Trade centres · carved c. 1400–1600
Nomoli and pomdo stone figures
Soapstone figures found buried in Kissi and Sherbro country, ascribed by their finders to earlier inhabitants.
Biography
Nomoli (Mende) and pomdo (Kissi) are steatite figures — squat, large-headed, often kneeling — turned up by farmers when clearing land. Their makers are unknown to the people who find them, who treat them as ancestors of the soil and place them in rice fields to secure the harvest.
Stylistic links to the Sapi ivories date many of them to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making them the region's principal surviving pre-contact sculpture.
Historical significance
Material proof of a sculptural tradition on this land centuries before 1822 — and of a population whose descendants' memory of them has been transformed rather than lost.
Timeline
- c. 1400–1600Figures carved in the Sapi cultural sphere
- c. 1600Makers dispersed; figures pass out of memory
- 1900sCollected and catalogued by Europeans
Related entries
References
- Person, Yves (1961). 'Les Kissi et leurs statuettes de pierre.'
- Bassani, Ezio & Fagg, William (1988). Africa and the Renaissance.
Suggested reading
- Person (1961).