121 HERBERT M. COLE MATERNITY MOTHERS AND CHILDREN IN THE ARTS OF AFRICA MERCATORFONDS of the week and markets held on them, and with warfare in the old days. These deities are protective, healing, fostering agricultural and human productivity and general prosperity —or their lack if poorly treated. Earth is by far the most important god in the Owerri region of Imo state, among more than two million people. Most Igbo regions have mother-and-child woodcarvings representing deities, but only in Owerri is the Earth goddess so ascendant, or at least so visibly present. See Herbert Cole, 1982, Mbari: Art and Life Among the Owerri Igbo, p. 19. 4. Omenala is the Igbo word for tradition, custom, and culture. Ome = sprout, or bud of new growth; na = and; ala = earth. Elided with na, the word (apparently) is: “sprout and earth.” See Michael J. C. Echeruo, 1998, Igbo-English Dictionary: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Igbo Language, p. 127. 5. People from the sponsoring village are initiated as spirits after they enter the mbari enclosure, walking through its entrance backward, then symbolically killed as they are dedicated to the god for whom the mbari is being built. 6. Approximately half of the 125 mbari houses I surveyed in 1966–67 were dedicated to Ala. Mbari like those I’m describing here are no longer built, although a few cement and concrete block versions were built after the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War of 1967–1970; they were substantially secular structures, more as museums than as sacrifi ces. 7. More deeply than anyone, Sarah Brett-Smith has explored these ideas in her remarkable 1994 book, The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender. 8. Brett-Smith, op. cit. 1994: 124ff. There are many analogies between Bamana and Igbo beliefs about termite mounds as spirit dwelling sites and symbols of fertility and abundance. As among the Igbo, termite mounds among the Bamana are points of contact between this world and that of spirits and are said to have mouths and doors (ibid: 126). And like Igbo mbari houses, Gwan and Jo societies and sculptures are not found in all Bamana regions. These two cultures are about a thousand miles apart and have almost surely never been in historical contact. 9. Charles S. Bird and Martha B. Kendall, 1980, “The Mande Hero: Text and Context,” in Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird (eds.), Explorations of African Systems of Thought, p. 15. 10. Kate Ezra, 1986, A Human Ideal in African Art: Bamana Figurative Sculpture, p. 37. 11. Ibid., p. 38. 12. Jean-Paul Colleyn, 2009, Bamana: Visions of Africa, p. 33; Kate Ezra, personal communication, 2014. 13. Salia Malé speaks of the Jo society that owns these images as “the thing not to say” (“The ‘Jo’ and the ‘Gwan,’” 2001, in Jean-Paul Colleyn (ed.), Bamana: The Art of Existence in Mali, p. 143), perhaps also indicating that the names and nature of the fi gures also should not be spoken. 14. Brett-Smith, op. cit., 1994: 33. 15. For example, among the Chokwe, Shona, Hausa, and other peoples not related to one another. See Eugenia G. Herbert, 1993, Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies, pp. 34ff, 56ff. 16. Most, but clearly not all, African people consider Earth to be female. The Beng and Wan of Cote d’Ivoire are exceptions. See Herbert, op. cit., 1993: 215. 17. Neither Bamana Gwan cults nor beliefs in Senufo Ancient Mother are found in all parts of these two cultures, just as mbari houses are also confi ned to one Igbo region. My Senufo data owe greatly to the work of Anita Glaze, 1981, Art and Death in a Senufo Village; Anita Glaze, 1993, various contributions in Jean Paul Barbier (ed.), Art of Côte d’Ivoire: From the Collections of the Barbier-Mueller Museum; Gilbert Bochet, 1981, in Susan M. Vogel, For Spirits and Kings; African Art from the Tishman Collection, 44, 45; Gilbert Bochet, 1993, “The Poro of the Senufo,” in Jean Paul Barbier (ed.), Art of Côte d’Ivoire: From the Collections of the Barbier-Mueller Museum. 18. Bochet (op. cit. 1981: 47) and Glaze (op. cit. 1981: 103) say that Ancient Mother is head of Poro, while Till Förster disagrees, though he does see Katiolo as head of some related initiatory societies (personal communication, March 2014). 19. Bochet, op. cit., 1981: 45, 46; 1993: 78. 20. Bochet, op. cit., 1981: 45. 21. Bochet, op. cit., 1993: 78. 22. Zoë S. Strother, 1993, “Eastern Pende Constructions of Secrecy,” in , Mary H. Nooter (ed.), Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals, p. 175; 5.10, 5.11. 23. Constantine Petridis, however, indicates that some of these rooftop maternities were carved in the 1930s or perhaps earlier. See Petridis, 2002, “Mbala, Tsaam, or Kwilu Pende? A Mother-and-Child Figure from the Kwango-Kwilu Region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” in Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, vol. 7, p. 134. 24. Ibid: 161. 25. Petridis, op. cit., 2002: 133; Strother, op. cit., 1993: 176. 26. Strother, op. cit., 1993: 176; Zoë S. Strother 2004, “Architecture Against the State: The virtues of Impermanence in the Kibulu of Eastern Pende Chiefs in Central Africa,” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 63, 3 (September), 277. 27. Strother, op. cit., 1993, 291. 28. Mary Nooter Roberts, 2013, “The King Is a Woman: Shaping Power in Luba Royal Arts,” in African Arts, 46: 3. Many thanks to Polly Roberts’ many publications and to her careful reading and comments on an early draft of this essay. 29. Roberts, 2011, in William Fagaly (ed.), Ancestors of Congo Square, p. 288. 30. Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, 1996, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, p. 156. 31. Ibid: 196. 32. See Brett-Smith, op. cit., 1994: 139, 140, for parallels between Bamana iron smelting and childbirth, between the domestic cooking hearth and the blacksmith’s forge, as well as between sexual intercourse and the working of iron as transformative processes. Blacksmiths as fertilizing agents, iron tools as life-giving instruments, analogies between carving a human fi gure and childbirth, and many other complex ideas germane to our topic are explored in the Brett-Smith text, but are too extensive to be recounted here. These ideas are also developed in Herbert (op. cit., 1993). 33. For the importance of process (in contrast to form), see Cole, op. cit., 1982: 72–100); Roberts in Evan Maurer and Allen F. Roberts, 1986, Tabwa: The Rising of a New Moon. A Century of Tabwa Art, p. 10; and Petridis 1987: 199, note 25. FIG. 22 (above): Neckrest. Luba, DR Congo. Wood. H: c. 12.5 cm. Collection of Marc Felix. FIG. 23 (below): Cover of the upcoming book Maternity: Mothers and Children in the Arts of Africa. Courtesy of Mercatorfonds.
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