The Shirts That Mande Hunters Wear

Abstract

The Shirts That Mande Hunters Wear "A tree trunk can stay forever in the water and never become a crocodile."Jirikuru men o men ji la, a te ke bama ye.n the Mande world, hunters are considered by the rest of their society to be extraordinary individuals (Fig.1).If we divide the enterprise of civilization into theory-what a society's ideology says people should be-and practice-what those people actually are-then theoretically Mande hunters hold unique positions within their West African culture area.They are very much a group set apart, and this separation is everybody's doing.Hunters choose to isolate and distinguish themselves in several ways, and for several reasons, while the rest of society, for its own reasons, is very much interested in holding the hunters at bay, at least most of the time.First of all, hunters have an incredible thirst for adventure, along with the pluck and determination to indulge that thirst and survive.They are also by and large very self-possessed and very self-oriented, features that are both good and threatening to the rest of society.Hunters develop, if they are good, a corpus of impressive physical skills, which make them quite different from most other people.They develop as well a refined set of supernatural skills that make them very potent and potentially dangerous.Finally, most hunters aspire to be heroes, that is, to become so renowned within the Mande world that their names are forever remembered in Mande oral history.Often they don't mind disrupting the rest of society to become famous, and that fact linked with these other characteristics make hunters a group to be reckoned with.In fact they are organized into groups, fraternities called donson ton that offer the camaraderie of like minds and unite individual practitioners from a number of communities in a formal structure of support and respect.Hunters' organization branches hold meetings, gather for the funerals of their members and sometimes stage group hunts.They are viewed as a formidable association with considerable power.Such groups, we think, formed the corps of crack troops in the armies that helped build Mande states and empires.In theory their capacities and appetites make them an aggressive and fearsome lot, against which the rest of society must remain on guard.At the same time, hunters are important resources when society is subjected to internal or external stress and iron-willed individuals are needed to pull it back on its feet.Thus hunters are an anomaly, and they generate high levels of ambivalence in Mande civilization.The cothes they wear, most notably their shirts and hats, encode in no uncertain terms the anomaly that hunters represent and the ambivalence that they generate.The shirts (donson dlokiw) in fact are symbols with a complex set of references, which ultimately include very nearly every aspect of the hunters' abilities and their roles in traditional society.They use them to proclaim themselves, this in a civilization where clothes reveal a great deal about their wearers.We can use these hunters' clothes as focal points for understanding hunters, and in the process we will begin to see the clothes as the Mande themselves see them.The Mande and Their Hunters Like the Bantu, the Mande have long been an expansive civilization.The great Mali Empire, for example, was founded in the 13th century A.D. by the Maninka (Malinke), a core ethnic group in Mande civilization.The Bamana (Bambara), another core group, established in the early 17th century the large and powerful states of Kaarta and Segou.Just before colonialization the Dyula, another core group, created quite a large empire that was growing rapidly when the French finally subjugated it and began to establish an empire of their.own.During the course of all this empire building the Mande systematically enlarged the territory they controlled.The Mali Empire sent colonists to settle the Gambia River basin, and thus a series of small kingdoms were established-initially owing allegiance to old Mali but gradually establishing their own autonomy.These states controlled much of the trade that came to the coast, and they remained politically and economically powerful until the middle 1800s (Quinn 1972:9-11).To the south and east the Mali Empire sent groups of traders and blacksmiths to tighten their grip on the gold trade and refine the technologies used to amass that precious material.Today large groups of Mande Dyula, Ligbi and Numu (blacksmiths) are prominent components of the ethnic complexion of western Ghana and the Bondoukou region of Ivory Coast (Bravmann 1974:59-73).In a somewhat less systematic fashion, the Mande have been very influential south of their savanna homelands, in what are now modern Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.When the Mali Empire began to fall, for example, many Maninka infiltrated the lands to the south, displacing indigenous populations and establishing their own political order.They settled first in Guinea, but then, apparently under the leadership of a clan segment bearing the last name Mara, they spread into northern Sierra Leone (Jackson 1977:1-3).These people are now known as the Kuranko, and they represent but a single instance of the kind of aggressive enterprise for which the Mande have become very well known.Embedded quite securely in Mande civilization is a pair of concepts that help very much to explain this tendency to expand and take over, and which also pertain directly to hunters and their clothes.These concepts are called Badenya, "mother-childness," and Fadenya, "father-childness," and they are derived from the nature of Mande polygamous households.Siblings born of the same father and mother-full siblings that isare called Badenlu, "mother's children," and they may be characterized by the word "affection" because in

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