Mande culture and birds are honoured

Reviewed by
Sheridan Griswold | Friday September 25, 2009 00:00

A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ball and the Art of West African Masquerade is the culmination of 30 years of involvement by Patrick R. McNaughton in this unique Mande art form. He first watched Sidi Ball perform the bird dance in Dogoduman in 1978. He is now the Chancellor's Professor of African Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. McNaughton went to Mali to study blacksmiths. His first book is The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power and Art in West Africa (1988). He has also written Secret Sculptures of Komo: Art and Power in Bomana Initiation Associations.

A Bird Dance Near Saturday City is a remarkable book. Many others before McNaughton have studied Mande art and he clearly recognises their contributions. One scholar of these giant dancing masks is Pascal Imperato, a physician who began working in Mali in 1966 and studied the Mande youth association and their art forms. Charles Bird worked with the great artist Seyodu Camara. Others studied the Bamana youth association's rural theatre north of Bamako, especially the anthropologist James Brink who has explored Mande aesthetics over many years.

His research assistant Kasim Kone has remained a productive ethnologist. Dozens of others have been excited by Mande dance, performance, culture and art and have all exposed various aspects of this truly amazing art form. McNaughton's work is a welcome addition to this oeuvre.

In the ancient Mande culture and birds are honoured in a surprising variety of ways. They are admired for their abilities and powers, their gifts of soothsaying and sorcery, and this respect is echoed in ballads and dances. Outstanding of these was the bird dance Sidi Ball performed at Dogoduman, south west of Bamako, 31 years ago.

Great art permeates people and enriches their lives, becomes a transformative experience, ennobled and empowered by supernatural energies and enhanced by music and song, drumming and singing, call and response, of outstanding vitality. The whole becomes embedded in people's lives, becoming a foundation and giving meaning to their existence. The aesthetics is social and spiritual all at once, underpinned by the role of individuals in creating the ultimate performance-such as the bird dance near Saturday City.

The Mande culture of Mali is rich and ancient, filled with history, commerce and art, enriched by ancient spiritual traditions and Islam, herbal medicines and prophecy, and the integration of music, dance, storytelling, poetry, the visual arts and the performance of old epics.

The Mande spirit cuts across other ethnic groups and networks of agriculture, livestock, commerce and industry including brass, iron, gold and terracotta manufacturing. The youth associations became spearheads in unifying artistic creation on the Mande plateau.
This book is divided into four parts. As the author says: 'The first part is about the Dogoduman performance: the artists it brought together and the ideas it engaged. The second part is about the featured performer, Sidi Ball - his character and contribution as an individual and the value of individuals more generally in artistry and social life. The third part is about aesthetic power; the accomplishments and prowess of the Dogoduman performers, especially Sidi Ball and Mayimuna, and the broader importance of aesthetics as elements of social dialogue that fuel thought and inspire action. The fourth part is about meaning, the ideas and values people might associate with a bird dance and the reasons individuals' associations can be so full of variety'.

Sidi Ball is an exceptional artist. Most bird dancers have a career that spans five years. Sidi Ball has been a bird dancer for more than 40 years. In the process he has reinvented both the masks and the dance. The same black vulture feathers are used to make the mask, but it is now made differently, larger, more cone shaped, heavier, and rigid and has lost its  flexibility. Yet, with Sidi Ball inside it, he found new ways to make it move and new feats of daring, like levitating along a wall on its side, an act that had never been done before.

Nearly 60-years old, still fit in mind and muscle, his performance dominates the masquerade. His athleticism had improved, his character and skills deepened and delighted audiences. The bird dance was alive, and Sidi Ball was still its amazing master. The author writes about Sidi Ball that, 'He is like Seyodu Camara in the ways that his knowledge, prowess, confidence and intensity tumble out into people's perceptions of him. But he is less philosophical and more matter-of-fact about life. For more than 20 years I found it hard to write about him because I never stopped feeling that I could not do him justice. Perhaps now I have - or at least I have helped show how a person like Sidi Ball can be to a society and the people he meets in it' (page 261).
It is to our enlightenment, the readers of this book, that we owe a hearty thanks to McNaughton for overcoming his reservations and sharing with us his insights on Sidi Ball and the art of West African masquerade. We could wish for more, a CD with the music and a DVD that captures the dance, so that we could go beyond the words and the still colour plates. It would mean so much more to be able to capture the aural and visual sensations of Sidi Ball's performances and particularly how they have evolved over the decades.

McNaughton did participate in the production of a CD-ROM, Five Windows on Africa (2000), so he knows the difference forms of communicating to the wider public.
E-mail: sheridangriswold@yahoo.com