Hermaphrodites and androgynes

The hermaphrodite is a figure that often appears in the statuary and in African masks. The Dogon and especially its predecessors the Tellem have carved numerous hermaphrodite statues. Hermaphroditism which in Africa has a raison d'être, since it is at the origin of the human being. In the cosmogonies of many of their ethnic groups, the primordial ancestor or first ancestor was represented under the aspect of a hermaphrodite figure, since all aspects of the human being, the male and the female, were gathered in him, with more marked forms than in the normal person, since for them, both man and woman, at birth, were born with the masculine and feminine attributes. This is one of the reasons, the mythological one, for which, when it came to puberty, prior to the rites of initiation, one proceeds to the circumcision of the boys in whom the foreskin constitutes the female part or the ablation of the clitoris of the girls that is their male part. Thus, when they come to this new stage of life, they have freed themselves from the attributes that did not correspond to them and have become fully male or female. The Peul or Fulani, renowned shepherds spread throughout the Sahel countries thank Ndurbele, the famous hermaphrodite ox, for having begotten all his flocks. Androgynous figures abound in the African statuary, that is, those who do not appear clearly the sex to which they belong.