Ceremonial Bill-Hooks from Sierra Leone

Abstract

| african arts SUMMER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 2 In an article in African Arts in summer 1975 the Italian scholar V.I. Grottanelli announced the discovery in Rome of a hitherto unrecorded late fifteenth/early sixteenth century ivory salt-cellar from Sierra Leone. It was no ordinary run-of-the-mill work, but what he justifiably described as a masterpiece of carving, of exceptional size and decorative detail, not least in the carving of the lid, which showed a large squatting male figure, naked except for a pair of shorts, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a round shield on its left arm, and its right arm raised gripping the handle of a hatchet as if to strike (Fig. 1). In front of the figure was a smaller figure, its head bowed as if to receive the blow, and half-a-dozen decapitated heads. The ensemble understandably was interpreted by Grottanelli, and by others subsequently, as a scene of actual or symbolic execution. The identity of the large figure has been a matter of speculation. Most have supposed it to represent an African warrior leader or chief triumphing over his enemies. The wearing of the shorts with their codpiece and the appearance of hair drawn back in a pigtail at the nape of the neck have inclined others to think that the figure may be meant to be European (Curnow 1983: 133), although it is hard to imagine the circumstances in which a European would be shown in the pose of an executioner or warrior-chief. However what concerns us in the present instance is the weapon which the main figure holds aloft. Grottanelli explained that the right arm and hand gripping the hatchet were restorations modelled on the caryatid figures around the base of the salt-cellar, but that the restorers had no model for the weapon itself. It was clearly a chopping instrument of some kind, and there were published illustrations of generic African axes that might have provided a more plausible original of the kind of weapon the restorers were looking for, but the solution they settled on, a European-style hatchet, looks inauthentic even to the eye of a casual and nonspecialist observer. It is the aim of the present research note to suggest what kind of weapon the executioner-figure might originally have held and to draw attention to a group of similar weapons which have not hitherto been described in the literature about Sierra Leone. In 1985, while researching brass masks of chiefship among the Temne people of central Sierra Leone, I photographed an unusual weapon with a brass-bound handle and broad iron blade (Fig. 2). It was part of the paraphernalia of the chief ’s brass-masked ritual messenger in Kolifa chiefdom, Tonkolili district. The blade was pierced through in a number of places: two parallel rows of six and seven small rectangular vents through the broadest span of the blade and above them four larger vents around a central hole or hub forming a rough cross or wheel motif. In addition there were a number of pinholes around the edges of the blade and a curious extension to the point of the blade, bent backwards and terminating in a pierced disk. If I caught the name correctly, it was called a-boka-na-masim. Boka is Temne for a bill-hook or machete. Masim is a term commonly used in connection with ritual matters. Pa Masim is the title of the ceremonial chief responsible for installation rituals in a Temne chiefdom. An-seth-a-masim is the sacred house where the ritual objects of chiefship are kept. So the name should probably be translated as “sacred or ritual bill-hook.”1 Some years later I was shown a similar bill-hook-like implement that had been brought to the shop of a Foulah trader in Freetown from up-country. As in the previous example, the wooden handle was sheathed in brass darkened with handling, but it was more elaborately carved, with protruding flange-like bands of wood alternating with narrow brass collars towards its lower end (Fig. 3). The iron blade was not decoratively pierced, but had a series of brass nipples or caps on each side and tiny, free-swinging brass links attached by pins to its outer rim. There was a narrow metal handguard on the handle that curved upwards at the back, and what had probably once been a free-swinging hook at the point of the blade, now rusted and immovable. It seemed weathered research note