FEATURE 104 Instead the iconography could be a premonition of the man-in-the-making, already shouldering his future responsibilities and invested with the power inherited from his ancestors, which has brought him prematurely to adulthood. Given this, there is nothing especially surprising about seeing a child as if he were already expressing the maturity of a relative who is reincarnated in him. This is signaled in the given name “Old Man,” for example, referring to a deceased elder supposedly spiritually dwelling in his descendant’s body. It can also explain the maternal bond with an esteemed person, as was the case with Sunjata, who, apart from being a burden (literally and metaphorically) to his mother over many years, was also very close and indebted to her. The entire epic, up to the death of Sogolon, is constructed on this deep attachment,73 which also corresponds to behavioral codes in the Mande cultural area, where mothers are notably cherished and respected by their children. … among the children that five thousand women can While maternity figures are common in the corpus of IND terracotta sculptures, several qualities support our proposed interpretation of this example. Here the mother is turning her head to the left toward her child, which, if Sunjata, would be already famous and no longer a baby, though she is carrying him on her back in reference to his disability. The hyper-rotation of the head would emphasize the importance of Sunjata, to whom she is attentive although she cannot see him. For this interpretation to be feasible, Sunjata’s legs would be wrapped around his mother’s arms and, indeed, a missing leg has left a visible dent on the lower part of the mother’s left forearm. If a child’s head were also turned to the left reflecting the mother’s posture, his right cheek would originally have rested on the mother’s back, though given that the mother is looking slightly upward, we can envision a taller Sunjata with his chest instead of his cheek touching Sogolon’s hump. When all but the child’s right leg was broken off and part of the mother’s body was also lost, a traumatic break occurred where his cheek or chest touched the hump. Unlike the photomontage with the CT image showing a child carried on his mother’s back (fig. 24), on this figure, Sunjata’s legs would have hugged rather than lifted Sogolon’s forearms. There are two plausible explanations for this and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that Sunjata’s mother may have carried her disabled child well beyond the usual age for weaning. Indeed several other examples of “maternity” figures exist in the corpus in which the representation on the woman’s back is an adult, certainly small but sporting a beard (fig. 25). Such adult figures may be explained by the sacred status of political chiefs in the Mande cultural area, who, in some circumstances, must not touch the ground.72 If that were the case, however, it would be surprising if all the carriers were women. bring into the world in one year, we will not find more than three potential “men,” the others being ordinary uncircumcised lads. Ah! How hard it is to give birth to a “man!” Because a man cannot be born and become someone without the help of his mother. Just as a child receives his genealogy and the prestige surrounding it from his father, so too he receives his baraka blessing from his mother. Yes, a man cannot be born unbeknownst to his mother.74 FIG. 23 (above): Football/handball hybrid being played by young Congolese men suffering from paraparesis. Still shots from Thierry Michel’s film Zaïre, le cycle du serpent, produced in 1992 by Arte France, Les Films de la Passerelle, La Sept Arte and RTBF. FIG. 24: Photomontage laying an opaque CT scan of figure 1 over a picture of a young Ugandan woman carrying her child on her back, photographed in 1936 on the road from Hoima to Fort Portal. © Dr. Marc Ghysels, Brussels. Photo: Eric Matson.
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