1. Thompson, George, Thompson in Africa (New York, 1852), 276.Google Scholar

2. Thompson, George, The Palm Land of West Africa (Cincinnati, 1858), 414–16, 440.Google Scholar

3. Alldridge, T. J., The Sherbro and its Hinterland (London, 1901), 163–66.Google Scholar

4. British Museum, Registration number, 1886 A1126 4.

5. Rütimeyer, L., “Uber westafrikanische Steinidole,” Internationales Archiv für Ethnologie 14(1901), 195–205.Google Scholar

6. Employed by the Swiss firm Ryff, Roth (subsequently SCOA).

7. Dittmer (see Dittmer below) quotes it, then makes no use of it.

8. The Alldridge figure was, it is true, dug up at Bendu, but we know of no other stone figure having been dug up in the coastal area.

9. Alldridge, T. J., A Transformed Colony (London, 1910), 287–89.Google Scholar

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12. There is confusion in the rendering of this Mende expression. Greensmith is quoted by Rütimeyer as using mahei-yafei for the singular and mahei-nyafanga for the plural, and by Joyce as using mahai-yafei for the singular and mahai-yafanga or mahai-yafesia for the plural. We shall use mahei-yafei (definite singular form) and mahei-yafesia (definite plural form) throughout.

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15. The earliest record of the name nomoli was in Schön, , Mende Language, 118Google Scholar: “a stone rudely carved in the human form, used in the worship of spirits.” Alldridge, , Transformed Colony, 286Google Scholar, gave the variant numori.

16. Hair, P. E. H., “Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea coast,” JAH 8(1967), 253–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ibid., “An Ethnolinguistic Inventory of the Upper Guinea Coast,” African Language Review, 6(1967), 32-70.

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18 Particularly through the influence of Frobenius; see e.g., Frobenius, Leo, Das Unbekannte Afrika (Munich, 1923), 3–20Google Scholar; idem., Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Frankfurt, 1926), 213; see also Zwernemann, Jürgen, Culture History and African Anthropology (Uppsala, 1983), 30–36, 39.Google Scholar

19. This was given definitive criticism by Yves Person (see below).

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22. Paulme, Denise, Les gens du riz (Paris, 1954), 144–49.Google Scholar

23. Pomta is nasalized and sometimes rendered as pomtan.

24. Brown, Stanley, “The Nomoli of Mende Country,” Africa 18(1948), 18–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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28. Fagg, William and Plass, Margaret, African Sculpture: an Anthology (London, 1964), 22.Google Scholar

29. Personal communication to Christopher Fyfe, 11 January 1965. He subsequently made the change in the revised edition.

30. Fagg, /Plass, , African Sculpture, 22.Google Scholar

31. Person, Y., “Les Kissi et leurs statuettes de pierre dans le cadre de l'histoire ouest-africaine,” BIFAN 23B(1961), 1–59.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., 44.

33. Ibid., 5, 41; Person's “thousands” may seem an exaggeration. But counting the 300 reported by Jérémine in the Musée de l'Homme in 1945; 200 or so which ought to be in the Sierra Leone Museum; those in museums in Liberia, Guinea, and Senegal; over 80 in the Museum of Mankind; 41 in Bern; 38 reported by Rütimeyer in Basel; and those in other museums in Europe and the United States—not to mention large private collections, such as those published by Tagliaferri (see below)—the figure is certainly above a thousand and “thousands” is possible. But as we have no idea how many sculptors were working at any given time, any estimate of the time span of sculpting based on numbers alone, such as Person's ‘longs siècles,” is dangerous.

34. Person also cited a reference by Malfante to “idols of wood and stone” being worshipped by Africans south of Cape Verde. Since Malfante was writing in 1447, before the Portuguese had reached Sierra Leone, this cannot refer to sculptures there, if indeed it refers to anything specific, given that idolators worshipping sticks and stones is a familiar formula from the Old Testament.

35. In a footnote (“Statuettes,” 45n3) Person suggested that there had been a similar “bouleversement” in the Kono country (“Le processus fut sans doute analogue en pays kono”), without reflecting that this undermined his case for singling out the “Mani” invasion as the event that brought stone sculpture in the region to an end.

36. Jones, Adam, “Who were the Vai?” JAH 22(1981), 171–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. If, as Dittmer has persuasively argued (see below), the figures represented members of a ruling elite, and were linked to their rituals, the sculpture tradition is likely to have ended with the ending of their rule. It is worth noting (although it does not affect our immediate argument about the end of stone sculpting in Kono country), that Person's theory that the “Mani” invasion brought about a cultural “bouleversement” in the coastal country, taken up by Rodney, Walter, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, has been discredited by Hair, “Ethnolinguistic Inventory,” and idem., “From Language to Culture” in R. P. Moss and R. J. A. R. Rathbone, eds., The Population Factor in African Studies (London, 1975), as well as by Jones, “Vai,” 159–78.Google Scholar

38. According to Valentim Fernandes the peoples south of Cape Verde made idols of wood and stone. But in his very detailed section on Sierra Leone he mentioned only idols of wood and clay. So his “idols of wood and stone” may again be no more than the familiar Old Testament reference (see note 34). (Fernandes, Valentim, Description de la Côte d'Afrique, ed. Monod, Th., da Mota, A. Teixeira, and Mauny, R. [Bissau, 1951], 75, 82–91Google Scholar). A French text of the 1570s described a “likeness of a toad or frog, in the very heart or center of a stone which was split and broken by the savages of [Sierra Leone].” (Thevet, André in Hair, P. E. H., “Some French Sources on Upper Guinea, 1540-1575,” BIFAN 21B [1969], 1032Google Scholar). This has been taken to be a description of a nomoli but might equally refer to a fossil, or some natural trompe d'oeil. There remains a single passage in Manuel Alvares, writing in the early seventeenth century: “There is such a collection of these images that they have to be seen to be believed. Some are hewed out of blocks of wood with skill, and show the face and other features; others are only hacked out of similar blocks in a single blow. Some are sculpted on small stones or on rocks' (Alvares, Manuel, “Ethiopia Minor, and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone (1615),” translated Hair, P. E. H., Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1990, f. 64vGoogle Scholar). But it is only of the wooden images that we are told they showed the face and other features. The stone “images” may simply have been scratched or inscribed.

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40. Hill, Matthew H., “Archaeological Fieldwork in Sierra Leone, 1967-1968,” West African Archaeological Newsletter 11(1969)Google Scholar; idem., “Towards a Cultural Sequence for Sierra Leone,” Africana Research Bulletin 1/2(1971), 6-7.

41. Dittmer, Kunz, “Bedeutung, Datierung und kulturhistorische Zusammenhänge der ‘praehistorischen’ Steinfiguren aus Sierra Leone und Guinée,” Baessler Archiv 40(1967), 183–238.Google Scholar

42. See note 17.

43. We can trace no other writer who has noted this alleged “universal tendency” (and are extremely grateful to Jürgen Zwernemann and to Adam Jones for helping us in our search). Neither Frobenius nor his contemporary Fritz Graebner mention it. And Carl Einstein, one of the first German art historians to study African art seriously, specifically repudiated the use of changes in style to date historical development. Einstein, Carl, Afrikanische Plastik (Berlin, [1922]), 6.Google Scholar

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45. Some writers, notably Lamp, have despaired of being able to obtain reliable provenances. We think such defeatism premature until a systematic search of museum collections has been made: some early museum collections are much better in this respect. A start might be made in the Sierra Leone Museum, where a high proportion of figures have provenances, some of them quite detailed, which no one has bothered to use. For example, 62. 6. 7 Found Moinde Valley, 1/4 mile south of Sukudu Town, 20 feet deep; 62. 13. 32 Found near Gbanankava stream, 1 1/2 miles north of Tumbodu, Kamara Chiefdom, less than 2 feet from the surface; 64. 29. 7 Found in gravel, depth of 4 feet, Nyandehun village, Nimi Koro Chiefdom, about 3 miles SE of Jaiama Town; and so on.

46. Ironically, the only mention of horses in Portuguese texts concerns their use by the Susu and Fula against the “Mani.”

47. Allison, Philip, African Stone Sculpture (London, 1968).Google Scholar

48. Ibid., 3.

49. Ibid., caption to plate 69.

50. Atherton, John H. and Kalous, Milan, “Nomoli,” JAH 11(1970), 303–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Kalous, Milan, “Frobenius, Willett, and Ife,” JAH 9(1968), 659–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., “Some Hypotheses About the Art of Southern Ife,” Afrika und Ubersee 52(1969), 124.

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55. Similarly, Northcote Thomas, who wrote of stone images or heads being “not uncommon” in Kuranko country, was referring to Yawaraya (or Yawaradugu) on the border with Kono and Kissi. Thomas, Northcote W., Anthropological Report on Sierra Leone (London, 1916), part I, 39.Google Scholar

56. Dalby, T. D. P., “The Extinct Language of Dama,” Sierra Leone Language Review 2(1963), 50–54.Google Scholar

57. Dalby has shown that western Mendeland, west of the Jong River, was formerly a Temne-speaking area: Dalby, T. D. P., “Banta and Mabanta,” Sierra Leone Language Review 2(1963), 23–25.Google Scholar But that is irrelevant, since stone sculptures have not been found there.

58. Lamp, Frederick, “Ancient Wood Figures from Sierra Leone,” African Arts 23 (1990), 48–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59. Curnow, Kathy, “The Afro-Portuguese Ivories: Classification and Stylistic Analysis of a Hybrid Art Form” (PhD., Indiana University, 1983).Google Scholar

60. Tagliaferri, Stili del Potere.

61. See note 36

62. He also supposed them to have “exercised influence over the Bullom” and to have confined them today to part of Turner's Peninsula, a positively Dittmeresque piece of fantasy.

63. We think it likely that the stone figures still hold surprises in store. One of us (WAH) remembers being shown in Freetown in 1970 a sculpture that was clearly genuine and did not fit into any of die existing stylistic categories. It was carved in an extremely hard, rough-surfaced, brown stone. The figure was about six inches tall, almost two dimensional, and had a round moon-face with little projections, like rays, around the edge.