Statue of Ba De Krinjabo

1 For the Agnis of the Kingdom of Sanwi the ancestors are elevated to the rank of divinity by the name of màname that also receive the small terracotta statues that represent them. As in most African Animist peoples, the human being does not die, only his body returns to the land from which it originates and the spirit passes into another dimension, but for some Agnis his spirit is reincarnated into an ethnic woman. And it is also a woman, the sorceress, who modeled these mà or representation of the deceased. In other times, a weekly holiday was celebrated in honour of the mà or living dead.

These statuettes mà were placed on the tombs or laid in a place far from the village and received food and drink and blood from victims of sacrifices to safeguard the lives of the women who had made them. They were washed once a year.

When a sovereign died, numerous human victims were sacrificed, in addition to their wives and concubines, slaves and slaves to serve him in the hereafter.

The mà or Bà They were dedicated to the cult of ancestors by being the receptacle of the spirit of the divinized ancestor. They were modeled in front of the body present of the deceased accompanied by the wailings of the wailings. The mà They were piled up and fed on the day of the weekly feast. These customs as well as the bloody sacrifices ceased in the year 1901. According to specialist B. Hello the different information available on the subject are quite contradictory.

These figures have appeared in different places in the ancient kingdom of Krinjabo, near Aboisso. They seem to date from the centuries. XVI a XIXMostly only heads have appeared with signs that the bodies have been broken. In other cases they were, in their time, deliberately separated from the body. There are very few pieces that have been preserved whole and many of them with breaks or flakes. We are faced with a mà elegant bill acquired in Abidjan in the mid-sixties of the last century.

It represents a female character with incipient breasts, without a doubt an initiated young woman from the nobility, with ritual scarifications on her face. The body is cylindrical, expanding at the level of the feet. It has no arms or legs, disproportionate hands come directly from the trunk. The ringed neck, as corresponds to the beauty canon of women of many African ethnicities. The statuette suffered a break in its transfer from Abidjan. Nice gray patina produced by time.