Kingdoms & polities · pre-1822 and continuing
Sacred groves and the bush school
The enclosed forest precincts where Poro and Sande held their schools — protected land, protected knowledge.
Biography
Every town of the forest belt kept a grove that could not be farmed, cut or entered by the uninitiated. Inside it, initiation schools ran for months or years; outside it, the same trees were common woodland.
The groves functioned simultaneously as seminary, court, hospital and conservation regime. Their boundaries were among the most rigorously respected property lines in the region.
Historical significance
An indigenous land-tenure and conservation system with religious enforcement, invisible to surveyors who saw only 'unimproved forest'.
Timeline
- pre-1500Grove-based initiation established across the forest belt
- 19th c.Groves misread as vacant land in settler surveys
- 1941Documented by G. W. Harley
Related entries
References
- Harley, G. W. (1941). Notes on the Poro in Liberia.
- d'Azevedo, Warren (1962). 'Uses of the Past in Gola Discourse.'
Suggested reading
- Harley (1941).