Trophies of Grace? The "art" collecting activities of United Brethren in Christ missionaries in nineteenth century Sierra Leone.

The collecting activities of a group of American missionaries in southern Sierra Leone in the second half of the nineteenth century have an importance that has not been widely recognized. They were members of an evangelical protestant church, the United Brethren in Christ (UBC), based in rural communities in the East and Midwest of the United States. Although the American Missionary Association (AMA) was earlier into the field and had set up mission stations on Sherbro Island and the adjacent river estuaries by the late 1840s, the UBC mission proved to have greater vigor and staying power. This led the former in 1883 to transfer its remaining Sierra Leone missions to the United Brethren, together with a sum of money for their support. In the following decade fresh mission stations were opened in the heart of Mendeland. Despite the setback of the Hut-Tax War of 1898, when missionary premises were attacked and a number of missionaries and their converts killed, they quickly reestablished themselves. The United Brethren were pioneers in setting up schools in the interior of Sierra Leone and their characteristically Midwestern combination of education with industrial training gave a practical edge to their evangelism that other Christian denominations found it difficult to match. (1)

From the very first the Sierra Leone mission was a route for African artifacts to find their way to the United States. This was twenty years or more before T.J. Alldridge, whose collections of the arts and material culture of the Bullom and Mende peoples of southern Sierra Leone have until now been reckoned the earliest representative group of artifacts from the area. (2) Admittedly our knowledge of the collecting activities of UBC missionaries in Sierra Leone is still very incomplete. It can be partly pieced together from early missionary publications and from occasional snippets of information in museum records. An invaluable resource has been the journal, letters, and artifact collections of one missionary couple that have been made available to the writer of this article through the kindness of their present-day descendants. There seems surprisingly little information to be gleaned from the surviving archives of the United Brethren Church itself. This may reflect its complex institutional history: The Church split in two over the introduction of a new constitution in the 1880s and the larger portion (the New Constitution United Brethren) subsequently amalgamated with the Evangelical Association and then with the Methodist Church to form today's United Methodist Church, a series of changes that cannot have helped the preservation of its archives and special collections.

Elsewhere in Africa the sporadic collecting activity of Christian missionaries has provided some of our earliest physical evidence of art and craftwork from the continent. Thus, seventeenth century Roman Catholic missionaries in the kingdom of Kongo sent back to Europe examples of "idols" worshiped by the heathen (perhaps, from the description, figure sculptures of some kind--for example, the collection of "idols and other various instruments for superstitious practices" brought from Angola in 1692 by the Capuchin missionary Andrea de Pavia, noted in Bassani 2000:160-1). Two such carved wooden figures have survived and are today in the Pigorini Museum in Rome; they have been the subject of scholarly discussion by Ezio Bassani and others (Bassani 2000:nos. 514-5; see also his Appendix II "The Master of Bamba Ngo," 269-75). However, although there were also Roman Catholic missionaries in Sierra Leone in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, they were for most of that time single individuals working in isolation and dependent upon irregular visits of ships to the coast to maintain their contacts with Europe. Despite these difficulties they managed to transmit written reports to their superiors, some of which described local crafts and manufactures, Alvares (1615:f.55v) refers to mats, bags, wooden dishes, carved ivory spoons, and carved seats. But there is no record that they sent or tried to send back examples of the kinds of articles made. And by the 1660s this spate of missionary activity in Sierra Leone had run its course.

A more concerted missionary effort followed the establishment, by a group of English philanthropists, of a settlement for free Africans on the Sierra Leone peninsula in 1787. The evangelizing work of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a Protestant group, in Freetown and its environs in the second decade of the nineteenth century stimulated an interest in African handicrafts among the sponsors and supporters of the mission. The CMS missionary Gustav Nylander, working on the Bullom Shore across the river from Freetown, dispatched to the museum in the Society's headquarters in London a few examples of "Bullom curiosities," apparently charms and simple ornaments. (3) These cannot now be identified. He was unsuccessful in his bid to acquire a more distinctive prize, the mask associated with the Kolloh masquerade (see Hart 1993). Other objects associated with African traditional practices were collected by CMS missionaries around Freetown from "liberated Africans" in the villages set up to house them. Many were promptly destroyed as instruments of superstition, but a few items of this kind found their way into museum collections in England. (4)

Except for a few expeditions into the interior by individual missionaries, CMS missionary activity and that of other British Protestant churches in the first half of the nineteenth century was centered on Freetown and the villages of the peninsula. The initial evangelization of the peoples to the south of Sierra Leone, the Mende and the southern Bullom (or Sherbro), was thus left to American missionary organizations beginning in the late 1840s: the American Missionary Association already mentioned, set up in the wake of the Amistad affair, and the United Brethren in Christ. Together they were known as the Mehdi Mission. The first UBC missionaries, Daniel Flickinger, William Shuey, and Daniel Kumler, arrived in Sierra Leone in March 1856. They stayed only a few months, investigating possible sites for a mission station before returning to the United States. Yet even on this first trip one of the missionaries, Flickinger, had made a start collecting local artifacts to illustrate the talks he gave to American audiences about the mission.

   At the meeting at Mt. Pleasant
   [Pennsylvania] I did a good deal of
   talking, explanatory of the condition
   and needs of the heathen, during
   the business sessions, and then
   one night was given me to lecture
   on Africa, and to show the idols
   and various curios which I had
   brought from that country (Flickinger
   1907:40).

It is unclear what these "idols" and "curios" were. They presumably included greegrees or charms of the sort used by the Africans in Sierra Leone as protection against witchcraft. Examples of these were described in chapter 25 of Flickinger's 1857 book Off Hand Sketches of Men and Things in Western Africa, and they are illustrated in one of his later books (Fig. 3). Objects from Africa continued to feature in Flickinger's lectures following further trips to the mission. Thus in 1857-58 he noted that, "Great crowds attended my public addresses, and listened with ears and eyes to the descriptions and exhibitions of their idols, articles of clothing, and other curios which I brought from Africa" (Flickinger 1907:49). Nor was he alone in this respect. Kemp Billheimer, whom Flickinger left in charge of the United Brethren mission in Sierra Leone on his return to the US, also exhibited "curiosities brought from Africa" in his 1861-62 lectures to home audiences that followed his first tour of duty (MacKee 1874:54-5). Among these were "certain strange gods," a reference, one surmises, to figure sculptures of some kind.

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Confirmation of this comes elsewhere in History of Sherbro Mission (1874) by William MacKee, the Mission treasurer, who reported that the Africans made use of "images or statues of stone, iron, lead, wood, or anything that they imagine will answer the purpose." They were "usually of the crudest workmanship" and he remarked caustically that "the specimens our [UBC] missionaries have brought back to this country are hideous looking things" (MacKee 1874:67). The mention of stone images or statues may be a reference to nomoli figures, prehistoric stone sculptures, relics of an earlier culture, that are typically discovered buried in the soil by Mende and Bullom farmers in the course of their agricultural work. George Thompson, an AMA missionary who was in the same coastal area in the 1840s and 1850s, illustrated examples of these in two books he wrote about the country (Thompson 1852, 1858). More puzzling, however, is MacKee's reference to images of "iron" and "lead"--metals that are not used in statuary from this part of Africa.

In 1871, after fifteen years of lackluster progress, the UBC's prospects in coastal Sierra Leone took a dramatic turn for the better with the appointment to the mission of an African-American couple, Joseph and Mary Gomer (Fig. 4). The eighty-year-old chief at Shenge, Thomas Neal Caulker, received baptism and--although he died shortly afterwards, to be succeeded by his son George Caulker, who had no interest in Christianity--the pace of conversion among the local population began to quicken. Joseph Gomer's letters and journal, quoted at length in the successive editions of Flickinger's book Ethiopia (1877), periodically refer to "gods" or figure sculptures of the Bullom and Mende among whom he was living. He recorded occasions when he was able to acquire examples of such sculptures from African colleagues.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

   Mr Cole, the teacher, gave me a
   large mangro god that he got from
   Cantata, the chief's mouth-piece,
   and he now sends his boy to
   school. Rev. Mr. Williams brought
   me another large wooden god,
   which the owner got tired of (Joseph
   Gomer, writing from Shenge,
   July 20, 1875; quoted in Flickinger
   1877:192-3).

In another passage he noted that the work of one local carver had found its way, perhaps via Gomer himself, to the Union Biblical Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

   [At Shenge] Harry Yarn is a big boy.
   His father is the head-man of a
   country village and carves wooden
   gods for the heathen to worship.
   He carved one which is in the
   mission-rooms in Dayton, Ohio (Joseph
   Gomer's journal, quoted in
   Flickinger 1877:215).

We can form some idea of the appearance of these "gods" and other specimens of African handiwork from illustrations between pages 32 and 33 in the 1877 edition of Flickinger's book (Fig. 5). Alongside engravings of a native ax and hoe there are images of an "African Fiddle" (more accurately a harp-lute with a whole carved figure on the back); a "Walle-Bowl" (a carved wooden gameboard for the African game of warri or mankala); and an "African Goddess" (a sculpted naked female figure sitting atop a stool or column). The significance of these is that they are the earliest illustrations we have of woodcarvings from the south of Sierra Leone. In the light of Gomer's comment quoted above, it is natural to assume that they depicted Sierra Leonean artifacts that were then in the United Brethren's "mission-rooms" in Dayton.

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Gomer continued to collect figure sculptures after his return from home leave in 1877. For the most part, the circumstances in which he collected these figures and his motives for collecting them can only be guessed at. If his sole aim had been to remove possible sources of temptation to backsliding among his African converts, he could simply have destroyed them in situ. That he took the trouble to send them back to the United States suggests that he meant them to serve a purpose there: He wanted to publicize the work of the mission and perhaps to encourage potential supporters by providing them with evidence of the missionaries' progress in overcoming the forces of heathenism.

However, there is one account Gomer gives of his obtaining a sculpture that goes into unusual detail about the place and circumstances of its acquisition.

   Early next morning we reached
   Rotufunk. I was standing in front
   of the house. A girl passed, going
   toward the river, with an image ornamented
   with beads in her hand.
   I asked her to show it to me, and
   offered to buy it. She said it was a
   woman's child, and she was going
   to wash it. I spoke to the king, asking
   him to get it for me. He sent for
   the woman, who said that she gave
   birth to twins, and one died. She
   had this image made, and believed
   that the spirit of the dead child
   now dwelt in it and minded the
   family. She could not part with it. I
   had taken my revolver with me--the
   one presented to me in New
   York. I showed it to the king, and
   told him if he would get the image
   for me I would give him the revolver,
   and an Arabic Bible for his
   friend, who wanted one. He saw
   the husband, and they began making
   country fashion and offering
   sacrifices, I suppose to get the spirit
   out of the image. By two o'clock
   next day Foora Boando, the king's
   son, brought it to me. He had
   worked hard to get it for me, and I
   promised to send him a English
   Bible. This was his greatest wish. I
   send the image to you just as I saw
   it in the girl's hands (Joseph Gomer,
   October 2, 1877, quoted in Flickinger
   1882:247-8).

An engraving of what must be time figure in question faces page 248 in Flickinger's book (Fig. 6). There is much that is worth noting about what Gomer says here. First of all the figure was collected in Rotifunk (as it is now usually written), a mainly Temne town, the headtown of Bumpe Chiefdom, where the Women's Missionary Association of the United Brethren had recently established their first mission station. Secondly, the account makes clear that it was a twin figure carved to represent a twin who had died. The Temne believe that, unless a carving is made of a dead twin and treated in every respect like its living sibling, it will become jealous of the survivor and take its revenge on the family. The carving and use of such twin figures is a specifically Temne practice, not observed by the Mende or southern Bullom. (This would tie in with its having been collected from a woman in a mainly Temne area.) It is rare in missionary publications of this date to have the significance and context of use of a sculpture spelled out so precisely. Gomer makes plain that he took the initiative in trying to acquire the figure when he saw it in the girl's possession and that, when his initial attempts to purchase it were rebuffed, he went to unusual lengths to get around the owner's opposition, asking the "king" Richard Caulker to intervene and offering him a valuable object--his own revolver--and an Arabic Bible to use his good offices on his (Gomer's) behalf. It suggests that this was no crudely carved specimen, but one that Gomer himself recognized as something out of the ordinary. If it was the sculpture shown in the engraving opposite this section of text (Fig. 6), his interest is understandable. It shows a standing female figure with distinctively carved head and limbs, neatly incised ornament across the stomach and abdomen, festooned with beads and cowrie shells, and with a single European coin (showing a young Queen Victoria's head?) on a string around the neck.

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The figure bears a marked resemblance to one collected by another United Brethren missionary that is now in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (Fig. 7). The latter came in a box with a note that has been preserved in the museum's records. It reads:

   This idol was given by Chief Caulker
   of the Mendi tribe at Rotufunk,
   West Africa, to Richard N. West,
   M.D., upon his confession of Christianity
   in 1884, and was by Dr West
   given to the Rev C.H. Lemmon in
   1885.
   The Mendi's [sic] had great love
   and reverence for their ancestors,
   and believed that at death their spirits
   inhabited some visible object.
   This idol was prepared for such a
   receptacle, and had been in the family
   for many years, and was believed
   to be the dwelling of the spirits
   of all their ancestors.

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

West's figure has many features in common with Gomer's: The relative proportions of head and body are similar, as is the crested cap (wig? hairstyle?) of the two figures. Both have large, disklike ears and incised ornament down the front of the torso. And there are similarities too in the carving of the feet and toes. But there are also obvious differences. In Gomer's figure the fingers of the hands point inwards to the navel; in West's figure they point downwards. The forehead of the latter appears broader and the patterns of the ornament down the front of the body are different. But it would still be natural to see the two figures as the work of a single workshop, and perhaps even of a single hand.

It can hardly be a coincidence, therefore, that both figures are documented as having come from Rotifunk in Bumpe Chiefdom. The "Chief Caulker" referred to in the paper accompanying West's figure was the same "king" Richard Caulker who was instrumental in helping Gomer acquire his figure, and the acquisition dates (1877 and 1884 respectively) were only seven years apart. Strictly speaking, Caulker was not "of the Mendi tribe": He was Temne/Bullom. But tribal identities were somewhat fluid in this area and his description as Mende might owe something to the fact that the United Brethren missions were popularly known in the United States as the "Mendi Mission." There is nothing necessarily inconsistent in West's figure being described as an ancestor figure of the Caulker family and Gomer's being said to represent a twin. To this day in Sierra Leone figures otherwise indistinguishable can be commissioned from the same carver or workshop for different purposes, so that, unless a figure has been documented in the field, it is impossible to say what precisely it represented or what its significance was. What is prima facie more of a problem is to reconcile the claim that one figure had been in the Caulker family for "many years" with the claim that the other had been carved for a child who had recently died, if, as their similarity would tempt us to believe, they were made by one and the same carver.

Gomer's journal recorded other such acquisitions. In September 1880, writing from Shenge, he noted, "I have three wooden gods, which were brought in lately,--two from villages near Manoh and one from near Rotufunk. Raunchawah, the second head-man at Manoh, brought me all the greegrees and charms out of his house" (Joseph Gomer writing from Shenge, September 22, 1880, quoted in Flickinger 1885:299). The fate of these "wooden gods" is unknown. He made a present of one "idol" to a missionary colleague, Sanford Sage (of whom more below), on the latter's departure for the United States in 1890. And there is one janus-faced wooden figure given to the Florida State Museum in the 1920s by F. M. Hartman of Earlton, Florida, that was--according to the museum record cards--originally brought back from Africa by a missionary called "Mr. Gomer," presumably Joseph Gomer, in 1880 (Fig. 8). Janus-faced masks and figures are in Sierra Leone typically associated with special powers of spiritual insight, but there is no documentation accompanying this figure to say what it was used for. The large head with its two faces above a ringed neck is the most distinctive element of the carving. The "body" by contrast is rudimentary: a limbless torso with female breasts on one side standing on a round base. Body and base are partly concealed by strands of black fiber issuing from blue-and-white striped cloth packages attached around the neck. It is identifiably in the style of southern coastal Sierra Leone, but in the absence of documentation one hesitates to speculate about its possible significance.

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Joseph Gomer and Richard West were two early United Brethren missionaries known to have collected sculptures in southern Sierra Leone. Other UBC missionaries from whom we can identify early artifacts were an Ohio couple, Sanford and Esther Sage, who first went out to Sierra Leone from October 1883 until December 1885, and then (under the auspices of the UBC Woman's Missionary Association) from September 1887 until October 1890. Sanford Sage kept a missionary journal that has remained with his descendants to this day and his wife wrote regular letters to correspondents in the United States, so we are not short of information about their daily lives in Africa. Sanford Sage, a "terrific walker" according to one companion (Vivian, n.d.:83), took part in two pathbreaking missionary expeditions, the first with Richard West, already mentioned, to the Mende town of Bo in March 1889; the second in March-April 1890 with the Reverend William Vivian, an English Methodist, to Panguma, the capital of the Mende potentate Nyagua. These "itinerations," as Vivian called them, paved the way for the expansion of UBC and Protestant missionary activity generally into the heart of Mendeland in the 1890s.

The 1889 expedition took Sage and West from Rotifunk through Movamba and Taiama to Tikonko and Bo before they turned homeward. The 1890 expedition was a more ambitious affair, lasted a full four weeks, and took Sage and Vivian to Panguma, the head town of the most powerful Mende state in the interior. The routine on both trips was the same. During the day the two missionaries walked or were carried by their hammock bearers between the main Mende towns. If the town proved to have a substantial population and they were made welcome by the headman, they held an evening magic lantern show or religious service in the town barre, the open-sided pavilion set aside for court proceedings, public meetings, and entertaining visitors. Sage's journal shows him to have been an interested observer of local industries, such as pottery-making and weaving (Fig. 9). Both missionaries purchased "country cloths," local cloths sewn together from strips woven from the native cotton on a portable loom, and were given others as presents. Sage's attention was particularly caught by the distinctive Mende styles of hair-dressing of both men and women.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

   The manner in which people dress
   their hair in this country is very
   noticeable. Some of the men shave
   the entire head, others shave or cut
   a part out the hair leaving little tufts
   behind the ears or on top of the
   head or make zigzag roads across
   the top of their heads. Another is
   seen with a long que [queue?] on
   the top of his head while all the rest
   is cut closer. The women dress their
   hair very prettily, sometimes it is
   braided in rolls from front to back
   with small rolls over the ears and
   larger ones to the crown of the head.
   Sometimes it is braided from side to
   side in the same way. Many of them
   take the palm fibre and colour it
   black and platt (sic) this into their
   own hair ... roll after roll fill it is eight
   or ten inches high. Others braid it
   up until it has the appearance of a
   huge ant hill and yet others weave it
   in the shape of a hat (Journal, March
   20, 1890).

Those familiar with Mende sowei masks will recognize in Sage's accounts of women's hairstyles an accurate description of older styles of hair-dressing that are represented in the carving of such masks but have long since vanished from everyday use.

Their meeting with the Mende potentate Nyagua is a precious, because rare, account of pre-Protectorate ceremonial, and is worth quoting at length.

   About four o'clock word was
   brought us that the King was ready
   to come and formally receive us.
   Presently we heard the sound of
   war horns, the beating of drums
   and singing. Soon the company
   came in sight and they certainly
   presented an imposing appearance.
   At the head of the procession were
   two young men fantastically dressed
   who were singing and beating small
   drums. Directly behind them came
   the King. At his right side was a
   man beating a small iron gong and
   carrying a kind of scepter graven
   or carved to represent an image or
   idol, it was partially over laid with
   silver. On the other side of the King
   was a Yereh (Yeli) man, a regular
   clown, dancing and singing in a
   loud voice the praises of his master.
   Then followed the King's bodyguard.
   There were first a dozen or
   more of young girls about eighteen
   years who were his armor bearers
   and constant attendants, then followed
   about thirty young men carrying
   guns and swords and last were
   three young men blowing ivory war
   horns (Journal, March 24, 1890).

Sage noted that Nyagua himself

   was dressed according to the country
   style with the addition of a pair
   of silver shoes. But he was loaded
   down with ornaments. There were
   several long silver chains about his
   neck, large silver bracelets on his
   wrists and arms, bangles, lockets,
   charms, and rings. I counted eighteen
   rings on his right hand and
   seventeen on his left hand, covering
   his fingers and thumbs to the
   tips (ibid.).

Having reached their destination and explained the purpose of their mission to the Mende ruler, Sage and Vivian turned for home, going back to Rotifunk by a different route that took them through Gerihun and Bo. (5)

Nyagua made the missionaries a gift of eight country cloths and what Sage described as "two extra fine cloths." A fine country cloth of the kpokpo type was among the artifacts brought back by the Sages to America later that year and it has been preserved to this day by their descendants (Fig. 10). It could well be one of the cloths given to Sage and Vivian by Nyagua. Elaborately decorated country cloths using a broader woven strip and incorporating dyed threads in complex patterns that only emerge fully when the strips are sewn together are among the finest work of traditional weavers in southern Sierra Leone, and were typically made for and given as presents by powerful chiefs. The Sages' country cloth is essentially a "checkerboard" pattern, incorporating white, dark blue, and varicolored rectangles, the latter with red, white, and blue weft threads in irregular mixtures of stripes and diagonals. A cloth very similar in design and probably also in date of acquisition--1890 or thereabouts--was among the country cloths given by T.J. Alldridge to the Pavilion Museum in Brighton (Lamb 1984:ill. 127).

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

An even more remarkable masterpiece of Mende weaving is a country cloth gown (Fig. 11) that has been preserved along with the cloth described above. Like the former, the design is a rough checkerboard, plain white squares (albeit with a blue "comb" motif often present) alternating with patterned ones. But the weaver of the gown was a virtuoso who made each patterned square different, as if to show off the full range of his repertoire. Red threads, probably fibers picked out of imported European cloths, have been introduced selectively to contrast with the indigenous blues and whites/creams. Most striking of all, woven into the center pocket there is a spread-eagled four-limbed figure. The gown has been well looked after and is the work of one of the great master-weavers of nineteenth century Sierra Leone.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Sage's journal does not report his having seen any wooden figure sculptures on either of his trips into Mende country, hardly surprising perhaps since those were not objects that would ordinarily be put on public display. Nevertheless among the artifacts handed down within the Sage family are three carved female figures that have clearly come from Sierra Leone. One of them presumably is the "idol" that "Brother Gomer" gave the Sages as a going-away present in September 1890 (Sage 1890, entry dated September 11).

They include a truncated female figure, 18" (45.7cm) high (Fig. 12). It has the high forehead, ridged hair-dressing, and neck rings typical of figure sculpture from southern Sierra Leone. The breasts are sharply pointed and the figure ends at the hips, which form a rounded base. The arms, which appear to have been short and curved to meet the body just below the breasts, have been broken off. There is a very close match to this figure: a figure that was acquired at a similar date, i.e. the 1880s, and is now in the Anthropology Museum of the University of Oslo in Norway (Fig. 13; No. 7280). It was acquired by the then Norwegian Consul in Sierra Leone from a Madame Bicaise, widow of a retired army or naval officer with business premises in Freetown and trading connections with southern Sierra Leone. It is 13 3/4" (35cm) in height, is similarly cut off at the hips, and has the same puny arms supporting pointed breasts, ridged hair-style, ringed neck, and thin metal disks for eyes attached by nails. Closer examination of the Sage figure suggests that its eyes also were originally represented by metal disks nailed on in this way. Neither figure comes with any documentation as to use or significance. But the absence of legs and the consequent more-or-less flat base would suggest that they were intended to stand upright, perhaps as a guardian figure beside the "medicine" in a society house or sanctuary. (6)

[FIGURES 12-13 OMITTED]

A second sculpture collected by the Sages is a complete female figure 26 1/2" (67.3cm) tall (Fig. 1). As with the previous figures, the hair is represented as a stepped series of ridges descending from the crown of the head on either side. The body of the figure is slender, with sharply protruding breasts that are echoed in the carving of the buttocks at the rear. It stands on slightly flexed, slim legs and the long arms, ending in hands with delicately tapering digits, are held away from the body. There are strings of beads around the waist. Considering that it must have been collected in the 1880s, its completeness and good state of preservation make it a valuable addition to the comparatively small corpus of documented late nineteenth century figure sculptures from southern Sierra Leone.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The third Sage figure is clearly related in some way to the two figures from Rotifunk described earlier (Fig. 2). It has the distinctive large head with peaked cap or hairstyle; large disk-shaped ears; pendulous breasts; a long torso ornamented at the front with designs of body scarification; hands held to the side of the body with the fingers pointing downwards (as in the figure now in the Hearst Museum); and swelling hips with short, stumpy, flexed legs. However the feet are shaped differently, in a rough "cloven-hoof" manner that is very unlike the crisply carved toes of the other two figures.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The Sages also brought back a sowei mask of the Sande society (Fig. 14). It is the work of carver whose "hand" is identifiable in a number of other such masks. There is a photograph by Cecil Firmin of a similar mask in use by a sowei in the early 1900s (Johnston 1906:1031). Characteristically, the face is set quite high in the mask above a decorated cylindrical neck. There are three ornamented panels at the front, with the neck rings around the sides being separated by "tooth" motifs. Horns or teeth (which Mende women wear as charms) are a recurring motif at various places on the mask: around the rim, on the neck, and on the sides of the head. The smooth, swelling forms of the forehead, the neck rings, and the lobes of the hair contrast with the crisply executed patterned elements, including the tooth/horn shapes, elsewhere. The fact that the mask was acquired by the Sages during their missionary tours in the 1880s pushes back the date when this carver is known to have been active by fifteen years. (7)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

This completes what I have been able to learn so far about the early collecting activities of the UBC missionaries in southern Sierra Leone. However there remains a tantalizing, unanswered question. While the country cloth, gown, carved figures, and sowei mask collected by the Sages have survived through being handed down as family heirlooms by their descendants and relatives, a mystery surrounds the fate of other objects that UBC missionaries brought back from Sierra Leone. According to Gomer, in the 1870s there were African sculptures and presumably other artifacts in the "mission rooms" at Dayton, Ohio, in what was Union, and later Bonebrake, Theological Seminary. He does not say whether they were dispersed throughout the building or housed in some special room or rooms set aside for that purpose and, so far as I can discover, there were no formal accession registers or records kept of the objects held there. However, almost a century later, in 1969, John H. Ness, executive secretary of the Commission on Archives and History of the United Methodist Church (the successor of the United Brethren in Christ) and previously curator of the Dayton Depository, referred to a "museum" attached to the Dayton Archives and its Sierra Leone collection of "artifacts of tribal cultures, consisting of masks, drums, other musical instruments, beads and jewelry, cloth, and other curios." He estimated that they numbered more than 500 items, and he anticipated the transfer to the museum of additional collections that would, he predicted, double its holdings of Sierra Leone culture (Ness 1969). In the event, shortly after Ness's article was published, the Dayton Depository was closed down and the archives and collections of the Evangelical United Church were put into packing cases and sent first of all to Lake Janaluska in North Carolina to join the archives of the Methodist Church housed there. Then in the 1990s the combined archives were transferred to a building specially designed for their reception at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. The General Commission on Archives and History of the United Methodist Church (GCAH) has since published a complete list of its Sierra Leone artifact collection. The document raises more questions than it answers. It numbers only 200+ items, not the 500+ mentioned by Ness thirty years earlier. The artifacts, with few exceptions (viz. four sowei masks and a carved wooden head), are simple everyday objects: beads, jewellery, strips of cloth, kissy pennies (a form of indigenous currency), wooden pegs and spoons. In the few cases where acquisition dates are given they appear to be relatively recent, for example the 1960s. In other words--and this is the puzzling thing--this collection includes, so far as I can judge, none of the objects illustrated in Flickinger's books that are known to have been brought back to America in the nineteenth century. Of course we do not know what relation, if any, the museum collections described by Ness in 1969 bore to the objects in the "mission rooms" in Dayton ninety years earlier. We cannot even be sure, although it is a natural assumption, that the objects illustrated in Flickinger's books were held at Dayton. (They could have been objects Flickinger himself had collected and kept in his own possession.) But the discrepancy between the number of artifacts listed as now being in Madison and the figure of 500+ items cited by Ness in 1969 does prompt the question whether some part of the UBC collection might have gone astray somewhere in the course of the transfers of the material between Dayton, Lake Janaluska, and Madison. And, if so, where might those items now be?

There are two other UBC collections of artifacts from Sierra Leone in the United States. The first is in the Art Department at Otterbein College in Ohio, which has long-standing links with the church and Sierra Leone. This is a wide-ranging collection, including sculpted figures and masks, fine country-cloth blankets and gowns, and examples of woven mats and baskets. Most of these objects were given to the College by the families of UBC missionaries who were in Sierra Leone in the twentieth century, although the latter include John and Zelda King, who were there between 1895 and 1905. A few objects which were in College's original collection may be earlier but are not clearly identified as such. So far as one can tell, therefore, these objects are quite unconnected to the objects once held at Dayton (see Hassenflug 1988).

The other UBC collection is in Huntington College, Indiana. (Huntington College is associated with the Old Constitution United Brethren Church, which split from the New Constitution United Brethren in 1889.) Huntington College dates from 1897 and its collections of artifacts from Sierra Leone, like those in Otterbein, derive mainly from missionaries who were in Africa in the twentieth century, although there may be single items that were brought back at an earlier period. Again the names of the donors and accompanying documentation suggests that this collection is quite independent of the earlier collection in Dayton. (8)

It does not appear, therefore, that any of the existing public collections of United Brethren material from Sierra Leone in the United States holds the earliest Bullom and Mende artifacts brought back from West Africa by UBC missionaries. These would form, as I have said, a historically significant group of artifacts and, for that reason, discovering their present location, or indeed whether any of them has survived, is a matter of some importance. Fortunately the illustrations in Flickinger's books give us a ready means of identifying them, should they be located. In addition there may be, as the items preserved by the descendants of Sanford Sage show, objects of comparable age and importance in private hands. (9) (It would be interesting from this point of view to be able to trace any living descendants of Daniel Flickinger.) Brought together, they would represent a priceless archive of the art and material culture of southern Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and be an abiding memorial of the pioneering work of the early United Brethren missionaries.

This article could not have been written without the active cooperation of present-day descendants of Sanford and Esther Sage and their relations, in particular Mary Beth Udvari, Margaret S. Drury, and Mary Cay Wells. I am indebted to them for providing me with transcripts of the Sages' journals and letters and photographs of Sierra Leone artifacts handed down within different branches of the family.

[This article was accepted for publication in July 2005.]

References cited

Alvares, M. 1615. Ethopia Menor. Ms. in the Biblioteca da Sociedade de Geographia, Lisbon.

Bassani, E. 2000. African Art in European Collections 1400-1800. London: London: British Museum Press.

Flickinger, DK. 1857. Off Hand Sketches of Men and Things in Western Africa. Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House.

--. 1877. Ethiopia; or 20 Years of Missionary Life in Western Africa. Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House.

--. 1882. Ethiopia; or 26 Years of Missionary Life in Western Africa. Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House.

--. 1907. Fifty Five Years of Active Ministerial Life. Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House.

Flickinger, D.K., and W. McKee. 1885. History of the Origin, Development and Condition of Missions among the Sherbro and Mendi Tribes. Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House.

General Commission on Archives and History. n.d. Sierra Leone Artifacts. Catalog of the artifact collection of the General Commission on Archives and History, The United Methodist Church. Madison, NJ: General Commission on Archives and History.

Hart, W. A. 1993. "A West African Masquerade ha 1815." Journal of Religion in Africa 23 (2):136-46.

Hassenflug, E.C. 1988. African Art. Otterbein, Ohio: Otterbein College Department of Art.

Hommell, W.L. 1974. Art of the Monde. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Art Gallery.

Johnston, H. 1906. Liberia. London: Hutchinson.

Lamb, V. 1984. Sierra Leone Weaving. Hertingfordbury: Roxford Books.

MacKee, W. 1874. History of Sherbra Mission. Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House.

Ness, J.H. 1969. "United Methodist Archival Materials Relative to the History of Sierra Leone." Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion 11:45-51.

Sage, S. 1890. Journal. Ms. in possession of the family.

Sotheby's. 2003. African and Oceanic Art. Auction catalog, Nov. 14. New York: Sotheby's.

Thompson, G. 1852. Thompson in Africa. Cleveland: D.M. Ide.

--. 1858. The Palm-Land of West Africa. Cincinnati: Moore, Wistach, Keys, & Co.

Vivian, W. n.d. (1920s?). Mendiland Memories. London: Henry Hooks, United Methodist Publishing House.

Wells, M.C., ed. 1995. Sketch of the Life of the Reverend Jacob Kemp Billheimer by Amanda Louise Hanby Billheimer. Westervlile, OH: Westerville Historical Society.

Notes

(1.) Their influence can be gauged from the fact that the first three prime ministers of independent Sierra Leone, Sir Milton Margai, Albert Margai, and Siaka Stevens, were all educated in United Brethren schools.

(2.) Alldridge first worked on the coast as a commercial agent in the 1870s, but, with the exception of a few items he provided for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886, we cannot be sure that any of the large collection of artifacts he brought back from Africa in 1900 was acquired by him before the 1890s.

(3.) June 26, 1815. CMS Archives, University of Birmingham: CAl/E5 4.

(4.) For example, the items given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1826 and 1836 by a Dr. Simms and Rev. J.W. Weeks respectively. They include a wooden figure that is clearly Yoruba in style, presumably made by a Nigerian who had been set free in Sierra Leone.

(5.) Sage doesn't say what took place in the missionaries' discussions with Nyagua or what agreement, if any, was reached between them.

(6.) There is a frequently illustrated female figure, whose upper body is carved in one piece with a bowl, which was collected by H.U. Hall's Sherbro expedition in 1936-37 and to which he ascribed precisely this function in the Yassi/Njayei society (Hommell 1984, catalogue no. 46). So there is a precedent for carved wooden figures being used by the Mende and Bullom in this way.

(7.) There are two further objects worth mentioning among the Sage memorabilia: a small carved wooden pestle and mortar, probably for grinding tobacco or the herbs and spices used in cooking, and a carved wooden gameboard for warri (ti ha Mende).

(8.) Randy Neuman, archivist, Huntington College, personal communication, July 2001.

(9.) Sotheby's recently auctioned two Mende staffs that were brought back from Africa by the UBC missionaries Rev. and Mrs. J.H. Lesher, who had gone out to Sierra Leone with the Sages in 1883. See Sotheby's 2003, Lots 10-11.