FEATURE come deified ancestors.88 In most cases, these arguments 108 are based on supposedly anthropological fieldwork, including testimonies recorded in the twentieth century, which severely undermines their credibility and means that they cannot be considered scientifically, even if they do support our argument.89 These assertions are an integral part of a denigrating postulate that sees Africa as a group of societies with immutable practices. This discourse is outdated in academic circles90 and although it still finds followers, it immediately causes public outcry and an indignant reaction from the community of scholars.91 Bamba Suso, one of the griots who was asked to tell the story of Sunjata’s deeds, cleverly avoided this pitfall by saying, at the end of his tale: “That is where my own knowledge ends. Then Sunjata took control of Susu and Manding. The mode of life of people at that time And our mode of life at the present day are not the same.”92 In the dynamics of change, there are facts that oral literature uses and transforms by deliberately introducing anachronisms, since it recounts past events to illustrate contemporary moral values. The griots take liberties with the story to adapt it to their audiences, such as the detail that Dô Kamissa was invulnerable to bullets. Although we can accept the idea that religious practices vary less over time than most other traditions— largely because they try to conform, as far as possible, to the orthodoxy of established rites—it is inappropriate to use certain animist rituals observed among groups in the region93 during the twentieth century as an indication of probable uses made of IND terracottas hundreds of years earlier. To do so would be a hoax, even without the many surveys that illustrate nothing but the goodwill of the people questioned and their tendency to produce a “veiled discourse”94 in an attempt to satisfy their interlocutor, who presents himself as an anthropologist. Obviously such data cannot be used. From archaeological findings, however, we can suppose that these sculptures were part of domestic or perhaps, as in the case of the Natamatao site, collective worship.95 The results do not confirm96 whether this was centered on ancestors, figures from origin myths, or supernatural beings. Nonetheless, by drawing on the Mande oral tradition, we can hazard an identification and put names to some of the figures, and this identi- FIG. 29 (above): CT scans of figure 28, opaque 3D views from two angles. © Dr. Marc Ghysels, Brussels. FIG. 30 (above right): Screen shot from MQB website (March 2013). Note that the “use” has recently been changed from “funerary” to “indeterminate.” FIG. 31 (right): Monumental sculpture of the Buffalo of Dô in Place Sogolon, Bamako, Mali. Photo: Renaud Gaudin.
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