Wild Animals and Heroic Men: Visual and Verbal Arts in the Sogo bo Masquerades of Mali

Throughout the Segou region in Mali, local youth associations perform Sogo bò masquerades. The masquerades are owned and performed by the young men's associations, the kamalen ton. Their annual festivals are defined by the community as entertainment and play and they have a long history dating from at least the mid-nineteenth century. These masquerade performances are organized into a series of discrete masquerade sequences that are punctuated by short intervals of song and dance. Each sequence consists of a single dramatic character whose performance generally lasts between five and ten minutes. Well over twenty masquerades might be played in one evening event. The masquerades are voiceless and they are accompanied by drumming and by songs performed by a lead singer and women's chorus. Troupes creatively exploit the full spectrum of arts--masquerades, dances, drumming, and songs--to construct the dramatic characters in the fictional world of Sogo bò. The contemporary repertory includes bush animals and spirits, male and female personages, and a category of conceptual masquerades that provide a moral commentary on human relationships.

One of the largest groups of masquerade characters performed in the theater are the bush animals. Evidence from oral histories of the early Sogo bò theater suggests that the original set of four or five masquerades were all bush animals. One of the names for the event, Sogo bò, literally means the "animals come forth." In the late twentieth century, bush animal masquerades still make up over sixty percent of the masquerade repertory in most villages. Bush animal masquerades include elephants, hippos, bush buffalos, hyenas, lions, and other wildcats, as well as a whole group of antelopes and birds. This cast of characters constitutes one of the key interpretive frames of the event. In these communities the bush is defined as the domain of men and the Sogo bò bush animal characters are informed by beliefs and values associated with hunting and with hunters as men of action and society's heroes. It is with this world of the hunter and his association with heroic behavior that young men in the youth association, the owners and dancers of the Sogo bò masquerades, choose to identify and to celebrate through the performance of the bush animal masquerades.

With the bush animal masquerades great care is taken with the masks and puppet heads and their costumes in order to establish the identity of the animal character being portrayed. By definition a good Sogo bò sculpture, a sogo nyana, must include the appropriate cluster of diagnostic features, abstracted from the model in nature, which allow people to unambiguously identify the character being represented. When discussing this quality of representational verisimilitude, people frequently said that masquerades should be the tògòma of the living animal or person. Outside discussions of sculpture, the word tògòma defines a particular type of social relationship. It identifies people generally of different generations who share the same personal name. When a child is named after an adult, the child becomes the adult's tògòma. This naming establishes a relationship across generations between two individuals and this relationship has a moral force. In evaluating youth masquerades, people invoke this same moral force for these arts when they define these sculptures' nyi, or "goodness," in terms of animal sculptures' tògòma relationship with their models in nature.

When an animal or bird is represented, for example, the cluster of features that establish its identity most often includes the shape of the head and the muzzle or beak, or where appropriate the length, size, positioning, and shape of the animals' ears or horns. The large variety of ruminants performed in the theater are generally distinguishable from one another by the size of the head and the size and shape of the horns. For example, sculptures representing Dajè, the...