D’mba shoulder mask (Baga).

Guinea. Wood, height: 116 cm.

Private collection.

 

 

Worn statues are called “shoulders masks” because they are widely held by the dancer over his head and supported by his shoulders using a wooden frame. The most achieved sculpture among the shoulders masks in Africa is done by the Baga for the harvests, happy events, and ancestral worship. It represents a woman who has breastfed and symbolises fertility.

 

 

Belief in a Supreme God

 

The question is not completely solved as to whether the Negroes of Africa, aside from all Christian and Islamic influence, believe in a Supreme Being, in a unique God. It definitely seems that this belief is almost universal among them, but it is of a cosmological order rather than a religious one, as mentioned above[21]. They admit that the world and the beings it encloses, including the spirits, have been created by a ‘Superior Being’ whose existence they recognise, but in whom they have no interest because they would not know how to enter into relations with him and because he himself has no interest in the lot of his creatures, having nothing of the character of the Providence-God of the western religions. So the ‘Supreme Being’ is never the object of any sort of cult among the African animists, at least if he is not identified with the Sky, a generating divinity who fecundates the soil by means of rain, or else identified with the Earth, a fecundated and productive divinity. I have heard several times the pagan Negroes designate the Muslims by an expression literally signifying “those who invoke God”. The fact that men can address themselves to God appears to them surprising and contributes not a little to the prestige which the Mohammedans enjoy among them.

 

 

Magic and Magicians

 

As I have said above, superstition reigns among the Negroes, as among all men, but more supremely, of course, among ignorant peoples, who are impressed to the highest degree by mystery, than among populations which a more practical type of mentality, a more generalised education and a more abstract religion have disembarrassed in part from this plague of humanity. Belief, as naive as ineradicable, in the power of amulets and talismans is legendary among the Negroes. There is not one of them, whatever be his religion, who does not wear on his body several “gris-gris”, of which one is to preserve him from such and such an illness, a second from the evil eye, a third from the spirit irritated by his ancestor who was left without burial, while another should procure for him the love of the woman he desires, or the generosity of the master whom he serves or even, if he is an official, a rapid advancement. But here we have manifestations of an essentially human credulity and we can see almost the same things among ourselves.

 

The manufacturers of amulets, the magicians and sorcerers, have easy prey in such an environment. Numerous fortune-tellers predict the future and reveal hidden things, by means of processes, many of which strangely resemble those which our own clairvoyants employ. The magical spell, in diverse forms, is practised on a great scale. Some people are considered to have received at birth the power to kill or make sick at a distance, thanks to the evil spells which they cast, sometimes unconsciously, over their enemies or over unknown persons. These castersof-spells are naturally very much feared; special divinities, whose cult is made up of strange rites, mysterious and complicated, have been invented and secret societies have been created with a view to discovering these sorcerers, to annihilate or at least to counterbalance their power and, if need be, put them to death.

 

The family religion, as we have seen, has been instituted and functions only for the profit of the group. It does not bother about individual interests, and the patriarch, sole possible intermediary between the deity and the mass of the faithful, only intervenes when the common fate of the latter is concerned. It would especially not be proper to have recourse to it when one desires to obtain the disappearance of a member of the family. As for the special cults of which we have just spoken, they each have a well-defined object and one could not, for example, address himself to the god of thunder or to a god destined to combat the casters-of-spells when one has to solicit the cure for cancer or to preserve oneself from poisoned arrows. Here then magic intervenes, and it has taken an intense development among the Negroes, being substituted for religion each time that the latter is in default, that is to say, usually when it is not the interest of the collectivity that is concerned.

 

Such is, with its serene logic as to principle, its often bloody applications, and also with its degrading deformations, the religion to which the Negroes of Africa are profoundly attached.