Info - Baoule and Malinke music

Music and Dances of Occidental Africa

MUSIC OF THE BAOULE MUSIC OF THE MALINKE 


Found on ebay . Cannot find old link. Must be on a zip drive.

Research. African Masks, Rituals of Cross-Gender Transformation.

There are many examples of dual, antithetical masks. Among the Baga of Guinea, for example, the masquerade of D'mba is the epitome of beauty and good comportment, while her antithesis, D'mba-da-Tshol, is the epitome of ugliness and erratic behavior. Among the Dan of Liberia, sleek and gentle female masks are opposed to grotesque and violent male masks. 

Man-boy sex, or at least the representation of it, is most common. Among the Temne of Sierra Leone, for example, the last boy to be initiated is given the name, Tithkabethi ("vagina initiate"). Boys in initiation often wear women's clothes, as documented among the Temne and among the Nandi of Kenya. 


Among the Ndembu of Congo (Kinshasa), the chief instructor of the boys' initiation is called the "husband of the novices" and the novices themselves are called mwadi, senior wives, and are said to be "married by" the chief instructor. The novices are said to play with the sexual organs of male visitors to the initiation lodge, a practice considered helpful in the healing of their circumcisions. In a particular ritual, an elder man lies on the ground, exposing his penis, and each of the novices mimes copulation with him. 

While homosexuality may not often be the subject of African art, homosexual persons may be more inclined than others to become practitioners of the arts and rituals. In the Sudan, the healing ritual system known as zaar, practiced mainly by women, is also joined by men, some of whom become ritual leaders. These men are assumed to be homosexual by the community, and some are overtly homosexual. In Mombasa, Kenya, receptive homosexual men called mashoga, dressed in wigs and women's clothes, are active as performers at weddings, playing the pembe (a female musical instrument), and doing chagkacha (a seductive female dance). Male ritual leaders called mugawe among the Meru of Kenya dress as women routinely and sometimes even marry other men. Coptic monks in the sixth or seventh century, whose work included the painting of sacred manuscripts, apparently were known for their homosexuality, judging by a man's wedding vow on papyrus that promises "never to take another wife, never to fornicate, nor to consort with wandering monks." Among the Dagara of Burkina Faso, the homosexual man is said to be well integrated into the community, occupying a performance role of intermediacy between this world and the otherworld, as a sort of "gatekeeper." As Somé reports, a Dagara man has testified that such a person "experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different from the one the normal person would experience. . . . So when you arrive here, you begin to vibrate in a way that Elders can detect as meaning that you are connected with a gateway somewhere. . . . You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born." Diviners, who manipulate materials to find a spiritual solution to clients' problems, in several areas of Africa have been known to be homosexuals, for example among the Zulu of South Africa and among the Nyoro of Kenya, where they would demonstrate spiritual possession by "becoming a woman." Carlos Estermann found that among the Ambo of Angola a special order of diviner, called omasenge, dressed as women, did women's work, and contracted marriage with other men who might also be married to women. "An esenge [sing. of omasenge] is essentially a man who has been possessed since childhood by a spirit of female sex, which has been drawing out of him, little by little, the taste for everything that is masculine and virile." In the case of the Zande of the Central African Republic, sex between a man and a boy was said to benefit the diviner, and would take place before the consultation of oracles, when sex with women would be taboo. But, as Evans-Prichard reported, the Zande went on to allow that the reason was not simply ritual prohibition, but also "just because they like them." Homoeroticism in Art Perhaps the most common use of eroticism in African art is the depiction of the phallus. Well-known examples of singular phallic sculpture include columnar earthen shrines, documented among many groups in the Sahel, for example, the Dogon, Batammaliba, and Lobi. The sexual realism of these columns is heightened by the pouring of white meal over the rounded top. Large, vertical, stone pillars, called akwanshi, found along the Cross River in Nigeria, and traced to before the colonial period, are carved quite realistically as an erect penis, with a distinct head and shaft. Generally the height of an adult person, they seem also to represent a truncated human figure. Male initiates among the Zulu of South Africa carry wooden clubs with a knob on the end resembling the head of a penis. With sometimes several dozen young men initiated at one time, the sea of upraised phalluses is a powerful sight. The Baga of Guinea revere a great male founding spirit who is manifested by an enormous, vertical shaft of fiber, perhaps twenty meters tall, topped by a wooden bird head, and carried inside by as many as twenty men. The powerful male image is frightening to the community, as it shivers and throbs. Alternatively, a heavy, wooden, vertical shaft in the form of a huge serpent may represent the founding male spirit, and is balanced on top of the dancer's head.   African Art: Traditional   The exaggeration of the phallus as a part of a male figure is almost universal throughout Africa. The Yoruba god, Eshu, the god of confusion, the crossroads, chance, and sex, is depicted with a wooden phallus sprouting from the top of his head. Wooden figures of ancestral chiefs among the Ndengese of Congo (Kinshasa), are carved with enormous phalluses to emphasize the fertile power of the ancestors. The Egyptian god, Amun-Min, he who awoke the sexual potency of the god Osiris, is depicted as a mummy with an erection. Among the Yaka of Congo (Kinshasa), during the initiation called nkanda, young male officials perform with erotic masks known as kholuka in the coming-out ceremonies. The masks, constructed by the young men, often are surmounted by human figures in heterosexual intercourse but also frequently by the single male figure with an enormous erection, very realistically formed, and sometimes shown in masturbation. During the dance, including pelvic thrusts, the dancer also carries a wooden phallus, and sometimes sheds his clothing to reveal his own erect sexual organ. During this performance, the men disparage the women and ridicule the women's sexual organs, while extolling their own. But an exceptional event is the Baga dance for their great female spirit, a-Bol, in which all the participating men dress as women and imitate their movements erotically, undulating the hips, and sometimes suggesting sexual intercourse with men on the sidelines. The musical instruments used during the dance are those normally reserved exclusively for women: the cittern, wa-sakumba, and the small të- ndëf drum.  Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, priests of the god Shango, the god of thunder and lightning, are usually female, but male priests are common and they always dress as women, with braided hair. They operate in the ritual context in which the god is said to "mount" the priest in spirit possession, as a male animal mounts a female in intercourse. Some studies have indicated specifically that the male priests do not practice homosexuality, while others have disputed this.  Men also use masks to control, to honor, to placate, and sometimes, to rebuke women. In the Yoruba Gelede dances, for example, men assume the likeness of "the mothers" in order to control their extraordinary powers, which they fear, and which are symbolized, in part, by the woman's unique ability to nurture. There are some examples of permanent gender transformation, which goes beyond occasional cross-dressing, in which men "become" women and women "become" men in African ritual. Among the Gabra of Ethiopia and Kenya, symbolic gender inversion takes place as a function of the gender-specificity of space, as older men are assigned to the inside of the camps, a feminine space, whereas masculinity is constructed among the younger men by assignment to the outside. Whereas the initiation of boys turns them into men, the second initiation, jilla galaani ("rites of the return home"), turns the men into women socially, though not sexually.  The accession to leadership sometimes seems to require gender transformation. Two pharaohs of ancient Egypt, Hatshepsut and Smenkhare, who are believed to have been women (the latter being Nefertiti in her later years), are consistently shown wearing false beards and men's clothing, just as the male pharaohs. This is probably not because they functioned as men sexually, but because a male identity was needed to function as a pharaoh. Accompanying texts refer to them exclusively as men. Many representations exist showing the human being as Janus, of dual sex. Janus masks of the Ejagham in Nigeria, for example, have one face dark and one light, delineating the oppositions of physical and spiritual, female and male. Human figures of the Lobi of Burkina Faso, the Dogon of Mali, and the Luba of Congo (Kinshasha), among many African ethnic groups, are carved with a male face on one side and a female face on the other. This depiction can represent the bisexual ancestors or other spiritual beings who are both male and female or have attributes of both. It can also represent the ability to work in both the physical and the spiritual worlds, themselves frequently aligned with such dyads as the interior and exterior, the village and the wilderness, and the feminine and the masculine.