Marks of identity: potters of the Folona (Mali) and their "mothers".

A potter of the Folona region in southern Mali marks the wet clay of her pots with a unique sign, a mark that is passed down from mother to daughter along with favorite tools of the trade and the technical knowledge to employ them (FIGS. 1-2). (1) Once dry, the pots are fired in huge communal firings of as many as 800 pieces at a time. The women say they have no trouble distinguishing their pots from those of other women in the village, even without these signatures. Marking the pots is simply something they have always done. It is a mark of their artistry and, I would argue, of their identity and heritage as well.

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

The past always leaves a mark. Over time these marks compete with one another in the historical consciousness of people. Some become obscured beneath layers of events as traumatic as warfare and slavery; as life-altering as birth, marriage, and death; or as mundane as working in the fields, tanning hides, or making pottery. The challenge of reconstructing the history of creative expression is especially great in parts of West Africa where artists are minorities whose histories are subsumed within the larger concerns of the dominant population--they may have a different language, different religion, different marriage patterns, and different customs. This becomes even more difficult when the artists are women, whose own identities and histories may become hidden beneath those of their husbands.

My focus is a group of women potters from the Folona region of southeastern Mali whom I first encountered on a collaborative documentation and collection project with the National Museum of Mall in 1991. (2) The dominant ethnic population in the region is Senufo, with language and cultural ties to other Senufo peoples to the south and east. The potters of this area identify themselves as Dyula, (3) and they provide virtually all of the pottery for both Senufo and Dyula households in the region. They speak a dialect of the Mande language shared by the Bamana and Maninka potters with whom I worked in the Mande heartland (Frank 1994, 1998). (4) It is not at all unusual to find artisan groups in West Africa who have moved out of their ethnic homelands in search of new clientele and came to settle as minorities among neighboring peoples in need of their expertise. In fact, there is evidence of Mande blacksmiths and leatherworkers doing just that across a whole stretch of West Africa--Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso (see Roy 1985). For example, several of the artisan groups among the Senufo of northern Cote d'Ivoire, including two potter groups, have Mande traditions of origin even though they are fully established within Senufo society (Person 1968:57; Tamari 1991:243, 246-9; Glaze 1981:5, 37; see also Spindel 1989:68). (5) At first glance, one might assume that the Folona potters simply accompanied their husbands along the route and continued to practice the craft their mothers had taught them.

Indeed, when we asked the potters and their husbands about their origins, we were told repeatedly that their ancestors had left "Kaaba" (Kangaba), in the Mande heartland, many generations before and had come first to Sikasso, and then south to settle in the villages where they now live. I think the path that led these men and women to the Folona is much more complicated and not necessarily a shared path. Although the ancestry of the potter's husbands might well be traced to the Mande heartland, my research suggests that the origins of the potters themselves and of their artistry lie elsewhere. My evidence comes from several different domains: analyses of the styles and types of ceramic objects they make, comparisons of what may be called the styles of technology (6) used in pottery production, and careful study of the identities of artists. In each of these domains--objects, technology, and identity--the Folona potters have more in common with their non-Mande neighbors to the southwest, south, and east, than they do with their Bamana and Maninka counterparts to the north in Kangaba and elsewhere. I believe that the story of these women is one that must be set against a larger story about the movements of peoples, the transformation of social identity through marriage, and ultimately the continuity of cultural heritage through artistry.

COMPARING REPERTOIRES

As is typical of this part of West Africa, the Folona potters have a repertoire of forms that vary somewhat with the age, ability, and status of the potter, as well as with market demand. Most of these potters produce large jars for cooling and storing water (jidaga and jifinye), smaller pots for cooking (daga, todaga), and small bowls for preparing sauce and other foods (nadaga), or for storing karite butter (tuludaga; FIGS. 3-4). Some of these common pot types can acquire ritual significance through usage once purchased. Cooking pots when used for preparing spiritually charged herbal medicines then become known as furadaga (lit. 'leaf pot'). The small basins used to serve food (bide) are indistinguishable in form from those used for ablutions prior to prayer (selidaga). The general purpose wash basins made by some potters are known by the generic term faga, but when sold they might just as easily be used to mark a non-Muslim grave as to wash clothes. (7)

[FIGURES 3-4 OMITTED]

In some instances, ordinary pots may acquire highly personal associations for their owners that are not immediately apparent from their form or function, and that add to their meaning and value. For example, during an inventory of the pots in the household of an elderly Senufo matriarch, several large storage vessels in the compound were identified as ones once used to store millet beer (dolodaga; FIG. 5). When we asked how old they were, the owner was able to provide an approximate age (forty years in 1991) because they were acquired at the time of her son's initiation rites, a connection apparently as important to the mother as to the son.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Some potters also make vessels with specialized functions easily recognized by their shape, such as the small pierced pots used as incense burners (wusulanbele), the multiple-cupped griddles (ngomifaga) for cooking millet cakes, and narrow-mouthed pots (sheminfaga, shedaga) with holes sufficiently large to allow the watering of chickens and other fowl, but small enough to prevent larger animals from depleting the supply (FIGS. 6-7).

[FIGURES 6-7 OMITTED]

Some of the Folona potters also make architectural ceramics, including the long thin cylinders (taran) that will serve as rain spouts to carry the water away from the walls of flat roofed mud adobe houses, and finials (tiolo) designed to support an ostrich egg and to protect the adobe pinnacles on Sudanese-style mosques (FIGS. 8, 10). These latter are sometimes incorporated as decorative elements on the Middle-Eastern style cement brick mosques fast replacing the crumbling adobe ones.

[FIGURES 8 & 10 OMITTED]

Some kinds of pots are made only by a few potters, often only on commission, either due to the technical difficulty of the forms, or because of continued observance of long held taboos. Pierced pots for steaming grains or smoking nuts or fish (nyintin, basidaga) are more difficult to make, and could only be made by elder women, women past menopause, or women who were widows, because of the danger to the potter's reproductive health wrought by the action of piercing the clay body to make the holes (FIG. 11). Another type of pot that is made only by elder potters is a small, lidded vessel (bamadaga, jodaga, kurukuruda) covered with nodules and used to store sacred protective medicines. (8) The spikes serve as a warning to all that this is a vessel that must not be touched. Such vessels might be seen tucked in the corner of a private bathing area or nestled in a tree trunk on the edge of a compound.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

A comparison of the repertoires of the Folona potters to those of other potter groups in this part of West Africa reveals the extent to which some pottery types are found among nearly all ethnic groups, while others have more limited, and thus more revealing patterns of distribution. Like the Folona potters, Bamana and Maninka potters routinely make water jars (jidagaw and jifinyew), cooking pots (dagaw), sauce pots (nadagaw), wash-basins (fagaw), and incense burners (wusulanbelew), while some more experienced Mande potters make steamers (nyintin), gargoulettes and chicken watering pots (sheminfaga; FIG. 12; Frank 1994, 1998). The vocabulary of terms the Folona potters use for these different types of pots are identical to those used by Bamana and Maninka potters giving a false impression of a shared tradition. All of these pot types are found among an even wider array of pottery vessels made by Somono and Fula potters of the Inland Niger Delta region for a diverse clientele, and are identified there by an assortment of Mande, Fulfulde, Sonrai, Arabic and French terms. (9)

[FIGURE 9 and 12 OMITTED]

There are several types of pots routinely made by Bamana and Maninka potters that are either rare or nonexistent in the Folona potters' repertoires. To my knowledge, the Folona potters do not make the cooking pot known as negedaga (or barama), a skeuomorph of the metal cooking pots found among Bamana and Maninka potters. It is also rare to see the bowl-shaped braziers with three prongs extending into the interior that are known among Bamana and Maninka potters as singon. (10) These braziers are a staple of potters throughout the Mande heartland (Frank 1998; Raimbault 1980:445-6; see also Kawada 1990), they are also documented among Soninke potters (Boyer 1953:105), among Bamana and Somono potters of the Inland Niger Delta, and among Dogon potters (Gallay et al. 1998). (11)

On the other hand, there are other types of pots made by the Folona potters that are generally not made by Bamana and Maninka potters. For example, the multiple-cupped griddles (ngomifaga) made by Folona potters are rarely found among Bamana and Maninka potters, and are different in form than those made by Somono and Fula potters in the Inland Niger Delta region (cf. Gallay et al. 1998, plate 30). The distribution of these griddles extends from the Folona region, west to Bougouni, and south to Senufo communities in northern Cote d'Ivoire, and across northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. (12)

Similarly, the nodule-covered medicine pot the Folona women called "bamadaga" is another type of vessel unknown in the Mande heartland. (13) The closest stylistic parallels are found east among potters in southwestern Burkina Faso and to the south among the Central Senufo, where potters make ones virtually identical in the shape of the underlying vessel as well as the configuration of the lid. (14) Similar noduled vessels are also documented among the Baule and Akan of central Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, among the Lobi, Builsa, Dagari and other Gur-speaking groups of northern Ghana, into northern Togo, and as far west as Cameroon (FIG. 13). (15)

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

Thus when one focuses just on the distribution of more specialized pottery forms, rather than that of the water jars and cooking pots made by most potters, the repertoires of the Folona women seem to have more in common with those of other potters to the south and east, than they do those of Mande potters to the north and west in their reputed homeland. One could simply argue that types of objects often flow across time, space, and ethnic boundaries as items of trade or as goods acquired by people on the move. It would not be surprising for the Folona potters to respond to the market demands of their clientele. Differences in object types alone are not enough to support my presumption of a non-Mande origin for the Folona pottery tradition.

STYLES OF TECHNOLOGY

It is when we turn to examine the styles of technology that we find more compelling evidence that the origins of the Folona pottery tradition are to be found somewhere other than the Mande heartland. Most significantly, the way the Folona potters make pottery is fundamentally different from the forming technologies employed by other Mande potters. The Folona potters model their pots by a "direct pull" technique. (16) They begin with a cylinder of clay placed on a broken pottery sherd and set between their legs on a wooden plank. First with the heel of the hand and then with the tips of the fingers they pound out the center and then quickly and fluidly shift to pulling up and shaping the sides. For smaller vessels the original lump of clay provides enough material to form the body of the vessel, though additional coils may be added to form the rim. For larger vessels, large coils are added to gradually bring the sides of the vessel up to the desired height before the shape is refined and a rim added (FIG. 14). The Folona potters complete the upper portions of the vessels, including impressed and rouletted designs, before removing the pot from the sherd. They then scrape excess clay from the bottoms with a metal bracelet-like tool, (17) and smooth and consolidate the surface with knife scrapers, corn cobs, and stones. The foot and any impressed decorations are added to the bottom of the vessel.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

In general, pots made by the Folona women tend to have a greater range of embellishments to their surfaces than most Bamana and Maninka pots. The upper surfaces of water jars and rims of cooking pots often are burnished smooth, painted with red slip, and polished to a high sheen (FIG. 15). It is not uncommon for the Folona potters to roulette the lower surfaces and then take a red ochre stone and draw another design across the already patterned surface. Their tool kits include at least three or four woven fiber roulettes, several carved wooden roulettes, often a dentellated calabash wheel, as well as an assortment of found objects that make interesting marks when impressed into the surface of the wet clay (FIGS. 16-18). Although they use a corncob for scraping and consolidating the clay, they tend not to use it for decorative effect.

[FIGURES 15-18 OMITTED]

It is at this moment that the Folona potters add a distinctive mark or signature to most of their pots (FIGS. 19-20). It might be nothing more than a single line drawn with the finger across the textured surface of the lower part of the pot, or a series of dots indented below the rim. Other signatures are more complicated: a circle drawn with the finger, crossed by a line drawn with a bundle of palm fibers; two small arcs followed by two small parallel lines; three parallel lines, one thick, two thin, crossed at the bottom by a thin line. These marks are handed down from mother to daughter, more rarely from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law. In the event a woman marries into a community where someone already established has a similar mark, then the newcomer may create a signature of her own.

[FIGURES 19-20 OMITTED]

In contrast, Bamana and Maninka potters use a convex mold technique for the initial stages of forming a pot (see Frank 1994, 1998). (18) They complete the bottoms of the vessels first, including adding feet, and allow them to get leather hard. They then remove the vessel from the mold and add coils to build the sides and necks or rims. Only then will minimal decorations be added, such as a line of twisted string roulette pattern or a raised ridge around the middle. Variations on the convex mold technique are used by other Mande potters, such as the Soninke and some Somono potters of the Inland Niger Delta region, by potters of Mande origin among the Mossi, and by some Fula, Dogon, Mossi, and Bwa potters to the north and east in Mali and Burkina Faso (Roy 1975, 2000, 2003; see also Gallay et al. 1996, 1998; LaViolette 1995, 2000). It is also the method used by two distinct Senufo potter groups, the Kpeenbele and the Tyedunbele, both of whom may have origins in the Mande world (Spindel 1988, 1989). Thus, in the method they use to form their pots, in the extent and variety of textured surfaces, and in the use of individual potter signatures, the Folona potters are to be distinguished from their counterparts in the Mande heartland.

A forming technique identical to that used by the Folona potters (FIG. 21) has been documented among the closely related griot potters of the Sikasso region and eastern Burkina Faso (FIG. 22), (19) and among Bobo potters and some Dogon potters in the Inland Niger Delta region to the northeast (Gallay et. al. 1996, 1998). Otherwise, this technique is far more common across a broad stretch southwest, south and east of the Folona. Nafanra potters among the Senufo of northern Cote d'Ivoire use a technique virtually identical to that of the Folona potters, including the seating of the potter astride a wooden plank on which the sherd is placed (FIG. 23). A similar technique is used in Cote d'Ivoire by Mangoro potters of the Katiola and Dabakala regions, by Baule potters of Tano Sakossou and Wassou (FIG. 28), by potters in the region of Kong, by some potters in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and by a broad spectrum of potter groups in northern Ghana. (20)

[FIGURES 21-23 OMITTED]

The firing process of the Folona potters is most remarkable for the timing, scale, and communal nature of the undertaking. The women work for two to three weeks to produce a sufficient number of pots to make a firing worthwhile. (21) Young women and children are enlisted to help transport hundreds of pots to the firing ground where one or more large circular beds of thin branches are laid. While these are communal firings, each woman is responsible for gathering her own wood and straw, and for placing her pots on her own pie slice-shaped section of the pile. It is not uncommon for disputes to arise that must be mediated by the senior potter so that the whole process may move forward. (22)

It takes several hours to carefully stack the vessels (FIG. 24). Long, thin rainspouts are placed upright in the center, ringed by large water storage jars. Smaller pots are stacked on top of these and around the edges. Even smaller pots and lids are placed within larger jars. Old cracked pots and broken pieces of pottery are used to support and in some cases shield the pots from the wind. Chunks of banco (adobe mud) are used to support the pots, and are later ground and used to temper the wet clay. The entire pile is then ringed with more branches and covered with straw and thatch.

[FIGURE 24 OMITTED]

The most senior potter lights the fire, igniting it away from the wind to get the most even burning of the pile. As the flames rise the women stand back from the intense heat. They watch closely and for the next hour or so, as openings appear in the burning fuel, the women fill them by tossing on armloads of straw (FIG. 25). The main fire is then left to smolder until dawn.

[FIGURE 25 OMITTED]

While the vast majority of pots made by the Folona potters are allowed to remain the red ochre color of the fired clay, some of the Folona potters produce cooking pots to be blackened with a vegetal bath hot from the fire. (23) While the main fire is being tended, several of the women turn their attention to smaller fires where these pots have been piled in a similar fashion and allowed to cook for a half an hour or so. The women take up scythes for cutting grass and hook pots hot from the fire (FIG. 26). They are smothered with rice or millet chaff, peanut shells or sawdust, and either splashed with or doused in basins of a prepared solution of water and the seed pods of nere (Parkia biglobosa) that seals their surfaces and turns them a mottled shiny black.

[FIGURE 26 OMITTED]

By contrast, most of the Bamana and Maninka firings I witnessed were individual enterprises, with one or two women firing what they had produced over the course of a single week since the previous market day (see Frank 1994, 1998). As a result, the scale was considerably less dramatic than the firings we documented in the Folona. (24) The principal fuel used was wood, rather than straw. Blackening the pots was routinely done in a manner similar to that described above, using acacia seedpods or tree bark for the vegetal bath. Small water jars and incense burners were not given this reduction treatment, but remained the red color of the fired clay. These firings moved at a much faster pace, with the first pots hooked from the fire within a half an hour. The whole process--from lighting the fire to pulling the last piece from the firing ground--was often over in less than an hour or two.

Not all Mande firings are such small individual undertakings. For example, the scale and communal nature of the Folona firings is very similar to the large-scale operations in the Bamana village of Kalabougou (see Goldner, this issue, as well as Raimbault 1980 and Stelzig 1993). Like the Folona potters, these women, working together in family groups, fire hundreds of vessels at a time. Small branches, grass, thatch, and straw are the principle fuels used. However, the Kalabougou potters complete the process, including blackening the pots, in less than an hour, rather than leave the fire until dawn. Comparable large-scale communal firings have been documented among Somono and Fulani potters of the Inland Niger Delta Region, among the closely related griot potters in Burkina Faso, and among Senufo and Mangoro potters in Cote d'Ivoire. (25)

Thus, while adherence to tradition-specific ways of doing things does play an important role in guiding how potters fire their wares, the distribution of different firing technologies also depends on the number of women firing, the number of vessels being fired, as well as on locally available resources. To put it another way, the firing process can be modified and augmented as needed, just as the forms of vessels that potters produce can change as a result of market demands. The women with whom I worked have shown themselves willing and certainly capable of responding to opportunities, creating new forms, and adapting to circumstances in some aspects of their artistry. However, they are much less likely to experiment with the most fundamental part of the process such as how a pot is begun (see Kawada 1988, 1990 and Gosselain 1998, 1999, 2000).

Therefore, comparing the styles of technology, especially those of the initial forming of vessels, produces a distribution pattern similar to the mapping of object types across the region. In the way they make pots, the Folona potters have more in common with their non-Mande counterparts east into Burkina Faso, and south into Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote d'Ivoire, than with those of potters in the Mande heartland. When one adds a third frame of reference, that of exploring the identity of these women against patterns of craft specialization and identity in the region, some intriguing possibilities for the origins of the Folona women and their artistry emerge.

MAPPING IDENTITIES

Although they speak a Mande language and identify themselves as part of the larger Mande cultural complex, other aspects of the identity of the Folona potters sets them apart from their Mande counterparts. Most significantly, they are not the wives of blacksmiths (numuw), as is expected within the ideology and practice of most other Mande peoples. (26) Their husbands are griots (jeli, dyeli) whose sense of identity today is tied as much to the artistry of their potter wives as to their more distant heritage as oral artists and leatherworkers. The women say that their husbands are "jeli bobo" or "mute griots" who have left behind the practice of oral artistry and now engage in farming, trade, and assist in selling their wives' wares.

At the beginning of this article, I indicated that the Folona potters identify themselves as Dyula. In an earlier publication (Frank 1993), I reflected on how these women may have come to be Dyula griot potters. Taking my cue from the women and men interviewed, I focused my research especially on the turbulent period in the last part of the nineteenth century. Throughout southern Mali, southwestern Burkina Faso, and northern Cote d'Ivoire, people were uprooted, many were killed, and entire villages abandoned as a result of the slave-raiding activities of the powerful state of Kenedougou and the advancing army of Samory Toure (see Rondeau 1980:297-99, M. Diabate 1987:545). Survivors were "invited" or forced to take up residence behind the massive walls of Sikasso (Kenedougou's capital) where they could be protected and/or their labor conscripted. When the French siege of Sikasso ended in 1898 with the defeat of Babemba Traore, the French asked everyone to return "home". Some apparently did return to their prior villages while others went to new and different places. I speculated that it may have been in that mix of peoples that non-Mande women may have become the wives of Mande griots, forced by circumstances to lose their family identities even as they preserved elements of their maternal heritage by continuing to make pottery the way they had been taught by their mothers. I suggested that they may have "become" Dyula through marriage to men who had their own complicated past, one that laid claim to a distant and glorious heritage as griots for kings in the Mande world. (27)

I now believe the story of the Folona potters "becoming" Dyula begins well before the late nineteenth century, and that whatever may have happened during those tumultuous times has only further complicated the histories of these men and women. Given the patterns of connection suggested by my mapping of object types and technological styles, I have more recently turned my attention to looking for communities of Mande-speaking leatherworkers and griots associated with pottery production east and south of the Folona. What I have found is that the association of griots, and specifically of Dyula-speaking griot-leatherworkers with potters, is more widespread than I had previously realized. The Folona potters claim to have come to the region by way of Sikasso, and indeed, pottery production in Sikasso today is dominated by griot-potters who produce a repertoire of forms comparable to that of the Folona potters. (28) They make these pots using the same direct pull technique, they mark their pots with signatures, and they fire communally. They have very similar traditions of migration from a distant "Mande" past to the Sikasso region, and some have marriage ties with the Folona potters.

Closely related communities of griot-potters also exist throughout the southwestern corner of Burkina Faso. Like their relatives in the Sikasso and Folona regions, they produce the same range of pottery types using the same forming techniques, including the firing of great numbers of vessels at a time. They too use signatures, even in contexts where just one or two potters are firing their wares. (29) And they have oral traditions of movement and resettlement after the fall of Sikasso similar to those of the Folona and Sikasso potters. (30)

The presence of Mande griot-leatherworkers has been documented across northern Cote d'Ivoire and into northern Ghana, from the Dan-speaking peoples in the west (Zemp 1964), among the central Senufo (see Launay 1995), to the region of Kong in the east (Green 1987). (31) Such broad dispersal would have provided plenty of opportunities for minority migrant Mande men to acquire local wives. Indeed there is also evidence of male Mande griots and/or leatherworkers connected with female pottery production. Perhaps the most compelling data for such an association is found among the group of renowned potters known as Mangoro centered in the town of Katiola in central Cote d'Ivoire. There are conflicting stories of the origins of these women and their husbands, but they are consistent in claiming descent from a common ancestor known as Serahoule (Kone) who was expelled from the Mande heartland and came to the region in exile. Aminata Traore (1985) identifies Mangoro men as leatherworkers who became farmers after settling in the region, and Mangoro women as potters who hold dearly the belief that they are continuing the heritage of their female ancestors from "Kaaba." Ouattara-Tiona (1999:40) identifies the Mangoro as a second influx of Mande migrants to the region (after the Muslim-Dyula traders), and as a "caste" of weavers, hunters, and farmers whose wives are potters. (32)

I began this article with a reference to the distinctive marks the Folona potters put on their pots. Such signatures are extremely rare in West Africa. (33) Individual marks are apparently not used even in those contexts where one might expect to find them-where potters fire huge numbers of pots communally, such as in Kalabougou or in the Inland Niger Delta region of Mali. (34) However, they are used consistently by griot-potters in the Folona, in the Sikasso region, and in southwestern Burkina Faso. This is the case even when the firings are small, incorporating the work of just one or two women, when there is clearly no need for signatures in order to differentiate the pots of one potter from another. There is no evidence of such marks being used by Senufo potters, nor have I found references to them among any other potter groups in Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, or Burkina Faso, with one exception: in describing the final phase of the firing process among the Mangoro potters of Dabakala, one source notes that each potter is easily able to retrieve her own pieces from the fire to give them the vegetal bath treatment because of the personal marks she has placed upon her pots. (35)

So, who were the "mothers" of the women potters of the Folona? The Folona potters most certainly share the past with the griot-potters of the Sikasso region, and of western Burkina Faso. It also seems possible that the Mangoro potters are their distant cousins, given the confluence of distinctive signatures, technologies, and identities. I suggest that somewhere in their history, the "mothers" of these potters became the wives of griots who practiced the craft of leatherworking in the absence of demands for their skills as oral artists. The women continued to work with clay using the knowledge passed down to them from their own mothers, and they were very successful. To be sure, history has taken their lives and those of their descendants in different directions, presented different challenges, and provided different opportunities. However, I would suggest that by continuing to thrive as potters of acclaim, these women have redefined what it means to be griot, Dyula, or Mangoro in their own local context. My research demonstrates the need to combine a broad regional approach with in-depth, location-specific studies of minority artist groups from their own perspective, rather than from the vantage point of the dominant or host populations. While we may never be able to fully reconstruct a comprehensive picture of Africa's artistic past, I suggest that the traditional focus of art history on objects, combined with the study of technological styles and with the study of aspects of identity such as gender and craft specialization, can significantly contribute to our efforts to better understand the history of African cultural traditions generally, and especially the history of women as artists.

All photos and drawings by the author unless noted

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Notes

Many people have contributed to my research over the years, including colleagues, friends, and family here in the United States and in Mali. I especially wish to thank Marla Berns, Anita Glaze, Adria La Violette, Christopher Roy, the late Roy Sieber, William Siegmann, Carol Spindel, and Jerry Vogel for sharing knowledge from their own field experience. Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Christine Kreamer, and Catherine Bernard each made substantive recommendations on earlier drafts of this article helping me to articulate my thoughts and clarify my argument.

(1) Folona is an earlier name for the region encompassing the town of Kadiolo and its environs and now part of the administrative cercle of Kadiolo.

(2) This project was funded in part by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and the West African Museums Program (WAMP). All of the pieces collected went to the National Museum of Mali, along with photographic documentation and field reports (see Frank 1993, 2000). The project was undertaken while I was in Mali conducting research on Bamana and Maninka potters under the auspices of a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship. I returned to the area on my own for follow-up research in 1992 when I was in Mali on a Social Science Research Council Grant. My continuing research on these women has benefited from traveling with Jerry Vogel in Cote d'Ivoire during the summer of 2000 when I was a faculty member on the Drew University summer abroad program and by a Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art combined with sabbatical leave from Stony Brook University during the 2005-2006 academic year. This article also incorporates information from interviews conducted on my behalf in the spring of 2006 in the region by Mamadou Samake (one of my colleagues on the 1991 project) and in Burkina Faso by Dahaba Ouattara and Susan Gagliardi.

(3) The term dyula (jula, dioula) is a generic Mande word for 'trader' and indeed it was primarily trade that brought the ancestors of the present-day Dyula to southern Mali, southwestern Burkina Faso, northern Cote d'Ivoire, and northern Ghana (Launay 1982, 1992). Throughout this region, Dyula has become recognized as an ethnic label for peoples who speak a dialect of the Mande language and profess and proselytize the Muslim faith. The Dyula continue to be recognized for their commercial activities, even though many have taken up farming to support their families. They are associated especially in northern Cote d'Ivoire with the crafts of weaving and indigo dyeing and, as my research has indicated, some are also known as having once served as griots (oral artists, musicians, and spokesmen) and leatherworkers. In earlier publications I have referred to these women as Dyula (or Jula). However, since my contention is that the origins of their pottery technology, and by extension the origins of their "mothers," is not Mande, and thus not Dyula, I have chosen here to use the more neutral geographic label of Folona to clarify my argument. I have also chosen to use the phrase "mothers" in the way that people would often use the phrase "anw faw" (lit. 'our fathers') to refer to ancestors of the distant past.

(4) The Mande heartland region is that traditionally understood as the center of the thirteenth-fourteenth century Mali empire, located in west-central Mali across the border into eastern Guinea, including the present-day towns of Kangaba (Mali) and Kankan (Guinea).

(5) Not all authors agree with blanket identifications of Mande origins for different Senufo artist groups. Glaze (1981:5, 30, 34-40, 227 n. 28) identifies the Tyeduno (Tyedunbele, Cedumbele) numu blacksmith potters as being of Mande origin and suggests that the Kpeene (Kpeenbele) brasscaster-potters may also be of Mande origin. Spindel (1989:68) is more cautious about theories of Kpeenbele origins. The Kpeenbele with whom she worked speak Kasara, the dialect of their Senufo hosts, as a first language and Dyula as a second language. The third group of potters among the central Senufo--the Nafanra--are described by Spindel (1988:8, 10-16) as somewhat of an anomaly because they are the wives of farmers, rather than belonging to an endogamous occupational group as do the Kpeenbele and the Tyedunbele.

(6) For a discussion of the concept of technological styles and related cultural behaviors from which I drew my initial inspiration, see Lechtman 1977. Closely related to the concept of technological styles is that of the "chaines operatoires," the notion of the significance of the sequence of certain procedures and gestures in craft production (cf. Gosselain 1998, 1999, 2000). See also the work of Bernhard Gardi (1985) for his linking of craft technology and ethnic identity in a focused study in the region of Mopti, Mali.

(7) See Frank 2000. I visited two of these cemeteries. On each occasion, permission had to be granted by the non-Muslim proprietors. One was about 5km (3 miles) from the village of Dogueledougou, where there were about twenty shaft tombs dug into the ground with a central space and chambers dug off to the sides. The pots were placed upside down above the shaft and the bottoms were pierced. One of the potters told me the pots were pierced to make them unusable and thus less likely to be stolen. I find it more plausible to imagine that the piercing was done as part of the burial rituals, but I have no information on such rituals. The cemetery did not appear to be well maintained: Most of the pots were broken, exposing the shafts and the remains they contained. At the second cemetery near the village of Sissingue, there was what appeared to be a relatively recent burial, with most of the pot concealed within the mound of earth over the grave.

(8) One source suggested that this type of vessel is used especially to contain the medicines to treat a child ill with tetanus.

(9) There is a considerable diversity of ceramic types in the inland Niger Delta region, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of the region. In addition to the common forms found elsewhere, one finds weights for mosquito nets, ceramic supports or feet for beds, pots with raised platforms in the center for ritual ablutions prior to prayer, pot lids, and a variety of architectural elements. See LaViolette 2000:135, Gallay and Huysecom 1989, Gallay et al. 1996, 1998.

(10) I documented just two examples of this kind of brazier in the village of Sissingue, both in the context of household inventories rather than in the process of being made. Our informants identified these braziers as tasumafaga or tasumadaga (lit. 'fire bowl'). They were not familiar with the term singon.

(11) I photographed braziers of this type among the items offered for sale by Somono potters in Djenne and by Fula potters in Fatoma (Frank 1998).

(12) Spindel (1988:45) identifies this kind of griddle among the objects made by Kpeenbele potters. One was also collected by Marla Berns in Bonakire, Ghana in 1978; they are documented among the Bulsa of northern Ghana (Kroger 2001), and among the Lobi of Burkina Faso (Pere 1988). A rectangular version is found in the repertoire of Nuna potters of Tierkou (Banaon 1990) and among the Gulmanche (Geis-Tronich 1991) of Burkina Faso. Kawada (1990) illustrates a potter in Bougouni (Mali) making a griddle of the type made by Folona potters, but the ethnicity of the potter is not identified.

(13) Singular vessels with nodules (and snakes) have been documented in archaeological contexts in the Inland Niger Delta region (cf. McIntosh 1989).

(14) According to Spindel (1989:71-2), these pots are made by Kpeenbele potters only on commission arranged secretly due to fear of accusations of sorcery. The essential form is predetermined, as are the number of rows of bumps (three), but the client may specify how many bumps are to be modeled in each row. Newman (1974) includes a photograph of a woman making one of these vessels identified only as a potter in Korhogo, Cote d'Ivoire. See also Forster (1985).

(15) An exhibition catalogue with pieces collected in Silaya, Guinea, shows a lidless pot with nodules similar to the Folona pots (Kivekas 1993:56, 61). For information on Lobi uses of this kind of vessel, see Schneider 1986, 1990 and Meyer 1981. For other images of the shrine at Birifor as well as other images from Burkina Faso and Mali, see Huib Blom's website, www.lobi-dogon.com. The Field Museum in Chicago has one in its collections identified as a Baule medicine pot (cat no. 210113) collected in 1957, and the Fowler Museum has one collected by Marla Berns in Bonakire, Ghana. Other sources include Builsa (Kroger 2001) and Kabre, Togo (Vermot-Mangold 1977). I purchased one in the market at Ketu, Benin in 1995. As noted by Berzock (2005), the distribution of this type of noduled pot extends well into Nigeria and Cameroon.

(16) See Roy 1975, 2000 and Gosselain 2000 for a discussion of different forming techniques and their terminology. The term "direct pull" most appropriately describes the action of pulling the side of the vessel up after the cylinder or lump has been hollowed out. The term "pinch pot" is also used by some authors but, like "direct pull," it does not capture that initial action of pounding the center out of a mass of clay. French (cf. Gallay et al. 1998) sources more accurately use the phrase "creusage a la motte" ('pounding a lump') to describe the initial stage of handling the clay on the palette before the sides are drawn up. Some interesting comparative research on the significance of bodily positions and gestures, including those used by potters, has been done by Kawada (1988, 1990).

(17) Iron, braceletlike scrapers similar to the ones used by the Folona

potters are found among related potters in Sikasso and Burkina Faso, among Senufo potters in Cote d'Ivoire (Spindel 1988) and in Bonakire (Berns, this issue).

(18) While the convex mold technique is used by potters of Mande origin throughout the heartland regions, variations on the direct pull technique have been documented among a number of southern Mande speakers, including the Kono (Hardin 1993, 1996:41), Dan (Fischer and Himmelhaber 1984:162), Bandi (Siegman 1977), Wan and Mono (Biot 1989), and Mangoro (Biot and Fofana 1991, Comoe Krou 1975). Gosselain (2000) suggests that, because these variations are much more common among some southern Mande speakers long isolated from the core Mande region, this technique might represent an early or "proto"-Mande way of making pots, replaced in the heartland regions by an intrusive convex mold technique. I am intrigued by this possibility even though it does not explain the unusual confluence of identity and craft production in the Folona region (i.e., how the wives of griots rather than those of blacksmiths could have become potters). I think it just as likely that the male ancestors of the peoples now recognized as Southern Mande may have married local women whose pottery skills reflect a now-lost maternal heritage. I think we both agree that much more documentation of ceramic traditions is needed throughout the region, from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, across Cote d'Ivoire and into northern Ghana.

(19) I was first alerted to the presence of potters in eastern Burkina Faso working in a manner identical to the Folona potters by Christopher Roy's DVD (2003) on pottery forming and firing techniques, which includes a segment by a griot potter in the village of Pelignan. Field interviews done in the spring of 2006 in Pelignan, Kawara, and Oulonkoto by Susan Gagliardi and Dahaba Ouattara in southeastern Burkina Faso and by Mamadou Samake in the Sikasso region of Mali revealed the close historical and social ties among these potters and the potters of the Folona.

(20) It is difficult to fully assess the parallels between different techniques from verbal descriptions. Ideally, one would like to be able to compare segments of video documentation as they would capture both the speed and subtleties of the gestures involved. William Siegmann's (1977:55-6) description of pottery making techniques among the Bandi of Liberia and those of Kris Hardin (1993:243-5, 1996:41-2) among the Kono of Sierra Leone correspond to those used by the Folona potters in the directness of the initial forming technology. For Nafanra potters, see Spindel 1988 and Soppelsa 2000; for Mangoro potters, see Comoe Krou 1975; for the potters of Kong, see V. Diabate 1988; for various potters of northern Ghana, see Priddy 1974. Most sources on pottery-forming techniques among the Mo and other Akan-related groups of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana (Crossland 1989; see also Berns, this issue and Roy 2003) describe a direct pull technique in which the sides are pulled up from a ring of clay placed directly on the ground. Roy Sieber (personal communication), however, observed another forming technique among the Mo in which the potter forces a depression with her fist in the center of a mass of clay before pulling up the sides.

(21) The number of pots and the frequency of firings vary from week to week and from season to season. The first firing we documented in Dogueledougou was the most dramatic--two huge piles of 500-600 pieces each, plus three other smaller piles of pots to be blackened. The potters in Sissingue (a smaller community) stack just one huge pile with eight to ten of the thirty-five or so active potters firing some 600-800 pieces at a time. They do not blacken any of their pots.

(22) On one occasion the dispute was over whose wood was to be placed in the very center. On another a woman who was helping a friend mistakenly placed her friend's pot on someone else's section of the wood bed.

(23) The potters of Sissingue were familiar with the techniques of blackening cooking pots hot from the fire, but they said they no longer undertook the added burden because the market did not support the extra effort. Both firings we saw in 1991 in Dogueledougou consisted of two large piles, one with three smaller piles of pots to be blackened and the other with just one supplementary pile. This difference between these two main pottery centers in the Folona is apparently still maintained as confirmed in follow-up interviews in the region in 2006 by Mamadou Samake,

(24) The largest Bamana/Maninka firing I documented had about seventy-five pieces and represented the work of four women from one family compound. Most of the firings I saw involved one or two women and included anywhere from six or eight pieces to as many as thirty-five or forty.

(25) In his video on pottery techniques Christopher Roy comments on the unusually large scale of the firings in the village of Pelignan, Burkina Faso. In a study of ceramic technologies across Burkina Faso, Kawada (1975) singled out the griot-potters of Kawara for their large firings. For firings among different groups in Mali, see especially Mayor 1999 and LaViolette 2000; for Senufo in Cote d'Ivoire, see Spindel 1989; for Mangoro, see Traore 1985.

(26) The ideological separation of artists from the rest of society, maintained through endogamous marriage practices, is most salient in the core Mande region; see Frank 1994, 1998, Conrad and Frank 1995, and Tamari 1991. Among southern Mande peoples, by contrast, most artists are specialists by choice, rather than by hereditary right and obligation (William Siegmann, personal communication.)

(27) In my search for clues to the origins of the Folona potters, I looked first to the Central Senufo of northern Cote d'Ivoire. As noted above, the most important group of Senufo potters, the Kpeenbele, produce a range of objects similar to the repertoire of the Folona potters. However, their use of a convex mold has more in common with the forming techniques used by Bamana and Maninka potters than with the more direct method of the Folona potters. The second most important group of potters among the Senufo, the Tyedunbele, also use a convex mold in making pots. Like the Folona potters and many of their counterparts elsewhere, the Kpeenbele and the Tyedunbele are members of minority artisan groups who maintain a separate identity from their farmer hosts through endogamous marriage practices. However, they are not the wives of griots or leatherworkers, but of metalsmiths--brasscasters and ironworkers respectively--who have their own conflicting traditions of northern origins. There is a third group of potters among the Senufo, the Nafanra, who share a similar forming technology with the Folona potters, but, they are the wives of farmers and are not an endogamous group. Spindel (1988:10-161 was unable to explain how the Nafanra potters came to be the wives of farmers (or conversely, how the wives of Senufo farmers came to be potters). She speculated on whether Nafanra women might have learned from Tyedunbele or Kpeenbele potters who sought refuge among the Nafanra from the warfare and slavery that wreaked havoc in the region in the late nineteenth century; however, she ran into the problem of then trying to explain the differences in their technologies. She noted the similarity of the techniques used by the Nafanra women and those documented among the Baule. See Soppelsa (2000) for a comparison of Nafanra and Baule techniques.

(28) In January and February of 2006, Mamadou Samake, one of nay colleagues on the initial documentation and collection project, conducted a series of interviews on my behalf in the Sikasso region, as well as follow up research in the Folona region. All of the information included here about the potters of the Sikasso region comes from his research. His findings in the Folona region confirm the persistence of traditions we documented in 1991 during the collaborative project and during my research in 1992.

(29) Kawada (1975) noted the use of signatures in large-scale firings among the griot-potters in Kawara (near Sindou) in Burkina Faso. A signature is also visible on the pots assembled for firing in the village of Pelignan in Christopher Roy's video on pottery techniques in Burkina Faso. Dahaba Ouattara and Susan Gagliardi have documented the use of these signatures in several villages.

(30) According to information collected by Boureima Diamitani (1999:65) in the town of Pelignan in Burkina Faso, the griot-potters there came originally from an area south of Korhogo in northern Cote d'Ivoire. He records a familiar story of forcible removal to Sikasso, followed by emigration to Pelignan where the women found gond sources of clay and were asked to settle by their Senufu hosts.

(31) See Frank 1995 and 1998 for a discussion of the distribution of Mande griot-leatherworkers and especially conflicting theories about the origins of the leatherworking group among the Senufo known variously as Tyeli, Tyelibele, or Celebele, whom I believe were early Mande griot-leatherworker migrants to the region. See also Launay 1995.

(32) A study undertaken in the early 1970s (Thoret et al. 1971) identifies two distinct groups of potters in the neighboring region of Dabakala--the Mangoro and the "Djeli." The latter are identified as griots or leatherworkers whose wives are potters. The author(s) report that the Mangoro potters compete with Djeli potters in several local markets and that they have ceded the Dabakala market to their Djeli competition. The text says there are two communities of Djeli (leatherworkers or griots) whose women make pottery; however the map indicates four--Djelisso, Gbadougou, Nanfale, and a quarrier in Dabakala. Three communities of Mangoro potters are identified on the map--Kawolo Mangorosso, Kpana, and Djemala Mangorosso. Research for the project was apparently done in Kawolo. Clearly, more research needs to be done on both of these groups of potters in order to understand their relationship to one another as well as any relationship in the distant past to the Folona potters.

(33) The use of potters marks has been documented among the Soninke (Gallay 1970:25) and among the Dogon (Gallay 1981:92), but in each case, it was noted as an exception to the general rule, something done by only a few individual potters.

(34) Janet Goldner (personal comunication, see also her contribution to this issue) told me that the Kalabougou women fire with other women of their household and that there is no need to distinguish individual pieces one from another.

(35) "... chacune des potieres s'approche du foyer avec une longue perche terminee par un fer recourbe, et saisit un par un ses propres pots qu'elle reconnait grace a la marque individuelle qu'elle y a imprimee; ..." (Thoret et al. 1971:7) "... each of the potters approaches the fire with a long pole ending with an iron hook, and seizes one by one her own pots which she recognizes thanks to the individual mark she has placed on it."

Barbara E. Frank is associate professor of art history at Stony Brook University. Her primary research has been in Mali, West Africa, where she has worked with ceramic and textile artists, leatherworkers, and blacksmiths on artistry, technology, and social identity. Her major publications include Mande Potters and Leatherworkers. Art and Heritage in West Africa (Smithsonian, 1998, 2001) and an edited volume Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande (Indiana, 1995). bfrank@ notes.cc.sunysb.edu