahara took seventy days and required intimate knowledge of the landscape and night sky. As “the ship of the desert,” the camel was the critical agent. Caravans comprised of thousands of camels and hundreds of people, ferried goods between the Mediterranean and northern Sahara trade centers. Goods sent south included cloth, glassware,
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armaments, ceramics, metal housewares, paper, and horses bred in North Africa. The latter were the most costly and prestigious. Principal among those carried north was West African gold. At its sources, gold was bartered for other regional commodities, such as salt from the Sahara. Scholars estimate that between 800 and 1500 CE, a ton of gold a year was supplied through this axis until it was diverted to shipments along the Atlantic coast. The Sahel supplied an established market for slaves in North Africa and the Arab lands to the
price of a human life was most often quoted in relation to that of the value of a horse—from ten to thirty persons. ISLAM Islam’s arrival in the Sahel was peaceful. Its introduction by Karijite merchants in the late seventh century established a relationship of cooperation between its followers and those of non-scriptural religions born in Africa. Islam’s gradual adoption both expanded existing spiritual and cultural repertoires and transformed it
FIG. 9 (below): Equestrian. Middle Niger civilization; Mali. 12th–14th century. Terracotta. H: 68 cm. Ex Bubu Chara, Mopti, Mali (possibly); Samir Borro (possibly); Émile Deletaille, Brussels, 1973; Leon and Fern Wallace, Los Angeles, 1978; Donald Morris Gallery, Detroit. Collection of James J. and Laura Ross, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Peter Zeray.
east into the twentieth century. As many as ten million Africans entered that network between 800 and 1900, and half of these traversed the Sahara. In contrast to the trans-Atlantic trade, female captives were a priority for affluent urban households. As Islamic law required that masters recognize sons born from unions with enslaved women, replacement of those who were emancipated as well as high mortality rates fueled a constant demand. On the Saharan frontier, the
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into a dominant religion of the Sahel. Far from monolithic, its practice has been defined by a diversity of approaches. The earliest Sahelian sovereigns to embrace Islam customized their observance of the faith at home to retain the allegiance of their non-Muslim subjects. At the same time, their participation in an Islamic world beyond West Africa afforded new coordinates—prayer oriented toward Mecca, a non-seasonal calendar, and the spiritual journey of the hajj. From the fourteenth century, itinerant teachers who followed the extension and expansion of long-distance trade routes propagated Islam and the coexistence of Muslims and nonbelievers. Mansa Musa of Mali’s grandiose 1324 pilgrimage via Cairo forged multilateral connections and reverberated globally. Musa brought Muslim scholars back with him to Mali. Upon his return home with Muslim scholars, state patronage and wealth generated by trade fostered the development of Timbuktu as a center of Islamic study. This period coincided with the development of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam emphasizing the inward search for spiritual closeness with God through learning. Sufism was disseminated through the establishment of a diversity of mystical orders, or tariqas, named after individual founders espousing distinct doctrines, traditions, and social conventions. The earliest among these, founded in twelfth-century Iran, was that of the Qadiriya brotherhood. Following
FIG. 10 (above left): Curing Diseases and Effects both Apparent and Hidden. Timbuktu, Mali. 1733. Manuscript on paper. 22.5 × 17.5 cm. Mamma Haidara Memorial Library, Timbuktu, Mali, inv. 116. Photo: Mamma Haidara Memorial Library.
FIG. 11 (above): Female figure. Ghana empire; Kumbi Saleh, Mauritania. 7th–11th century. Terracotta. H: 10.5 cm. Office National des Musées de Mauritanie, Nouakchott, Mauritania, inv. KS72 KI 94. Photo: Antoine Tempé.
FIG. 12 (right): Equestrian. Bura-Asinda-Sikka Site, Niger. 3rd–10th century. Terracotta. H: 18.4 cm. Institut de Recherches en Sciences Humaines, Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Niger, inv. BRK 85 AC 5e5. © Maurice Ascani, www. photographe-niger.com.
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FIG. 13 (below, top): Pectoral known as the Rao Pectoral. Rao/Nguiguela; Senegal. 12th–13th century. Gold. H: 12 cm. Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal, inv. 41 32. Photo: Antoine Tempé.
FIG. 14 (below, bottom): Hand. Bura-Asinda-Sikka; Niger. 3rd–11th century. Terracotta. H: 50.8 cm. Institut de Recherches en Sciences Humaines, Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Niger, inv. AC3 BRK 85. Photo: Maurice Ascani, www. photographe-niger.com.
its establishment in Morocco during the fifteenth century, it was adopted by the Kunta family responsible for promulgating Timbuktu’s scholarship and commerce. Another major Sufi order, that of the Tijaniyya, originated in North Africa much later, during the eighteenth century, a time of intense religious revival. ARCHAEOLOGY Until the twentieth century, understanding of the Sahel’s deep history was informed by oral traditions and the accounts written by Islamic sources. Amateur archaeologists who set out merely to confirm those accounts often intervened with destructive results. Painstaking modern investigations of the Sahel’s many-layered settlements have afforded an independent fount of information. Most notably, they have established that urbanism and state formation were already in progress before the development of trans-Saharan trade with Berber North Africa. Signs of pre-Islamic cultural practices and beliefs of the members of
these communities survive in the traces of their distinctive burial practices. Three decades of sustained excavation of the tell, or foundation, of Jenne-jeno begun by Roderick and Susan McIntosh in 1977 has contributed an especially detailed case study of the development of a major Sahelian urban center from 250 BCE to 1400. Analysis of the site suggests that its citizenry participated in a unified economic network and political self-governance. Such evidence has dispelled earlier assumptions that the rise of Sahelian states was due to external stimulation. Instead, the region’s culturally diverse settlements fostered highly developed east-west networks of exchange as evidenced by beads and other exotic items from as far as East and Southeast Asia deposited at the time of Jenne-jeno’s founding. ANCIENT GHANA: FOURTH TO FOURTEENTH CENTURIES Key to the allure of ancient Ghana was an ideology that identified its leadership with gold production. Known locally as Wagadu, according to legend, its first king and the founder of Soninke clans was said to be the offspring of a water spirit. A pact for its prosperity brokered with a serpent exchanged rainfall, a bountiful harvest, and gold for the annual sacrifice of a maiden. While Arab/Berber geographers defined Ghana as “the land of gold,” it was in fact strategically positioned between gold producers to the south at Bambuk and desert-dwelling Berbers, or Sanhaja, who procured salt. Ghana’s rulers taxed the exchanges of salt for gold to their south and of gold for copper and manufactured imports from the north. Referred to as an empire, Ghana was likely a gradually consolidated confederation of many small polities. Some of each of these may have been fully administered and others nominally affiliated through tribute payments. Eleventh-century visitors described its capital of Kumbi Saleh as comprised of the rounded mud structures of a central royal residence adjoined by a district of stone mosques inhabited by Muslim traders. When the Gold Coast became the first nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain its independence from colonial rule in 1957, it named itself Ghana in honor of the empire that was geographically unrelated.
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lated new trade networks and state formation. The Wagadu epic tradition traces the precipitation of waves of migrations across West Africa to the villainous slaying of their guardian serpent that unleashed drought, famine, and loss of gold. ANCIENT MALI AND MIDDLE NIGER CIVILIZATION: TWELFTH TO FOURTEENTH CENTURIES Malinke chiefdoms southeast of ancient Ghana united to form a new state under the heroic leader Sunjata in the early thirteenth century.
SONINKE DIASPORAS The population of the ancient states of Ghana and Takrur west of the Niger River were predominantly Soninke speakers. Also referred to as Wangara, they were credited with establishing interior trade routes and urban settlements. At the start of the second millennium, a series of developments contributed to their dispersal. In the eleventh century, a declining Ghana was likely conquered by Islamic Berbers of the western Sahara known as the Almoravids. During the twelfth century, the opening of new goldfields at Buré, on the frontier of present-day Mali and Guinée, led caravans from North Africa to shift toward the east and south. In the thirteenth century, the marginal western Mauritanian lands were impacted by severe drought. In response to such cataclysmic change, the Soninke ventured further south. Their engagement with Bamana and Malinke groups stimu-
FIG. 15 (above left): Kneeling female figure with crossed arms. Middle Niger civilization; Mali. 12th–14th century. Terracotta. H: 50.8 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston, inv. 1982-20 DJ. Photo courtesy Menil Collection.
FIG.16 (below): Reclining figure. Middle Niger civilization; Jenne-jeno, Mali. 12th–14th century. Terracotta. W: 36 cm. Musée National du Mali, Bamako, inv. R 88-19-275. Photo: Musée National du Mali.
At its height under Mansa Musa (d. 1327), ancient Mali’s influence extended from the Atlantic coasts of Senegal and Gambia to the Niger Bend as far as Gao and the forest-savanna of the southern Niger River basin. Within that territorial expanse lay the city of Jenne-jeno. Settled as early as the third century BCE, its fertile floodplain yielded surpluses of abundant biannual crops. Mud brick construction delimited an outer wall and the densely packed abodes of its ethnically diverse citizens. Organized in professional districts, they included metalsmiths and potters responsible for complex figurative representations as well as brickmakers, builders, traders, fishermen, and farmers. There are no signs, however, of central authority in the form of monuments, palaces, or temples. Unknown sources of stress led to Jenne-jeno’s gradual abandonment between 1200s and 1400. That period coincides with an explosion of fig-
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urative representation across the Middle Niger. The few examples of these documented in controlled excavations were originally integrated into the foundations of domestic compounds as household shrines or deliberately discarded. ANCIENT MALI AND TELLEM CIVILIZATION: ELEVENTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURIES Embrace of Islam allowed Mali’s leaders to transcend the beliefs of their culturally diverse subjects. Their stance was one of tolerance toward a plurality of practices. The edifices sponsored by Mansa Musa as gestures of Islamic devotion in Timbuktu following his pilgrimage to Mecca are contemporaneous with traces of indigenous beliefs that endure in the forms of figurative representations in fired clay and cast metal created across the Middle Niger and those in wood from the nearby Bandiagara Plateau. The Bandiagara’s elevated and impregnable escarpment offered refuge to a succession of migrants, including the Soninke, who left ancient Ghana. Upon their arrival in the fifteenth century, Dogon settlers referred to those who preceded them as tellem, or “we found them.” The relative inaccessibility of Bandiagara’s caves allowed them to serve as secure chambers for storing reserves of grain and ancestral burials. That remoteness and the arid climate contributed to the preservation of
FIG. 17 (right): Figure with raised arms. Tellem; Ibi, Mali. 16th–17th century. Wood, organic materials. H: 45 cm. Fondation Dapper, Paris, inv. 0063. © Archives Fondation Dapper.
FIG. 18 (above): Female figure with raised arm. Tellem (?); Ireli(?), Mali. 15th–17th century. Wood (Ficus or Moraceae), applied organic materials. H: 44.8 cm. Collected by Pierre Langlois, Paris, 1955–56(?). Ex Henri Kamer, Paris and New York; Julius Carlebach Gallery, New York, until 1957; Nelson A. Rockefeller, New York, 1957; on loan to the Museum of Primitive Art, New York, 1957–78. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection. Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979, inv. 1979.206.64. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Peter Zeray.
FIG. 19 (left): Tunic. West Africa. Before 1659. Cotton, indigo. W: 191 cm. Weickmann Collection, Museum Ulm, Germany, inv. D.41. © Museum Ulm—Weickmann Collection. Photo: Oleg Kuchar.
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FIGS. 20a and b (left and below): Mother and child. Bamana; Mali. 15th–early 20th century. Wood. H: 118.1 cm. Private collection. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Peter Zeray.
FIG. 21 (right): Commemorative stela for Queen M.s.r (or M.s.n) Gao-Saney, Mali. 1119 CE. Schist. W: 43 cm. Excavated in Gao-Saney by Jean Chambon, August 1939. Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal (IFAN). Photo: Antoine Tempé.
some of the earliest textiles from Sub-Saharan Africa. The Tellem laid their departed to rest with these as burial offerings along with attributes of their vocations as hunters and farmers. THE LEGACY OF ANCIENT MALI AND THE DOGON: SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO 1900 Ancient Mali’s territory exceeded that of any other Sahelian state before or since. Until its gradual decline during the latter half of the fifteenth century, its system of law and order incorporated nonMande Dogon, Senufo, Bozo, Somono, and Fulani subjects. Dogon oral traditions evoke an original homeland in the center of the Mali empire as the point of departure for their own migrations north to Bandiagara. Dogon settlers were greatly influenced by the Tellem traditions they encountered there. They removed votive offerings from Tellem necropoli and transferred them to their own altars. Given their embrace of such precedents, it is impossible to distinguish between Dogon and Tellem sculptural traditions on a purely formal basis. The Dogon pantheon includes the celestial creator, Amma, as well as divinities identified with water (Nommo) and earth (Lebe). Dogon sculptural creations have constituted altars at which prayers are directed for the ongoing engagement of venerated ancestors and expressions of the intense desire for new life. With the mid-twentieth-century conversion of members of Dogon communities to Islam and an interest in Dogon sculpture in the world at large, such works have been dispersed internationally. SONGHAY EMPIRE: FIFTEENTH TO SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES In the 1430s, ancient Mali’s control of Timbuktu and Gao was relinquished to Songhay. Songhay’s political capital, Gao, was a major terminus of trans-Saharan trade that developed in parallel to ancient Ghana. Its rise was led by Sii Ali Beeri (r. 1464–92). An effective military strategist whose forces included cavalry and a fleet of riverboats, he sacked Timbuktu in 1469 and subsequently invaded Jenne following a four-year siege.
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While Ali Beeri maintained ties to his people’s traditional beliefs, one of his military commanders and founder of a new dynasty, Askia Muhammed (r. 1493–1528), prioritized relations with the Islamic establishment. Under that patronage, Timbuktu flourished as a major intellectual center that attracted scholars from the Sahara and North Africa. By 1591, weakened by internal divisions, Songhay was invaded by troops deployed by the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur. Troops equipped with firearms defeated the Songhay forces at the Battle of Tondibi and proceeded to loot and occupy Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne. The Songhay army continued a campaign of resistance but never recovered. In defiance of their Moroccan overlords, during the 1600s Timbuktu authors drew upon oral traditions in now-classic texts to chronicle Songhay’s past triumphs.
FULANI EMPIRES: EIGHTEENTH TO NINETEENTH CENTURIES Based on the desert’s southern fringe, Fulani pastoralists (also known as Fulbe) have annually taken their herds into the lands farmed by Mande communities. After 1500, a widening economy led some Fulani to settle in cities and become committed to the study and practice of Islam. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, they played a dominant role in Islamic reform movements that led to the establishment of the Islamic states of Bundu, Futa Jallon, Futa Toro, and Sokoto. These reforms inspired Seku Amadu (1773–1845) to transform Masina from a former tributary of Segu into the independent Caliphate of Hamdullahi in 1820.
Born to a clerical family in Futa Toro in about 1795 and educated in Futa Jallon, El Hajj ‘Umar Tal was appointed Caliph of the North African Sufi Tijaniyya brotherhood for all the Sudan. Decades later, in the 1850s, he recruited followers from Futa Jallon, Futa Toro, and Bundu to follow him into combat against “pagan” Mandinka and Bamana and to resettle their conquered lands. The superior firepower ‘Umar Tal provided to his forces, which he obtained through European traders, allowed them to prevail on the battlefield against all but the French. ‘Umar Tal’s jihad against idolatry blazed a trail across the Sahel from west to east. Following his 1855 seizure of Kaarta’s capital of Nioro, its Bamana residents were ordered to bring their bo-
FIG. 22 (above): Equestrian. Dogon; Mali. 16th–18th century. Wood, pigment. H: 81 cm. Fondation Dapper, Paris, inv. 123. © Archives Fondation Dapper. Photo: Hughes Dubois.
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liw shrines to be destroyed in the public square. With the 1861 conquest of Segu, the “fetishes” of gold and wood used in annual rites recalling its founding were prime evidence of apostasy. When Amadu III (1830–1862) of the Masina Caliphate refused to turn over Segu’s deposed leader, Bina Ali, ‘Umar Tal prepared a written case justifying his subsequent attack on Masina, arguing that its alliance with a “pagan” opponent constituted infidelity. The defeated Massinanké rose against the Umarian regime in 1864, with support from the Kunta of Timbuktu, leading ‘Umar Tal to flee and seek refuge in the Bandiagara cliffs. Following his death, his eldest son and anointed successor, Ahmadu Sheku (r. 1862–1893) inherited a fractious divided house with three separate capitals. His brother Agibu was among those who participated in Colonel Louis Archinard’s 1880s campaigns that led to French conquest by the end of the century. In Senegal, the place of his birth, ‘Umar Tal has come to be viewed as a resistance hero against French colonialism. For those who identify with the sovereign states he conquered in Guinea and Mali, his legacy is that of a zealous crusader.
FIG. 23 (above): Equestrian. Bamana; Bougouni District, Ouassabo, Mali. 19th–20th century. Wood, iron staples. H: 129.5 cm. Private collection. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Peter Zeray.
FIG. 24 (right): Boubou. Bamana; Segu, Mali. Before 1879. Cotton, silk, dye. W: 55.6 cm. Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, inv. 71.1880.69.8. © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
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FIG. 25 (left): Mother and child. Dogon; Mali. 17th–19th century(?). Wood. H: 55.6 cm. Ex John J. Klejman, New York; John and Dominique de Menil, Houston, 1968. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo courtesy of the Menil Collection.
FIG. 26 (top): Boli. Bamana; Mali. 19th–20th century. Wood, sacrificial materials. L: 45.1 cm. Collection of Francesco Pellizzi, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Peter Zeray.
FIG. 27 (above): Unidentified artist (Senegalese), portrait of a woman, 1910s. Gelatin silver print from a glass negative by Jerry L. Thompson, 1975. 16.5 × 11.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Susan Mullin Vogel, 2015, inv. 2015.499.14.2. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
THE SEGU STATE: EIGHTEENTH TO NINETEENTH CENTURIES Known for his political acumen and ruthlessness, Biton Kulibali, the “Man-Killing Hunter,” established the Bamana state of Segu in 1712. Biton’s power base were the members of a voluntary youth association that became a permanent martial force. His tonjonw waged campaigns seasonally to gain captives of war incorporated into local regiments or sold to the Saharan and Atlantic markets for arms, munitions, horses, and luxury goods. Around 1750, Ngolo Jara, a former captive turned leading member of the army, founded a new dynasty that endured for over a century. His grandson, Da Monzon, is estimated to have placed as many as 100,000 soldiers on the field to gain control of the Middle Niger region from Bamako to Masina. At the Segu court, traditional priests officiated over rites concerned with farming, hunting, and war, practices that made the state the chief target of ‘Umar Tal, who characterized it as a “citadel of paganism.” Despite the alliance of its leader, Bina Ali, and Amadu III of the Masina Caliphate of Hamdullahi to avert conquest by jihad, both were ultimately invaded by the Umarian army. ‘Umar Tal smashed Segu’s “idols,” and its capital transitioned from a stronghold of traditional belief to that of the Umarian Islamic regime. Only thirty years later, Umarian colonization was replaced with that of the French. Across Segu’s former territories, however, Bamana cultural traditions were not extinguished but have continued to accrue enriched meaning into the present. Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York through May 10, 2020 metmuseum.org
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w w w. t r i b a l a r t m a g a z i n e . c o m THE quaterly publication entirely devoted to the Arts and Cultures of Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas