105 This relationship between mother and son is undeniable, even if what emerges most powerfully from the Mande ethos is the inferior status of women subjected to male law.75 The second explanation is that the artist, by depicting a child wrapping his legs around rather than under his mother’s arms, wanted to show the energy that Sunjata was putting into taking his destiny in hand. This solution fits the exceptional temperament of the hero better than the relaxed posture common to children dozing on their mothers’ backs. The thick callus on the leg of the MQB sculpture is a further argument in favor of the representation of a disabled child. A thickening of the bursa at the knee joint is characteristic of paralytics who move around on their knees (fig. 27). The description of Sunjata as a child in the various versions of the epic (see above p. 101) supports this iconographic detail: And yet all Niani76 talked of nothing but Sogolon’s paralyzed child: he was now seven, and dragged himself along on the ground; despite the king’s attachment, Sogolon was in despair.77 And She Sogolon returned and found her son Magan Sunjata sitting in his hole. During the long years of his paralysis, he had dug a hole from which only his head and shoulders emerged. Sunjata, with his paralyzed legs, sat in that hole for seventeen years.78 In some versions, Sunjata consciously decides not to stand up and walk out of spite and anger, because the birth of a son born to one of his mother’s co-wives was announced before his, even though he was technically the firstborn. This wrongfully established the other male child the king’s “legitimate” successor. For seven years he went on all fours And refused to get up. Those seven years had passed, And the time had come for the boys who were to be circumcised to go to the circumcision hut. The people said, “But Sunjata goes on all fours and cannot walk.”79 A standing figure in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (fig. 28), clearly by the same hand as the male figure shown in fig. 21, could well be another representation of Sunjata wobbling and unstable when he finally stood up, either supported by the iron bar that the epic describes as having been obtained by him from the blacksmiths80 or at the moment he decided to uproot a baobab tree in response to Sogolon’s humiliation after one of her co-spouses refused to give her even a few baobab leaves.81 The position of the foot on the MQB figure is harder to explain. It may indicate a calcaneus foot deformity, that is, dorsal hyperflexion (dorsiflexion), recognizable by the foot pointing acutely toward the shin (see fig. 27). This is not a physiological result of the above-discussed disorders, in that paresis or paralysis of the lower limbs usually causes plantar flexion by the retraction of the Achilles tendon (forcing the foot into a pointed position), rather than dorsiflexion that is mechanically hindered by the anatomical disposition of the anklebones as depicted in the sculpture. However, FIG. 25 (above): Two headless maternity figures, one with a bearded figure on the back. IND region, Mali. 13th–17th century. Terracotta with ochre/red slip. Left: H: 32 cm. Ex Baudouin de Grunne. Right: H: 29.6 cm. Kenis Collection, Brussels. © Dr. Marc Ghysels. Photo: Frédéric Dehaen, Roger Asselberghs Studio, Brussels. FIG. 26 (below): CT scans of figure 25, opaque 3D plunging views taken obliquely from the right side. © Dr. Marc Ghysels, Brussels.
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