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Ceremonial Bill-Hooks from Sierra Leone

2022; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_a_00653

1937-2108

William Hart,

African history and culture studies

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.”1Some 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 by age and use, but nothing was known about where in Sierra Leone it had come from or what it had been used for, and the trader himself claimed never to have seen anything like it.A larger weapon of the same kind came to my attention in December 2009. It was reportedly collected at Makeni in the northern province of Sierra Leone, but, as with the previous example, was unaccompanied by any information about what it was or how it had been used. The handle was wrapped in narrow bands of brass, slightly bulging in the center, and with a metal knob at the end (Fig. 4). There was a metal handguard that extended outwards at the back before turning back upon itself.As for the broad iron blade, apart from a disk shape at its lower end where the blade joined the handle, it was otherwise quite plain, although there were a series of pinholes pierced at intervals in the center and around its outer rim which might once have held attachments of some kind.I later learned that the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown holds two similar broad-bladed bill-hook-like implements. The first has an ivory handle decorated with tiny incised concentric circles (Fig. 5). The upper part of the handle is metal and incorporates a two-pronged metal hand-guard. Around the rim of the iron blade are six brass caps (two of the original eight are missing) similar to the example in the Freetown trader's shop. Two free-swinging miniature blades, now rusted, are attached to the rear rim.The second example has a wooden handle partly bound with brass and decorated with what seem to be tiny brass rings set into the wood (Fig. 6). There is no handguard. The iron blade is decorated with brass caps along its outer rim; and the top of the inner edge, instead of coming to a point, seems to curl back upon itself in a circle.One might have expected the museum registers to have recorded how it came to have the two pieces and what they were, but frustratingly neither of them has an accession number and a detailed search of the registers has so far failed to find any description that might plausibly apply to them. Surprisingly also, they were overlooked in the recent audit of the museums collections carried out as part of the Re-animating Cultural Heritage project and, so far as I am aware, have still not been given accession numbers.In addition to these bill-hooks that have come to my attention recently, I would cite an example which I know of only from an illustration of so-called “Ashantee Implements” in the London Illustrated News of October 18, 1873 (Fig. 7). It shows what is said to be a “Knife of Office” with a broad blade similar to those previously described.2 In common with four of them, it has a wooden handle bound and ornamented in brass. But the most compelling point of resemblance is the presence of what are described as “four brass bells” along the outer rim of the iron blade, arranged like the brass caps on three of the Sierra Leone bill-hooks. Notwithstanding the caption, with the exception of four objects labelled A-D in the upper left-hand corner which were collected by T.E. Bowdich, the objects shown in the illustration are not from Asante and were, one suspects, only so ascribed because the English public's attention in 1873 was fixated on the prospect of an Anglo-Ashanti War. The “Kroo boy's pipe” and harp with a gourd sound-box (I and T) seem most likely to be from Liberia. The chief's bow and spear (R and S) are said to be from “Porto Locco,” presumably Port Loko in Sierra Leone; and Sierra Leone/Liberia is also the likely provenance of other items: the leather-and-straw gree-grees or amulets and the powder flask of cow horn. So the knife above may well be from Sierra Leone also.3 Its description as a “Knife of Office, used in human sacrifices,” at least as regards the latter part, probably owes more to the public's preconceptions of Asante society as peculiarly barbarous and bloodthirsty than to any definite information about the knife from reliable sources.Bill-hooks, machetes, or cutlasses—as they are commonly called in Sierra Leone—are almost universally used by farmers in this part of west Africa to clear the undergrowth of the bush for planting rice and other crops. But the bill-hooks already described were clearly not intended for agricultural use. The elaborate decoration of each of the handles, particularly the use of brass, marks them out as implements of a special kind. The ornamentation of the iron blade with decorative piercings (as in the Kolifa example) or with brass attachments standing out from the surface on the blades of other examples, features which would render them useless for bush-clearing purposes, conveys the same message. They are clearly display weapons of some kind, meant for ceremonial use. And here one naturally thinks of the ceremonies surrounding the installation of a Temne paramount chief.4 However, although there are various ritual items that form part of a new chief's regalia—the necklace of leopard's teeth, a-kire-ka-rabai; the traditional staff of chiefship, ka-bonkolma; and his head-cloth, an-yirma—items that vary slightly from chiefdom to chiefdom—I know of no Temne chiefdoms where the regalia include a ceremonial bill-hook.However it is a different matter if we go further back in time, to the late sixteenth century. The Cape Verde trader André Álvares d'Almada in his account of the crowning ceremonies of the local “kings” in Sierra Leone ends his description as follows:The late Paul Hair (1984) commented that the word d'Almada transcribed here uniquely as queto might be the Temne word gbath, meaning a cutlass.6 If that is correct, then we have, from the sixteenth century, an account of the installation of a Temne chief that involves placing in the hand of the chief-to-be a cutlass or bill-hook, symbolizing his power to cut off the heads of the condemned. In other words, a scene similar to that depicted on the lid of the Sapi-Portuguese ivory salt-cellar that was the subject of Grottanelli's article.Nor is this reference unique. The missionary Manuel Álvares, writing in the second decade of the seventeenth century, referred to the kings and leaders of the people of Sierra Leone having a ceremonial killing weapon called binte, that the king gave as a token of safe passage to anyone travelling in his lands. Gbinti, as Hair (1984) noted, is the word for cutlass or bill-hook in the Susu language.7 Perhaps in these earlier times the chief's bill-hook was a weapon that could be used to lethal effect and was not simply an object for display.There is what may be an illustration of such a bill-hook in a Sapi-Portuguese oliphant in the musée du quai Branly (Fig. 8). Among the images carved in the ivory is one of a figure astride an elephant. Since there is no history in this part of west Africa of men riding elephants, the late Ezio Bassani (1988) argued that this was most likely copied from a European illustration of an Asian elephant with its mahout on its back carrying in his right hand the latter's typical hooked goad or ankush. But the implement shown only loosely resembles a mahout's hooked goad; whereas it bears a marked resemblance to the bill-hooks that are the subject of this research note.8 Human figures astride or apparently riding elephants are among the ancient stone sculptures found in Sierra Leone. They are generally taken to be metaphors in stone of the power of chiefs, able to lord it over the strongest creatures of the bush. Could this have been how the Temne or Bullom carver of the oliphant interpreted an image he was being asked to copy? In which case, he might well have intended to depict the figure on the elephant as a chief holding aloft the kind of bill-hook that was the emblem of his chiefship.What particularly weakens the case for the carving being of an elephant goad is that elsewhere on the same oliphant there is an image of a wild or dog-headed man menacing a centaur-archer with what looks to be a similar weapon (Fig. 9).Ordinarily one would not look to sources so remote from the present for clues to the possible significance of the bill-hooks in question. But in the absence of anything relevant to them in more recent writing, one has to spread the net more widely, even to centuries-old reports, with all the caveats that that involves. Reports from the more recent past are unhelpful here. John Matthews, writing in the 1780s, says of the kings of Sherbro, the island and adjacent district to the south of the Sierra Leone peninsula, thatSo it does not appear that a bill-hook-like weapon was at that period a recognized symbol of chiefship in the coastal areas with which Matthews was familiar.10All of the bill-hooks described here have an antique, weathered appearance. That would seem to rule out their being of recent manufacture and hints at the possibility that, like the 1873 illustrated example, they date from the precolonial period. But, in the absence of carbon-dating the wood of the handles, of which there seems no present prospect and which might in any case prove inconclusive, we have no grounds for thinking them to be older still, and certainly none for thinking them to be of an age with our Portuguese sources.I have described them as display weapons. Within Sierra Leone the only weapons comparable to them are the double-bladed knives or sickles (nkono) carried by the gbendekoloing, the Limba funeral dancers who perform at the “wailing” for the death of a chief or big man (Hart 1988). But those, although part of the ceremonial accoutrements of the gbendekoloing, are generally plain and unadorned, not elaborately decorated in the manner of the ceremonial bill-hooks that are the subject of this research note.If we take a wider perspective, however, display or ceremonial weapons are to be found in many societies in west Africa. The most familiar examples are probably the state swords, akrafena, of the Asante, with their familiar gold-leaf-covered dumbbell-shaped hilts, and the sickle-shaped knives, emambele, of the Mangbetu people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other display weapons are known from Dahomey and Benin. They are, however, typically associated with African societies with well-developed state systems and where the possession of such weapons is a mark of status serving to distinguish different individuals or groups within a hierarchy. This isn't, and so far as we know never has been, a feature of the segmentary political structure of the chiefdoms in Sierra Leone. So not only is the existence of display or ceremonial bill-hooks on this part of the Upper Guinea coast an outlier geographically, it looks aberrant given the circumstances in which such weapons are to be found elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.Could the use of such weapons for ceremonial purposes have come to Sierra Leone from those other societies? When I came across the first of these bill-hooks in Kolifa chiefdom, I initially fancied I saw a resemblance between the general shape of its broad iron blade with its decorative piercings and the ceremonial swords also with decoratively pierced iron blades from Asante; the handles of course being quite different. However the bill-hooks that have come to light more recently are more like each other than they are like anything else from Africa, and seem to represent a distinct and and formally homogeneous class of object. Admittedly, for the time being the corpus of examples is small, but there may be others, as yet unrecognized for what they are, in private or museum collections, that the present notice will bring to light.Shortly after completing the writing up of this research note, I read in George Schwab's Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland, that the chief of Ganta, a Mano town in northeast Liberia where the missionary George Harley was stationed, “carried an ornamented machete as his insigne” (Schwab 1947: 169, Fig. 6), and that such a machete, described as a “Mano chief's scepter knife,” had been donated by Harley to the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1930 (Fig. 10).There is a second weapon with a curved blade, described as a “clan chief's scepter knife,” collected by Harley in 1940 and given by him to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in 1962, that may be an example of the same kind (Cat. No. E400598). The uncertainty here arises from the current unavailability, due to the coronavirus pandemic, of a photograph of the object and the possibility that the description came not from Harley himself but was taken from the description of the machete in Harvard. Finally there is what is described as a “Dan ceremonial sword” that was No. 2 in the collection of Edmondo Trombetta. The iron blade is bill-hook shaped and has a ornamented brass or brass-covered handle with a small masklike face in brass where the handle joins the blade. There is no indication of which ceremony or ceremonies it was used in, and the description and the attribution to the Dan or Gio people may have been surmised from its elaborate decoration and from the stylistic features of the masklike element.These Liberian bill-hooks, for all their ornamentation, are more like the everyday bill-hooks or cutlasses used in agricultural work than the Sierra Leone bill-hooks that have been the subject of this research note. They are worth mentioning only because, in the absence of other documentation, they hint at—indeed Schwab/Harley positively confirm—the recent use of bill-hooks as emblems of authority among other ethnolinguistic groupings in the general vicinity of Sierra Leone.