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FEATURE Another precedent for the convergence of material culture and oral accounts is the extraordinary statue— unique in the corpus we studied—in the Barbier- Mueller museum in Geneva, in which we see a woman giving birth to a snake, which is slithering out of her vagina onto her belly (fig. 34).114 Straining in labor, this woman has an ugly face covered with pustules and deep labionasal grooves. She also has a cervical hump. Similar to the sculpture depicted in fig. 10, her headdress 114 may have been broken off by agricultural implements when she was still buried in the ground, or she may have been bald. Could she be Sogolon? In some versions of the epic, Sogolon is described as bald (see above p. 96). The more she is afflicted with deformities and sores, the more interesting she becomes as she transitions toward her remarkable destiny. She is sometimes miraculously healed along the way by the powers of her ancestors.115 If this work is intended to show Sogolon giving birth to the future ruler of the Mali Empire in the form of a snake, the oral tradition sets the stage for this decisive moment. Suddenly the sky darkened, towering clouds from the east hid the sun; and yet it was the dry season; thunder roared, lightning cracked ripping clouds and released large drops of rain and a terrible wind kicked up; a flash of lightning followed by a deep growl of thunder lit up the sky from east to west. The rain ceased, the sun appeared. At that moment, a matron came out of Sogolon’s hut; she ran towards the vestibule and announced to Nare Maghan that he was the father of a boy.116 It would not be incongruous for Sunjata to be depicted as a snake because at birth he already possessed the potential for the vigorous, unifying, fertile, essentially violent, and eminently occult power he would later wield.117 He became an inflexible, reckless, and dangerous warrior, and these qualities were unleashed at the moment of birth. Sogolon’s pregnancy is usually related as extraordinary. Sunjata is said to have stayed curled up in his mother’s belly for many years—from seven118 to seventeen119 years depending on the version. Some variants of the epic tell that, even as a fetus, he already had a will of his own and would come out of Sogolon’s belly at night to hunt and eat lizards.120 After seventeen years of this “game,” “God on High” decided it was time for Sogolon to wake up and realize what her son was up to. She consulted a witch, who helped her trap him by putting a mortar between her legs so he could not crawl back into her uterus.121 Sogolon’s ploy marked Sunjata’s birth, which occurred not when he came out of his mother’s belly but when he could no longer slip back in. It is easier to depict such a scene metaphorically through a snake slithering surreptitiously out of the mother’s vagina to go and swallow a few lizards (taking care to grill them first). Here we clearly see the transformation from the fantastical animal to the exceptional man. From the moment of his conception, Sunjata was marked with the seal of a singular identity but also with the stigmata of this abnormality, the outward signs of occult power, though this would not obstruct his unique destiny. On the contrary, it fostered this destiny. Deus Ex Machina As we were completing this article, within the space of three days we encountered illustrations in two publications that provided further evidence to support our argument. The first was the official release of a book by the collector Claude-Henri Pirat, for which we had written the foreword but had not seen the final selection of objects illustrated, and the second was Bernard de Grunne’s most recently published work. In each we discovered IND terracotta busts—one, a fragmentary female holding the head of a child122 (fig. 37) and the other a profile view of a well-known sculpture123 (fig. FIG. 38 (below): CT scans of figure 39, opaque 3D views from two angles. © Dr. Marc Ghysels, Brussels. FIG. 39 (right): Female bust. IND region, Mali. 13th–17th century. Terracotta with ochre/red slip. H: 40.5 cm. Ex Baudouin de Grunne. Private collection. © Dr. Marc Ghysels, Brussels. Photo: Frédéric Dehaen, Roger Asselberghs Studio, Brussels.


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