124 FIG. 3 (left): Serpent-shaped headdress. Baga, Guinea. Possibly late 19th or early 20th century. Wood, pigment. H: 190.5 cm. Acquired by Hélène and Henri Kamer in the village of Kanfarandé, Guinea, in fall 1957. Ex J. J. Klejman, New York, 1958; Celeste and Armand Bartos, New York, 1962–2013; Christie’s, Paris, 2013. Private collection. Image © Christie’s. FIGS. 4a and b (above and upper right): “Masque-serpent.” Boké, Guinea, c. 1954. Photo on paper, cardboard mount. 9 x 12 cm. Ex Musée de l’Homme, Paris (gift of Marceau Rivière). Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, inv. PP007124. Courtesy of Marceau Rivière and Galerie Sao. FIG. 5 (right): Letter from Jacqueline Nicaud to Thomas G. B. Wheelock describing the CMA serpent headdress, July 17, 1994. Curatorial archive, The Cleveland Museum of Art. Courtesy of Thomas G. B. Wheelock. The above-referenced Nicaud letter actually was addressed to Thomas G. B. Wheelock, a now-retired expert and appraiser of “primitive art” in New York, who in the mid 1990s was conducting research on the subject of Baga serpents. He kindly shared a copy of the letter for the CMA fi les. It is also thanks to Mr. Wheelock’s efforts that a sample of the CMA serpent was scientifi cally analyzed by the late Roger Dechamps, a dendrologist at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium. A facsimile message to the CMA conservator dated October 7, 1994, identifi es the wood as Nauclea pobeguinii, a large tree that grows in forested river areas and is common in Guinea. Extract derived from the bark of the trunk of this tree has proven to have antimalarial effi - cacy in human adults. In addition to this technical discovery and to the confi rmation of the serpent’s collection history, we can add data from other research that enhances the interpretation we offered on the subject in South of the Sahara in 2003. To sum up what was expressed there, much of what we know about such serpent headdresses is based on American art historian Frederick Lamp’s fi eldwork in Guinea of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is discussed in his 1996 catalog for the exhibition, Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention7 (regrettably, this exhibition and catalog did not include the CMA’s magnifi cent sculpture). He and other researchers have recorded that the mask both incarnates and resembles the powerful serpent spirit Ninkinanka, honored for bringing rain, bestowing riches, and enhancing fertility. Lamp also describes how it was worn in various initiation contexts, most typically at the beginning of the initiation of young men into adulthood. Ranging in size from 90 to 260 cm, the headdress would always be given a personal name but was generically called a-Mantsho-ña-Tshol among the Baga Sitemu subgroup—or dialect group—where Lamp conducted most of his research. The term bansonyi commonly used in the earlier literature to denote these snake sculptures was actually the term given to them by the neighboring Susu people. While acknowledging the limits of her memory of events that took place forty years earlier,
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