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The Missing Women of Sande a Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization

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The Missing Women of Sande a Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization The Missing Women of Sande A Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization Susan Kart y introduction to the art of Sierra Leone was curating a tiny exhibition of African art for the Smith College went something like this: Despite the Museum of Art, did I start to consider what is painfully absent overwhelming presence of African from our visual narratives on Sande art: our understanding and headpieces in the worlds’ museums, the appreciation of elderly women and their position as art patrons masquerade tradition is not widespread and performers of their own objects. Quite separately from the across the continent. Of the limited scholarly need to understand their role in the production of art, regions in Africa where performances requiring wooden mask Sande/Bondo members have now found themselves victimized headpiecesM were and are practiced, it is generally a performance and disparaged due to the international debate over their initia- of men. Only in West Africa does a dierent tradition of masked tion practices, which traditionally include genital modication dance take place, where women in Sierra Leone and Liberia are the of pubescent girls by female elders. e controversy over genital primary singers and dancers in masquerade as well as the wearers alteration, understood in Sande tradition to mark the death of and commissioners of their sculpted wooden masks (Phillips 1978: childhood and the beginning of adult life, has come to rest on the 265; Boone 1986; Lamp 2014). Among the Mende, Temne, and objects used in public by the most senior Sande women and those their neighbors, adults belong to organized societies—the Poro for appearing most frequently in our museums: their wooden masks. men and the Sande (Bondo) for women—both of which serve as Even though a mask in a museum is long divorced from the powerful political, social, and family entities.1 e Sande society mature woman who may have worn it and was never worn while organizes and hosts the women’s masked performances, which are she was operating on girls, the mask has been proclaimed a tool marked by elaborately carved wooden helmet masks. e masks, by which elder women mutilated their children, and museums stained black, appear as part of a black ber costume enveloping such as the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland and the British a woman’s body. e whole manifestation of woman, mask, and Museum in London have found themselves in the uncomfortable costume is referred to as Sowo. e Sowo preside over a handful of position of having to defend their displays of Sande sculptures, important public events, the primary being the celebration at the while arguing they are not condoning “FGM.” end of girls’ initiation into the Sande society, marking the end of As most Sande activities are conducted in private, the helmet their childhood and the beginning of their lives as adult women. masks worn by the Sowo are the public face of Sande, viewed by the Sowo also appear in public at weddings, funerals, and in litigation Mende during public appearances and subsequently by interna- of cases where men are accused of criminal activity against women. tional museum-going audiences. I suspect that because the Sowo is I am sure this sounds familiar to just about everyone who has the most important public representative of the Sande society, her learned about Sande masquerade arts. Only recently, though, as I mask has become a vector for contemporary concerns about Sande and its women. In addition, the mask wearers (if the mask was in S K is an assistant professor at Lehigh University with a joint use prior to its collection) are senior members of Sande, that is, appointment in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Design and older women. In Euro-American cultures—where the vast major- the Africana Studies program. Her research focuses on Senegalese art of ity of art museums are situated—the older woman is understood to the independence period and the exhibition and display of African art reside somewhere between the irrelevant and the obscene (Frueh objects. She has curated exhibitions of African art at Smith College, Le- 1994: 66, 70). at older women are empowered through Sande high University, and consults for the Allentown Museum of Art. She has culture to dictate their own femininity and to thwart the norms of published in Critical Interventions, ird Text, and Visual Resources. Euro-American society by shaping their daughters’ genitals ren- [email protected] ders them out of bounds for acceptability (Silverman 2004: 429). african arts AUTUMN 2020 VOL. 53, NO.3 Downloaded from| http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar_a_00539 by guest on 28 September 2021 kart.indd 72 5/8/2020 1:00:14 PM 1 Pessima (deceased c. 1980) Sowo-wui mask of Ligba Rank (Ndoli Jowei). Moyambawo, Sierra Leone. Mid-20th century Wood; 17 5/8 x 8 x 8 ½ in Gift of Gwendolen M. Carter, Smith College Museum of Art SC 1960:55 Photo: Stephen Petegorsky Many Sande women are now refugees residing in Euro-American projects—including reanimating the Sande and Poro societies—as settings and are therefore subject to nationalistic and racialized a means to assist with the cultural and historical losses incurred condemnation as well. in the largely devastated country.2 e unintended consequence of these eorts to document and preserve the contemporary activi- ties and historical objects of Sande women has brought the socio- MASKS AND THE MUTILATION DEBATE political debate about genital surgeries into the art museum. For some time now, Sande has been active worldwide, largely as Some women who underwent Sande initiation as children are a result of the vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and now coming forward to condemn the practice’s inclusion of genital Liberia (1980s–early 2000s). Both countries saw mass displace- alteration. e international audience has been quick to proclaim ment of populations, horric violence (including sexual) against its outrage at “female genital mutilation” (FGM) and attempts women and children, and the forced conscription of child soldiers to ban the practice worldwide are gaining traction (Mgbako (Zack-Williams 2011; Coulter 2008; Human Rights Watch 2003). et al. 2010; Mohamud, Radeny, and Ringheim 2006; World Sande survived in both countries because it moved with its mem- Health Organization, UNICEF, and United Nations Population bers to large cities, such as Freetown and Bo in Sierra Leone and Fund 1997). For example, in 2003, the UN declared February 6 Monrovia in Liberia, when the countryside became too dangerous. to be “International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Sande also traveled internationally, primarily to England and the Mutilation.” Regardless of one’s stance on altering healthy genital United States, as women and children ed the conicts as refugees. tissue in children, the sociopolitical debate runs into its own hy- Just as the two African countries were beginning to stabilize in the pocrisy on a regular basis. Euro-American societies comfortably early 2000s, the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014 created more devasta- grant their own mothers control over the genital alterations of tion. In Sierra Leone, recent initiatives by museums, scholars, and their male children through circumcision, yet they have made it activists at the international level have worked to support heritage illegal for immigrant mothers to alter their daughters (Bell 2005: VOL. 53, NO. 3 AUTUMN 2020 african arts Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar_a_00539 by guest on 28 September 2021 | kart.indd 73 5/8/2020 1:00:15 PM 127–28; Abu-Sahlieh 2006).3 Labiaplasty has become wildly popu- taught by the older women to girls before and during Sande ini- lar in the United States as older women want to keep their vaginas tiation (Boone 1986: 45–81). Her statements are echoed today in looking “young” and as teenagers want to sculpt their own genitals. the work of Dr. Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, who points out that male Nonmedical elective vaginal surgeries on teenagers are not pros- initiation among the Poro regards the vagina as an object of “awe ecuted under anti-FGM laws already on the books in the United and deference,” while Sande women are taught to “dominate the States, unless those teenagers are non-white immigrants.4 penis” for pleasure and for reproduction (Ahmadu 2000: 16–17). As the highly charged debate has arrived at the art museum, cu- e wooden masks commissioned by Sande women depict the rators and art historians are feeling the pressure to take a stand, entirety of these processes from birth through adolescence, ma- as museums are understood as sites of educational, institutional, turity, and ancestry. Commissioned by professional Ligba danc- and frequently cultural authority. Yet if museum professionals use ers and also by the head Sowei of each Sande chapter, the masks their exhibitions of Sande art to condemn the practice of genital highlight such abstract characteristics as modesty, integrity, eroti- surgeries, they risk repeating the colonial practice of criticizing the cism, and beauty, as well as the Sande spiritual realm. As there is a “primitive” nature of the colonized in order to prove the “civiliza- correlation between rank in Sande and a woman’s age, only older tion” of the colonizing Empire. To issue blanket positivist support women can commission and wear the high-ranking Sowei mask. for the Sande society and its art objects discounts the very real A dancer’s mask can be commissioned and worn by much younger testimonies of initiated women who nd the process barbaric and members. As the masks themselves distinguish between old age have suered from its eects. To ignore the debate altogether and and youth, they can help museums determine their own collec- focus only on the masks as art with a capital A is akin to the ostrich tion’s bias towards youthful representation.
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